Women-hater kills 10 people in Toronto
 

Toronto van attack suspect says he was 'radicalized' online by 'incels'
Alek Minassian said after his arrest he drew inspiration from men who used violence as retribution for ‘being unable to get laid’



The man accused of killing 10 people by ploughing his van onto a crowded Toronto sidewalk has admitted that he was a violent misogynist who was radicalized online, in a video that was made public on Friday.

Alek Minassian is accused of driving a rental van into a crowd on one of Toronto’s busiest streets, killing 10 pedestrians and injuring 16, in the deadliest act of mass murder in the city’s history.

The attack traumatized Canada’s largest city, and cast a spotlight on the so-called “incel” online subculture of men united by sexual frustration and a hatred of women.

In a nearly four-hour interview after his arrest, Minassian told police officers that he was virgin who had never had a girlfriend, admitted to using the van as a weapon and said he wanted to inspire more attacks.

Asked how he felt about the death of 10 people, he replied: “I feel like I accomplished my mission.”

Minassian will be tried in February on 10 charges of first-degree murder, as well as 16 counts of attempted murder. The video, and transcripts of the interview, were made public on Friday after an Ontario judge lifted a publication ban. Families of the victims were shown the video before it was released to the public.

During the meandering discussion with Detective Rob Thomas, Minassian said he belonged to an online subculture of sexually frustated men, and described his path towards radicalization, saying he drew inspiration from other men who used violence as a form of retribution for “being unable to get laid”.

“I know of several other guys over the internet who feel the same way,” he said, adding they are “too cowardly to act on their anger”.

Clad in a white prison jumpsuit, Minassian told police that his interactions with women left him embarrassed and angry. He described a Halloween party in 2013, where he tried to speak with young women, but was often ignored or laughed at.

“I consider myself a supreme gentleman,” he said, adding: “I was angry that they would give their love and affection to obnoxious brutes.”

A friend at Toronto’s Seneca College, where Minassian studied software development, first directed him to online message boards for men who identify as “involuntary celibates” or “incels”.

The group views their inability to meet women as punishment for their status as “beta-males” and direct their anger at the people with active sex lives who they derisively call “Chad” and “Stacey”.

Minassian claimed to have been in contact with Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and himself in a 2014 the campus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014. Rodger was a self-described incel who posted deeply misogynist videos and a sprawling online manifesto calling for an “overthrow” of what he said was feminist domination.

Minassian told police he was “radicalized” at around the time of Rodger’s attack – and began to fantasize about starting his own “rebellion”.

“I was thinking that I would inspire future masses to join me in my uprising as well,” he said.

He told police that he decided that a 10ft delivery van “was the perfect medium size to use as … my weapon”.

While he hadn’t initially chosen Yonge Street as his target – one of the busiest thoroughfares in Toronto – he decided it was “time to go for it” after seeing all of the pedestrians milling about the shops lining the street.

“I’m thinking that this is it – this is the day of retribution,” he told Thomas.

The video also revealed how the attack was stopped.

“Someone’s drink got splashed on my windshield, and I was worried that I would crash the van anyways,” said Minassian, explaining why he stopped the vehicle and got out.

He then sought out a police officer, hoping to provoke a “suicide by cop”. But Ken Lam, a constable, resisted opening fire on Minassian, even though he repeatedly pretended to draw a weapon.

“Unfortunately, he didn’t react,” said Minassian.

Minassian’s trial, which will begin in February 2020, will be overseen by only a judge alone. Minassian has admitted to driving the van but has not yet entered a plea. The judge overseeing the case has said that Minassian’s state of mind will be an important part of the trial.

Honestly I'm not surprised - incel forums are some of the most bizarre and terrifying corners of the internet :umm2:. Genuinely unstable individuals, in large groups, feeding into each others delusions, never ends well.

Agree, TS. Let's face it , it was only a matter of time before one of those angry nutters would take things further

I would think it happens a lot more than we know about, with just individual assaults or even murders that wouldn't necessarily be linked to "incel stuff" unless the perpetrator mentioned it. Assaults especially, most probably aren't even reported at all.

It's very easy to go down the rabbit hole with these forums - Incels, Red Pill, MGTOW. Hours of reading with this face - D:.

MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) is a good one for just laughs though rather than it being scary... because the premise basically seems to be, a load of blokes swearing off women "until they start being nicer"... and they do stuff like hill walking and woodworking and drinking whiskey instead... with the idea being that their absense from the dating scene will be a major blow to womankind :joker:

What's red pill?

Incel violence is a real and dangerous threat that is forming part of the massive resurgence of Right Wing terrorism. There's a lot of fears in the US that the Joker film will likely see an attack similar to the mass shooting in Aurora back in 2012 and that it'll be carried out by an incel.

It's strange and terrifying how these people's minds work and how they are so unwilling to see the faults within and better themselves. They just whine about 'Chads' without realising that there would probably be someone out there for them if they weren't such odious people. They could be beautiful people on the outside but they still wouldn't find what they're after because it's their personality that's broken.

They always say it's about sex but I've always doubted that, if it truly was an issue of getting laid then why don't these people ever consider going to a prostitute? It's a deep hatred at the heart of these people and sex is just the excuse.

Evil Loser

:worry:

The overall concept of "taking the red pill" is accepting the harsh truths of reality...

In this sense, the "red pill" group of men are essentially a bunch of aggressive misogynists / "pick-up artists" who have "taken the red pill" and are very proud of being aggressive misogynists.

It's hard to explain really. I think the actual reddit was removed / "quarantined" a while ago because it was full of - essentially - incitements to rape / abuse / treat women like animals.

I like to think of MGTOW's as peaceful red pill. They don't want to hurt anyone, they're just going to pick up their glass and... whittling tools... and amble off into the sunset to live in a cabin somewhere, away from the scary womens.

Thank you TS

What's wrong with those men! Jfc :worry:
We know some men can feel entitlement but constructing a whole false "reality" around it? That's psychotic

Yeah I used to read the incel reddit a bit too..only ever planning on reading say, one thread but ending up there for hours absolutely gobsmacked about how all those men think their problem in life is that women are too fridgid or something :rolleyes: The thought process was interesting to watch though I guess.

RIP to those who died. This idiot better get a decent sentence, life actually meaning life should do it. Life meaning like 10 years is stupid and shouldnt even be called life..

Didn't this happen last year?
I think the likes of Jordan Peterson embolden these characters.

Never heard of "incel" or "incel forums" before but that sounds AWFUL :bored:

This guy is sick, feels like even moreso than the typical mass murderer because he's so nonchalant about it in that article :skull:

that statement alone should seal his fate for a whole life sentence

It's from the film The Matrix.

In the Matrix, the character, Neo is offered the Red pill and the Blue pill by rebel leader Morpheus.

The Red pill represented an uncertain future-it would free him from the enslaving control of the machine-generated dream World and allow him to escape into the real World, but living the truth of reality is harsher and more difficult.

The Blue pill represented a beautiful prison, it would lead him back to ignorance, living in confined comfort without want or fear within the simulated reality of The Matrix.

So now we know what the Red pill is, who are these men you're talking about?

Redpill was (is?) a movement that started on Reddit, yes the name is taken from "taking the red pill" in The Matrix. As you say, "Taking the Red Pill" is a metaphor for accepting and embracing harsh reality, where the Blue Pill is a metaphor for accepting a comfortable, but unfulfilling, prison.

What these fellas believed, is that they were oppressed and "made weak" by women / shackled by... basically... having to be decent. They "took the Red Pill" and accepted (basically) that "blokes are supposed to be dominant", and used that "reality" as an excuse to use manipulation and pick-up techniques to shag around and essentially treat women like dirt, and then crow about it to each other.

I believe there was also a "red pill in marriage" movement that essentially amounted to married men "expressing their dominance" in ways that amounted to little more than spousal abuse.

Not nice chaps I'm sure you'll agree, Alf. Even Reddit shut down the main Red Pill forum, and Reddit allows A LOT.

Scary stuff

Incels. I thought that was obvious

Incels overall come across very angry & bitter but the ones who can't form relationships are probably unable to ever find anyone as all they do is complain and moan and there's clearly alot of mental issues there , I don't think they're all the same . They're not all going to lash out and want to fight or kill women though but jeeez this story is insane :crazy::umm2: . And the person is a lunatic who needs to be locked up for good! .

I've actually watched videos about MGTOW'S & incels and some of them either seem very defeated & sad at the whole relationship thing & dating and others are still angry from all the rejection & abuse they've had . And others seem to want to just be by themselves as they're too anxious and they find the whole dating process stressful .

Some of them have literally given up on finding a wife or girlfriend as they think nobody will want them , they think they're height, weight and looks are stopping them as they've apparently tried their luck with every type of woman they can think of and they swear all the women they've tried to ask out are not out of their league . And how people with disabilities, weight problems etc who probably find it difficult to date also reject them which clearly hurts them psychologically and they can't seem to get over that . So that seems to make them even more frustrated and angry .

But i keep thinking surely someone would date them if they had confidence and was friendly instead of negative ? . I know overall it's easier for women in ways to find a guy especially on these apps women get tons of messages.

And both men & women can be very shallow and picky which makes the process even harder .

Anyway to sum it all up if you're too happy and positive then you're living in ignorance and seen as BLUE PILL

If you're supposedly alert and thinks about the harsh reality alot and accept the sad truth then it's RED PILL

And the really negative grey clouds seem to be BLACK PILL

Trying to track down the_truth?

...really scary, he said that he would have continued in his killing but the drink of one of his victims spilled on his windscreen and marred his view...I had never heard the term ‘incel’...involuntary celibate...?...but he’s spoken of conversations with others of ‘turning life statuses to death statuses’ of females....and it’s known that these conversations and these sites of grouping together exist and it’s allowed to continue...?....

To be fair Truth had more of an MGTOW vibe than an Incel vibe.

Most of them are defeated and sad, at first, but those emotions can quickly turn into frustration and anger given a little time. Especially if they get involved with groups who are actively telling them to "stop being sad, get angry".

Anyway, their main problem (all of them) is treating the opposite sex like another species. They're confused about why no one wants them when they're "doing everything right" like a checkbox exercise... and fail to realise that if they just treated everyone like a fellow human being without a constant ulterior motive, and engaged and conversed with people normally and without agenda, then plenty of people would be naturally drawn to them.

It's the first time I've heard the term incel so it's an eye opener for me. I come from a group of people that has always contained married and single people, divorced or whatever. It has never stopped anyone in the group enjoying themselves or living life to the full. Life is too short. I think people that identify with incel would identify with something else if they were in a relationship because they just want to be unhappy. In this day and age, being in a relationship is neither a necessity or a requirement for fulfillment or happiness unless the person makes it so.

...but ‘incel’ is a form of ‘radicalisation’, I presume..?..it’s not the same as being a single...it’s being convinced by a person or a group that all of the negatives in a life is because of females and feminism...?...that, that person would have happiness if it weren’t for females preventing that..?.../...is my very limited understanding...

...is this type of thing what is known as the ‘dark web’, then..?...

It stands for "involuntarily celibate" ... basically the idea is that they're "owed" sex and are being "denied their right". But yes it's definitely made worse by them encouraging each other and developing full on ideologies that I think probably could be described as radicalisation, yeah.

Oh Ammi, sadly no... this is very much mainstream web. Dark web is the stuff you can't even find on a search engine and honestly if we discuss it you'll lose all faith in humanity and I couldn't do that to you :worry:

Like Islamic Snuff Videos?

Tip of the iceberg Arista.

..I mean, I understand that there are things from the dark web that I or many people could not possibly imagine...but surely to openly use phrases like ‘turning live statuses into death statuses’...and with complete intention as to the literal meaning of that...would also be seen as ‘dark web’...that could never be described as mainstream, to discuss killing sections of society or groups of people or individuals...

...people in relationships are termed ‘chads’ and ‘staceys’ for male and female...so these terms are used to dehumanise in exactly the same way as any radicalisation we’ve become familiar with...

Weird I'd never heard of incels either until a few days ago, seems to be basically purely a North American phenomenon?

I've just been having a look at some of the reddit posts and it's an eye opener alright

Sure The Dark Web is Full of Criminals

Dark Web is a specific thing though, not just the "dark side of the internet". You need specific software to access Dark Web sites, and specific search engines to search it. Many sites you need to actually know the full address and they can't be found at all without someone giving you the full link.

For now, mostly, it seems so. Terrifyingly they have many threads showing off their gun collections etc.

But as with most US cultural phenomena - it's starting to spill over towards Europe now and will probably gather pace. A lot of things over the last few years that were "a US thing" at first are very present in the UK now.

Another piece on this.
Ammi, theres lots of reading material on this on the Guardian site if you or anyone is interested


‘Raw hatred’: why the 'incel' movement targets and terrorises women
The man accused of carrying out the Toronto van attack has alleged links to ‘involuntary celibate’ online communities. The language they use may be absurd, but the threat they pose could be deadly

When a van was driven on to a Toronto pavement on Tuesday, killing 10 people and injuring 15, police chief Mark Saunders said that, while the incident appeared to be a deliberate act, there was no evidence of terrorism. The public safety minister
Ralph Goodale backed this up, deeming the event “not part of an organised terror plot”. Canada has rules about these things: to count as terrorism, the attacker must have a political, religious or social motivation, something beyond “wanting to terrorise”.

Why have the authorities been so fast to reject the idea of terrorism (taking as read that this may change; the tragedy is very fresh)? Shortly before the attack, a post appeared on the suspect’s Facebook profile, hailing the commencement of the “Incel Rebellion”, including the line “Private (Recruit) … Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161.” (“4chan is the main organising platform for the ‘alt-right’,” explains Mike Wendling, the author of Alt-Right: from 4Chan to the White House.)

There is a reluctance to ascribe to the “incel” movement anything so lofty as an “ideology” or credit it with any developed, connected thinking, partly because it is so bizarre in conception.

Standing for “involuntarily celibate”, the term was originally invented 20 years ago by a woman known only as Alana, who coined the term as a name for an online support forum for singles, basically a lonely hearts club. “It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she says, describing the feeling of watching it mutate into a Reddit muster point for violent misogyny.

It is part of the “manosphere”, but is distinguished from men’s rights activism by what Wendling – who is also the editor of BBC Trending, the broadcaster’s social media investigation unit – calls its “raw hatred. It is vile. It is just incredibly unhinged and separate from reality and completely raw.” It has some crossover with white supremacism, in the sense that its adherents hang out in the same online spaces and share some of the same terminology, but it is quite distinctive in its hate figures: Stacys (attractive women); Chads (attractive men); and Normies (people who aren’t incels, ie can find partners but aren’t necessarily attractive). Basically, incels cannot get laid and they violently loathe anyone who can.

Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attractive men who have sex with too many women – “We need to do something about the polygamy problem,” said the Incelcast, an astonishing three-hour podcast about the Toronto attack – but, of course, the main problem is women themselves, who become foes as people, but also as a political entity. There is a lot of discussion about how best to punish them, with mass rape fantasies and threads on how to follow women without getting arrested, just for the thrill of having them notice you. Feminism is held responsible for a dude who can’t get laid, and birth control is said to have caused “women to date only Chads. It causes all sorts of negative social ramifications”.

There are no numbers on how many adherents this doctrine has, or how extreme they are, “but it’s not one tiny bit of Reddit” says Wendling. “It’s big. It’s substantial. It’s a movement that has tens of thousands of people who visit these boards, these sub-Reddits, that are safe places for them.”

Angela Nagle is the author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. She says: “There is a really interesting irony in the incel style of quasipolitics – they are both a response to and advocates of almost an Ayn Randian view of romance and human relationships. So they rail against the loneliness and the isolation and the individualism of modern life, but they seem to advocate it as well, in that they love the language of the strong triumphing over the weak. But they themselves are the weak.”

Their landscape is strewn with completely unsquarable contradiction: “They’ll say how terrible it is that the left has won the culture wars and we should return to traditional hierarchies, but then they’ll use terms like ‘banging sluts’, which doesn’t make any sense, right?” Nagle continues. “Because you have to pick one. They want sexual availability and yet, at the same time, they express this disgust at promiscuity "

Incels obsess over their own unattractiveness – dividing the world into alphas and betas, with betas just your average, frustrated idiot dude, and omegas, as the incels often call themselves, the lowest of the low, scorned by everyone – they then use that self-acceptance as an insulation. They feel this makes them untouchable in their quest for supremacy over sluts.

They borrow a lot of language from the equality/civil rights agenda – society “treats single men like trash, and it has to stop. The people in power, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morning after the Toronto attack. Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. Yet at the same time, they hate victims, snowflakes, liberals, those who campaign for any actual equality.
The Guardian

The less sense their outlook makes, the more sense it makes, on some elemental level. Coherence, consistency, reason – these are all tools by which we understand, accommodate, include and listen to one another. In a purely authoritarian worldview, those are the rules you most enjoy not playing by. That makes it very difficult to formulate a response to, on an intellectual level, let alone a practical one: you can’t argue with a schema whose principle is that it will not brook argument. But the regular alternative – ridicule – is not necessarily wise, or right.

Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “retribution” against attractive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attractive men they would sleep with) before killing six people in 2014. He was named by the Southern Poverty Law Center (which tracks activity on the far right) as the first terrorist of the “alt-right”: so even if incels don’t describe the full extent of far-right activity, so far they have been its most devastating subgroup.

There is this huge disconnect between the threat they pose – which is, even if we accept Rodger as only a foot soldier, deadly – and the things they talk about, which are often absurd. In the sphere of the “pickup”, seduction is weaponised in the gender war: there is a huge amount of discussion about its finer points, but its core and only principle is that you get women to sleep with you (and behave) by making them feel insecure.

When this, amazingly, doesn’t work, incels disappear down the wormhole of the black pill: the game is rigged from the start. Appearance is everything. If you’re dealt a bad hand, you’ve lost before you’ve started. This escalates to violent fantasy, since if the game is rigged, then the only thing that will get attractive women to sleep with you is force. Attractive men are collateral damage in the violent fantasy, though it is interesting that message boards can get away with a lot of mass rape fantasy, only to be shut down when a man starts fantasising about castrating his male roommate.

From the way chatroom moder-ators respond to threats of violence against women, to the reluctance among authorities to name this as a terrorist threat, I am filled with this unsettling sense that because incels mainly want to kill, maim or assault women, they are simply not taken as seriously as if they wanted to kill pretty much anyone else. Doesn’t everyone want to kill women, sometimes, is the implication? Or at least give them a fright?

Their behaviour is often ridiculous – someone last week got a tattoo of Jordan Peterson’s face (he is the pop philosopher of meninism) across his entire arm. The incels’ folk hero is the 30-year-old virgin wizard – if you can make it to 30 without having sex, you will be endowed with magical powers. And the threads are so pathetic that it is hard to feel anything but ambient pity (on the site Wiz Chan – subtitle “disregard females, acquire magic” – one thread titled How do I live in my sedan? is like a short story).

Puzzling in the abstract, weirdly inevitable in the flesh, their stance combines that utterly flaky 90s joking-not-joking (“Hey, I was only joking when I said I wanted to rape you! Unless we’re actually in an alley and there’s no one else around”), raging self-pity, false appropriation and superhero costumes, all delivered with the deafening rage of the reptilian brain. It makes Four Lions look like Wittgenstein.

But this fails to reflect, or reflect on, what modern terrorism is: the perpetrators don’t have to meet and their balaclavas don’t have to match. All they have to do is establish their hate figures and be consistent.

“The answer is not simple,” Nagle says. “We end up talking about, say, gun laws and all these very surface things. But in America in particular, the root of this is very, very deep. It’s my view that the kind of cultural revolution that came to fruition in the 60s, where people were questioning older institutions, was very successful in the breaking down of those institutions. But I think it’s fair to say, if you look at contemporary American society, that there has been a failure to replace those institutions with anything new to hold society together. So they would say: ‘Women are just out for themselves, so the way to respond to that is to get some muscles and trick them.’ Love never enters into it. Trust in other people, it’s all gone. It’s a very, very bleak worldview. And they’re not getting that from nowhere.”

...I just have to go out for a while but I’ll read that later...thank you, TwoSugars...:love:..

I've known a few people IRL who certainly display some incel.... Qualities... In terms of mass violence however, I'd say it's mostly contained to North America.

It wouldn't surprise me to see some vehicle attacks or knife attacks happen over here in future though. Inceldom extremism is something that will become more prevalent as time goes on, I think.

From the way chatroom moder-ators respond to threats of violence against women, to the reluctance among authorities to name this as a terrorist threat, I am filled with this unsettling sense that because incels mainly want to kill, maim or assault women, they are simply not taken as seriously as if they wanted to kill pretty much anyone else. Doesn’t everyone want to kill women, sometimes, is the implication? Or at least give them a fright?

Their behaviour is often ridiculous – someone last week got a tattoo of Jordan Peterson’s face (he is the pop philosopher of meninism) across his entire arm. The incels’ folk hero is the 30-year-old virgin wizard – if you can make it to 30 without having sex, you will be endowed with magical powers. And the threads are so pathetic that it is hard to feel anything but ambient pity (on the site Wiz Chan – subtitle “disregard females, acquire magic” – one thread titled How do I live in my sedan? is like a short story).

Puzzling in the abstract, weirdly inevitable in the flesh, their stance combines that utterly flaky 90s joking-not-joking (“Hey, I was only joking when I said I wanted to rape you! Unless we’re actually in an alley and there’s no one else around”), raging self-pity, false appropriation and superhero costumes, all delivered with the deafening rage of the reptilian brain. It makes Four Lions look like Wittgenstein.

But this fails to reflect, or reflect on, what modern terrorism is: the perpetrators don’t have to meet and their balaclavas don’t have to match. All they have to do is establish their hate figures and be consistent.

“The answer is not simple,” Nagle says. “We end up talking about, say, gun laws and all these very surface things. But in America in particular, the root of this is very, very deep. It’s my view that the kind of cultural revolution that came to fruition in the 60s, where people were questioning older institutions, was very successful in the breaking down of those institutions. But I think it’s fair to say, if you look at contemporary American society, that there has been a failure to replace those institutions with anything new to hold society together. So they would say: ‘Women are just out for themselves, so the way to respond to that is to get some muscles and trick them.’ Love never enters into it. Trust in other people, it’s all gone. It’s a very, very bleak worldview. And they’re not getting that from nowhere.


...thank you for the article, TwoSugars...it was an interesting read and left me wanting to see if I could look at any of these Reddit threads...just to get a glimpse of the content because this is something that I was completely unaware of...I’m stunned...I mean, the part of the thread I read was awful, very disturbing word content...and a vid with a young guy fantasising about killing a female, it portrayed as him being attracted to...obviously it’s all so, so grim and woman hating...but what has stunned me the most is that it’s something that so many people are aware of and yet it’s something that is completely allowed...and largely ignored, even...it’s such a huge collective of extreme hate and yet the law keepers are not placing huge focus on it...that stuns me more than anything else...