Uncover - S14: "Boys Like Me" E4: A Soldier for the Cause

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

Evan shares a troubling period from his past and reflects on the different paths he and Alek took. What pushes someone to kill in the name of an ideology? Ellen speaks to a former Jihadi recruiter about the murky path from radicalization to terrorism. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/boys-like-me-transcripts-listen-1.6732152

Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson and I host CBC's daily news podcast, Front Burner. Every weekday, we set out to have a conversation about the biggest Canadian and global issues that you want to know more about, from politics to culture to online stuff. We spend a lot of time on the show thinking about the best ways to have those conversations and searching for the smartest people to have them with. That's it. That's The Cell. I hope you'll tune in. This is a CBC Podcast. This episode contains descriptions of violence. Please take care.

A few months ago, Evan and I took a trip to the beach. Evan, what do you say? Are we going for a swim? Yeah. Wasaga Beach, to be precise. It's a town on the southern shore of Lake Huron, Ontario's spring break mecca. Yeah, it's getting a little chilly. That's the problem with this time of year. Evan and I were there at the end of May, just as the weather was starting to feel like summer. The water was still freezing, but there were a few people scattered along the beach.

Would you guys admit to me what you guys do when you party? Fuck shit up. That's all I'm going to say. I just go around and make friends with people. I just talk to everybody. Forget making friends! You gotta bust a move for the shorties, okay? If you're not throwing it back and they're not going like, Hey! You're messing up! Like thousands of other kids, Evan came here the weekend after he graduated high school. I gotta be honest with you guys. I'm a veteran of the party scene here.

Ten years ago, I was here with my high school graduating class. You know what it's about! Yes sir! You know what it's about! Yeah! I'm going in. You going in? Yep, I'm going in.

He's going in, I'm going in. The water will be cleansing too. I didn't even go in the water, I'm going in. He's going in, I'm going in. The water will be cleansing too. I didn't even go on the water when I was here on prom weekend. It's not that I remember. We came here at the end of May and the water was cold. But I feel like this will be like good spiritual cleansing. Like, you know, you made a mistake here, but wash.

Like, you know, you made a mistake here, but wash. I am washing my soul of the sins of the past. Oh, my God, that's cold. It's not that cold. You're easy for you to say, country girl. Come on. Jesus Christ. You know what? I would totally swim in this.

Wow, you are brave. The Evan Mead I've come to know is sweet, caring, and optimistic. So when he told me this at the beach, it took me completely off guard. If you took me and Alec and stood us together side by side and asked the thornly graduating class of 2011, out of these two boys, Evan Mead and Alec Manassian, which one of them do you think is going to get brainwashed by incel propaganda and is going to commit a mass murder when he can't get laid. I have a feeling that after what happened at this beach on prom weekend,

a lot of those kids would have pointed at me, not Alec. I'm Ellen Chloe Bateman. This is Boys Like Me. Evan spent his first three years at Thornley Secondary School in Room 208, a special needs class primarily for kids with autism. It was a rough time for Evan. He was bullied. He had to take a special bus. And he felt like he didn't belong.

But in the last two years of school, things changed a bit. He transitioned out of Room 208 and joined the general population. He started making friends with neurotypical kids. He also started noticing the girls in his classes. One girl in particular. I can't remember why I liked this girl or what I saw in this girl. That has faded from me. But what I do remember is the stigma around what it would be like if I asked her out.

They'll call her Anna. She was a popular, neurotypical kid. And Evan, well, Evan was not. It took me about five weeks to get the courage to ask her out. I told her that I liked her and that I was that I would like to, you know, take her to see a movie of some kind or go out for coffee. She said, I'll let you know. She had to get her best friend to take me aside and give me the, it's not that she doesn't like you, but she's not interested speech. I thought to myself, okay, well, it's just a matter of trying again. It's not really a question of like, you know, taking no for an answer. You just

got to try again at some point. Evan did try again. Over his final two years of high school, Evan remembers asking her out formally two or three times. But he also texted her, messaged her, and generally tried to stay on her radar. Everyone around me knew I had feelings for her. As far as our peers were concerned, I was asking her out every week and getting a no. That's not exactly what happened, but it may as well have been what was happening

when you look at how my behavior was being interpreted and looked at through the eyes of my peers. I reached out to Anna, but she said she had no comment. I was probably that guy who, everywhere she went, I was not too far behind, which in and of itself is creepy. At the time, Evan didn't see what he was doing as out of line. The kids around him were fumbling through early romances and partnering up. His new friends were encouraging him to ask girls out. and partnering up.

His new friends were encouraging him to ask girls out. I constantly felt pressure to, you know, hook up with girls and just, you know, be cool to drink and to just be this bro. And I just wasn't a bro. I tried to be, but it just came out funny. I came away from every high school party I ever went to, you know, not getting lucky.

And that, that didn't help my self-esteem because I would get, you know, a talking to every time. It's like, well, why didn't you hook up? Like you were talking with this girl for like three hours. Why didn't anything happen? I didn't know how to explain to them that it's like, I either wasn't comfortable with, with making a move or I just didn't know how. Evan persisted with Anna. He saw himself as one more shy nerd in a long line of shy nerds, chasing down the popular girls of their dreams. This happened in the year 2009. The pop culture playbook that everyone would have been going by was the movie Superbad. You know when you hear a girl saying like,

ah, I was so shit-faced last night, I shouldn't have fucked that guy. We could be that mistake! I identified with Superbad on a deep level. They're nerdy, almost hipster guys who just want to ask out the girls they like and have sex with them before they graduate for college. with them before they graduate for college. The idea that men are entitled to sex is ubiquitous. It's reinforced everywhere.

In movies, TV shows, porn, video games. Access to women's bodies is a reward. Be the final boss, rescue the princess, live happily ever after. Be the friend who's always by her side. And eventually she'll see what was right in front of her the whole time. Talking to Evan about Anna made it painfully clear how much of this he'd absorbed. Well, not having a girlfriend led me to feeling like I was a lesser person. And that I was a loser.

Autism spectrum disorder is a complicated diagnosis because it manifests differently in a lot of people. But there are a lot of shared traits. One thing that's important to know is that folks with ASD are far more likely to be the victims of violence than to perpetrate it. Another common symptom is a tendency to fixate on things. For Evan, it was finding a girlfriend. I asked him to describe that feeling. It's not easy to talk about, but I'll try.

It's something that, you know, you know you shouldn't think about and you shouldn't take any action, but you do it anyway. think about and you shouldn't take any action, but you do it anyway. It's, you do it anyway because you know you won't feel better until you take an action, and then when you do take an action, you feel worse. Evan is super careful when he talks about this part of things. He doesn't want to make it sound like he's using his ASD as an excuse for how he acted around Anna. At one point, I tried to talk to her about it, but then she said very accurately, you can't blame your ASD on everything, on your hope, on all your behavior. You just can't. You

can't. It's not a scapegoat. But still, this combination of outside influence and his predisposition towards fixation was a problem. It came to a head shortly after prom at Wasaga Beach. We came to this beach town on prom week and then kind of partied in these cottages here. And I thought, you know, I was going to lose my virginity to the girl I had a crush on. I thought, you know, I was going to lose my virginity to the girl I had a crush on. Despite being turned down repeatedly, Evan believed that he still had a shot with Anna. The logic in my mind was, she never really said no to just a one-night stand.

Evan believed that Anna hadn't said no to him. He thought that what she'd actually turned down was a relationship. So Evan thought she might be open to something more casual. I guess maybe I thought that if I hooked up with my crush after being turned down, other guys would look at me as, you know, the guy who turned a no into a yes. And that's not a good way of thinking. It doesn't alleviate my responsibility for the mistake, but it does explain the mindset that I was in.

Evan wrote a letter telling Anna how he felt and what he thought they should do. I gave her the letter, and as it left my hand, I kind of started to regret it. It didn't go well. Once I saw that she was done reading the letter, I said, I think we should talk about this. And I knew I was sorry for doing it. And then she just said, there's nothing to talk about. And then she walked away very quickly.

And then I should have just walked away too, but I didn't. Evan chased Anna down the beach, trying to convince her to stop and talk. She wouldn't. Evan grew more and more frustrated. Eventually, he gave up and left her alone. People saw it happen. Word spread. Evan went back home, hoping to forget the whole thing. But it wasn't over. After two years of watching Evan try to pressure Anna into a relationship she clearly wasn't interested in having.

The scene he caused at Wasaga Beach was a breaking point. Some kids decided to retaliate. Pretty soon, he started getting anonymous calls at his parents' house. They pulled the whole, oh, Evan's going to be a virgin forever type of shit. They called me sped retard several times. Those calls became threatening. They threatened to beat the shit out of me, essentially.

And I had to tell them, like, you know, they knew where I lived, too, and it's like, if you come to my house, I'm calling the cops. It got that bad. And that's why Evan's pretty sure that a lot of his former classmates would have picked him to do something like the van attack, not Alec Manassian.

No single thing sent Evan chasing Anna down the beach that night. Not his autism, not bad advice, not his taste in movies. Evan's the first to say that he's responsible for his own poor decisions. Anna down the beach that night. Not as autism, not bad advice, not as taste in movies. Evan's the first to say that he's responsible for his own poor decisions. But those decisions don't exist in a vacuum, and his experience isn't unique. Millions of young men are watching the same movies that Evan watched and deal with those same pressures. We tend to write this all off as growing pains or awkward adolescence. But after Elliot Rodger, Alec Manassian, and other incel-inspired attacks, maybe it's time we stop

doing that and take a closer look. Because for a growing number of young men, when life doesn't work out like a movie, that frustration metastasizes into something more harmful, a belief that they've been cheated out of happiness. Involuntary celibates are defined, I think, by this notion that they're in a irredeemable and irreparable situation. That's Jesse Morton. This idea that this is just the way the world is, therefore you're never going to get out of this, your status as an involuntary celibate is perpetual,

and you might as well give up. It becomes a social identity that really makes everything based upon a deficit. I'm ugly, I'm born this way, people see me this way, instead of seeing the assets. Jesse left an abusive household as a teenager, got into drugs, and eventually wound up incarcerated, where he was introduced to Islam. When he got out, he started preaching on the streets of Harlem.

America wants to conquer your land, conquer your resources, kill your brothers, maim your sisters, rape their sisters, and drop bombs on your children, and you have nothing to say. This was shortly before 9-11, and pretty soon he found himself on the wrong side of, well, America. Either you're with us, either you love freedom and with nations which embrace freedom, or you're with the enemy. Jesse chose the so-called enemy. He went on to co-found an organization called Revolution Muslim. We really developed heinous radicalization techniques. We were the first to use like YouTube. We created English-language jihadi magazines.

And ultimately, I was arrested after I threatened the writers of South Park and made international controversy and fled to Morocco. The threat made against Parker and Stone reads, quote, We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them. Now, Theo Van Gogh is the Dutch filmmaker who was murdered in 2004 by an Islamic extremist for making a short film that was critical of Islam. In 2012, Jesse pled guilty to conspiring to solicit murder and using the Internet to solicit violence. He was sentenced to 11 years, but only served three, in part because after de-radicalizing, he started working as an FBI informant. These days,

his focus is understanding the radicalization process and how to intervene. Over the past few years, he's been paying close attention to incels and the Verizon incel-related violence. Recently, he's worked with the admins of the largest online incel community to do user polls. What he found was disturbing. We found that ideations of violence are pretty high. We were shocked to see that people that supported Alec Manassian and Elliot Rodgers was higher than we thought. Rogers was higher than we thought. I would say 10% would be considered at risk for radicalization to the point where they support terrorism, right?

Like explicitly support and endorse it and have no reservations about it. And that is a pretty alarming number that does suggest that the community could facilitate violence against the public at a level that is shocking. Just to clarify, Jesse's not saying that 10% of incels are at risk of becoming the next Alec Manassian. He's saying that, by his estimate, something like 10% of incels don't have a problem with Alec Manassian, which is still pretty scary.

Terrorism is a very, very, very low base rate phenomenon. It's very rare that an individual radicalized to the degree where they're ready to go out and just kill civilians. Jesse spent a lot of time looking at what it takes to push someone to commit an act of ideologically motivated violence. Based on his own experience as a jihadi recruiter, and on what he's seen since being de-radicalized, it's extremely rare to find a clear-cut path from radicalization to terrorism. We have reports and polling of numbers of people that have considered murder in their lives, and it's quite high. Very few act on it. We don't know too much about the

tipping point to violence from an empirical landscape. I will say with regard to other research on online activity, we see that those that are the least active are the most prone to commit acts of violent extremism. That was Alec Manassian to a tee. He lurked on incel sites, sat on the sidelines, and posted only about once a year. It's not to say the most active posters aren't problematic. It's just that they may not be the most dangerous. Not being able to overcome shyness or anxiety or whatever it was to actually engage in the community, he probably even felt like his flirtation with radicalized ideologies was a failure. It came out in Manassian's psych evaluations that part of what motivated him to kill was

the feeling that no one else would do the dirty work. He was the guy to walk the walk. He wanted to be a soldier for the cause because he felt like nobody else was courageous to do so and that he would be lionized and preserved in the same way E.R. or Elliot Rodger is on the fora. He wanted to give meaning and significance to his killing. The question is, yes, the ideology played a role

and gave him a framework or a framing through which he achieved that, but was it more the ideology or the predisposition, right? And that's what we don't know enough about. Alec Manassian's attitudes towards women have overshadowed almost everything else surrounding his motivations, for good reason. But he was also convinced he'd never be able to hold down a job. It was a huge source of anxiety for him. He's not alone. A lot of incels describe themselves as NEET. That's N-E-E-T, short for not in education, employment, or training.

Alec would cope with his frustrations about women, employment and his feelings of isolation by visiting sites that cataloged and glorified mass murderers. And to Jesse's point, this led Alec to want to be memorialized on those sites by carrying out an attack of his own. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal.

I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Alec Manassian didn't go to Wasaga Beach with Evan and the other kids from Thornley. By that point, he was isolating himself, spending more and more time online. While Evan was fixating on Anna, Alec was fixating on mass killings. After graduation, Evan also started turning to the internet to help cope with his frustrations.

Were you seeing other boys around you, date and getting all the things you wanted? Yes. And it was hard to watch. I would see guys, you know, have put little to no effort into getting girlfriends and it was difficult to watch. I didn't resent them. I didn't take my anger out on them. I just took it out. I took it out on myself. Despite what happened with Anna, Evan was still preoccupied with finding a girlfriend. He was fixating again, and this time he looked online for advice. was fixating again and this time he looked online for advice. Hey, I'm Bobby Rio and today I want to share with you how I went from living most of my life the typical nice guy stuck in the friend zone to becoming internationally known for

creating something called the scrambler and helping recovering nice guys reclaim their power and wind up with the woman they really want. Yeah, I did relate to Bobby Rio quite a bit because he solves himself as this guy who it's like, I used to be terrible at picking up girls. Now I'm amazing at picking up girls. This is what I did, and it's going to work for you too. Pickup artists, or P PUAs as they're known, are incredibly popular online.

It's big business. There are a lot of young men looking for advice on how to, you know, up their game. We're sitting here right now and a gorgeous girl walked by. What would you do about it? If you're most guys, the actual answer is nothing. Hey guys, it's your Prince of Poon and I've got great news for you if you're ready to get your game on.

Today I've got something very special because it's all about how to meet girls in bars and clubs. We're going to hit the streets of Boston and I'm going to show you the easiest way to approach a girl and get her phone number. Let's get started. PUAs are just one of many entry points into a much, much bigger universe, a set of ideas that have begun to permeate mainstream media. What's the quick speech on Red Pill? Red Pill is about intersectional dynamics. It's really what defines this new, I want to say it's the online community of guys,

this online consortium of guys called the Manosphere. To swallow the Red Pill is to accept that everything you've been told about society, about gender, race, politics, is a lie. The red pill, blue pill dilemma. You might recognize it from The Matrix. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill. You stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

In the context of online misogyny, taking the blue pill means seeing the world the way that mainstream feminism wants you to see it. So basically the patriarchy exists, systemic racism is a thing, and straight white cisgendered men are at the apex of societal privilege. Taking the red pill means waking up to the truth that straight white men are the victims of a feminist conspiracy, that women now control society, and that the only hope left for men is to game the system.

What has really pushed a lot of these young men to the edge and willing to really go this far is the fact that they're finding each other on online communities and they're radicalizing each other. This is Toronto journalist Arshi Mann in an interview on CBC Radio not long after the van attack. interview on CBC Radio, not long after the van attack. So over the last 20 years, you've had a number of different online male-oriented subcultures develop, and many of them are obsessed with kind of sex and women. Being red-pilled is a basic initiation right in a lot of online communities, but incels go one step further. And that's the black pill. And progressively over the years, these different groups have branched off and become more and more anti-feminist and more and more extreme. And at the most extreme end, you have this kind of politicized misogynist incel subculture, which is essentially nihilistic.

As opposed to, you know, in the matrix metaphor of taking the blue pill or the red pill, they say, no, it's neither of those. We're taking the black pill, we're embracing nihilism, there's nothing out there for us. And they encourage others to kind of have a race to the bottom of just horridness. Like Heaven, a lot of guys make social blunders in high school. They get bullied, rejected, and end up alone and online. Pickup artists are often a stop on the way to being blackpilled, sort of a last-ditch effort to overcome complete rejection.

Luckily, pickup artist tactics didn't appeal to Evan. I think as time went on, I just, none of the advice appealed to me. At some point in these emails, I'm just like, yeah, no, I'm either too nervous to do any of these tricks, or I don't have the, I don't feel comfortable doing these tricks, so I just lost interest. But he still felt the same pressure to succeed with women that drives a lot of young men to PUAs and to the red pill.

He wanted to find a partner and to be seen as an adult by the people around him. Well, it's something I still kind of have going on with me to this day. So like, I do want a relation, there's a part of me that wants a relationship and wants to connect with someone, but like, it keeps getting, what keeps getting in the way of that is, you know, this ulterior motive of I have to have a girlfriend

so I can be validated as a person. And that's a shitty feeling to have. A lot of people tell them, just work out and I'll teach you how to, you know, that's why they like the pickup artist shtick. Like there's this secret that you could just tell a woman something and, you know, she'll immediately sleep with you. And if you just have confidence and you go to the gym and you have, you know, muscles that women just flock your way.

I mean, they live in a very delusional world because they have no experience of interacting with women. Most people would identify them as misogynist and anti-feminist. We would agree. But we would also say that a lot of the underlying things that they point to in our society are very real. So when we look at rates of people that are having sexual contact, particularly amongst the youth, 27% of men, for example, reported that they hadn't had

sexual contact over the last year. Those rates are very, very high compared to past periods of history. And I oftentimes think about, well, what would it be like if I had never kissed a woman? What would it be like if I had never made love and been in a relationship? Like in so many ways we live to find a mate. And it makes me sometimes like tear. Because it's true that would be miserable. Their culture is not wrong about that. This is the heart of Jesse's approach to de-radicalization.

It's about harm reduction, not waging an ideological battle. A lot of social media contact is replacing real world connectivity. And it's not just involuntary celibates that are experiencing loneliness and isolation and dissatisfaction. Our entire society is grappling with these questions. The red pill is an easy answer to those difficult questions, but it still leaves you with an unsolved problem. How do you hook up with women? Pickup artists, bodybuilding forums, and other red pill sites promise tactics to unlock the female libido.

And if those tactics don't work? For a growing number of guys, what comes next is inceldom, the black pill. It's true that only a vanishingly small number of incels will ever go on to become violent extremists. But the number of incels is growing. So are the number of incel-inspired attacks. But the number of incels is growing. So are the number of incel-inspired attacks. In February 2020, a 17-year-old boy killed a young woman and injured another with a machete at a Toronto massage parlor. Now, in what appears to be a legal first,

police have upgraded the charges to include terrorism motivated by misogynist incel ideology. It was the first time in Canada, and likely the world, that incels have been labeled a terrorist movement. Jesse Morton thinks this might be a mistake, the same kind of mistake authorities made trying to stop jihadist terrorism. I mean, 20 years of the war on terror, there's four times more Sunni jihadists on the planet today than there was on 9-11. Maybe one of the fundamental problems was is that we almost, in a sense, confirmed the grievance that it was an us

versus them black and white worldview by conflating anyone who believed in any interpretation of political Islam with what al-Qaeda was calling to. Jesse's sympathy towards incels is purely pragmatic. He wants extremist violence to stop. But he worries labeling the entire incel community a terrorist threat might have the opposite effect. I think our primary problem or issue that we face is the conflation of radicalization and violent extremism. Because radicalization, if we really look at the numbers, is that such low numbers of radicals go on to become violent extremists. We're telling involuntary celibates that they're an enemy and that they're terrorists because some members of their group have gone on to become terrorists.

So we say, oh, involuntary celibates in general are terrorists, which dehumanizes them. For Jesse, extremist violence and radical ideology are connected, but they're still two different things. Even within the radicalized group, the guys who go on to actually commit violence are often outliers. Jesse believes trying to stop incel violence by demonizing the incel community isn't effective and maybe counterproductive.

And so what's really needed to address the involuntary celibate community is to create a parallel network where they're welcome, where some of those grievances are acknowledged, and where there's a willingness to acknowledge some of them. Jesse runs an organization he founded with the FBI agent who tracked him down back in his jihadist days. It's called Parallel Networks, and the name is a pretty decent summary of its mission. The idea is to help build pro-social communities to replace the anti-social ones guys have made for themselves.

We don't challenge people that are cemented in an ideological view. You develop human relationships, and you show some level of understanding and empathy, which allows them to trust you and share with you. And every time you do so, what they share with you initially is just trying to make themselves look bigger and better than they are. Jesse believes you can't debate somebody out of red pill or black pill thinking. It's not about winning a logical argument. It's about meeting their emotional needs one person at a time. The problem is people throw away everything that they say

because they come across as so heinous. So it's almost like none of what you say is valid to me and I'm going to reject all of it. But a lot of what they say is actually valid. So this leads me back to the fundamental question I've been trying to answer. What was it that kept Evan from following down the same path as Alec Manassian? Evan's pattern of becoming infatuated with women and misreading their signals continued after high school. By the time he was 23, he was graduating film school.

But his romantic life was no better off. That was when I learned I can't keep doing this unrequited love stuff anymore. For things to change, I have to change. Because it's not a good feeling when, you know, you have a friendship with them one day, and then the next day they're saying, I don't want to talk to you anymore. You're making me uncomfortable. It's not easy. And it's not a good feeling. Evan lived with that discomfort for a long time.

College sucked at first because I wasn't getting along with the people I was in class with. It took a couple semesters for me to find my friends. And I felt like I wasn't getting the work and I almost considered dropping out. So that was a really low point. But he eventually found positive things in the real world he cared about. Eventually, I had to fight to, you know, get my creative flair back up. I would go home and watch movies and just, you know, think about the stuff that I wanted to make. And eventually I started to trust, you know, my own creative intuition.

Evan made a few friends and found a community he connected with. Some of those friends were women and having friendships with them helped Evan recognize how problematic his behavior towards Anna and other women had been. Evan eventually apologized to Anna. He wrote her another letter a few years after graduating. He's not sure if she ever read it. I have apologized, yes. And this time I mean it. It wasn't just, because I would say sorry to her a lot, but I wouldn't't learn anything from the story I would just keep doing what I was doing do you feel like you've gotten better over the years at mana managing these

kind of powerful feelings that come up for you I feel like I get slightly better from each experience I may have moments with a girl where like I feel awkward coming away from the interaction, but I'm not going to go into stalker mode. Because I'll restrain myself from doing that. Do you see what you did before as going into stalker mode? I would say yes, and I'm not proud of it at all. Yeah. Do you think people misunderstood your actions as being dangerous? Quite possibly.

You have to have a line of control between your feelings and your actions, or you're going to screw up a lot, and you're going to get yourself into trouble. I started this project hoping to find a clearer fork in the road, a point at which Alec Manassian and Evan each went their own way. The divide that Jesse Morton describes between pro-social and anti-social communities seems to be a key factor, but it's also more complex than that.

One of the things that makes the Toronto van attack so complicated is that Alec Manassian's motivations were complicated. Yeah, he was frustrated by women, and he identified with parts of the incel ideology, but that wasn't the only worldview that influenced him. Incels are just one part of a much bigger picture, and the scale and intensity of it is frightening. Next time on the final episode of Boys Like Me.

This isn't like something that just came out of the blue. This was something he'd been thinking about a long time, and he was smart enough to hide it from everybody. I worry that capacity for violence can be linked to a kind of acceptance of or desensitization to violent imagery. What many of these groups are doing is training young white boys to see other groups as less than human. Boys Like Me was created by me, Ellen Chloe Bateman. The series is produced by me, Chris McEnroe, Scott Dobson, and Michael Catano. Michael Catano is our head writer. Additional production by Evan Mead. Eunice Kim is our associate producer. Emily Connell is our digital producer. Sound design by Michael Catano. Chris Oak is our story editor.

Sound design by Michael Catano. Chris Oak is our story editor. Damon Fairless is our senior producer. And the executive producer of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. Additional audio from KFNX and MSNBC. If you like the series, we'd really appreciate it if you'd take the time to rate it and review it. It really helps others find it. Thank you.