Three kids. They had to perform CPR on a kid who was barely breathing
and bleeding.
That deadly attack in Toronto, now at least ten people are dead.
A majority of the injured victims are women.
Elliot Rodger here.
I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut.
Police calling it premeditated mass murder.
In 2014, Elliot Rodger murdered six people
in a terror attack in California.
Prior to the attack, Rodger released a video
claiming his actions were intended to punish women
for not wanting to sleep with him
and men he considered more sexually successful.
22 years old, still a virgin.
This is my last video.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
The following years saw a series of deadly attacks
across the US, Canada, and Europe,
all perpetrated by young men
angry at their lack of sexual fulfillment,
with many explicitly citing Rodger as an inspiration.
He zigzagged from the street onto the sidewalk, hunting his targets.
Opened fire, wounding five and killing two women.
An eyewitness said a lone shooter
kicked down the door of a house in southwest England,
then continued down the street, firing indiscriminately.
What's often been missed, however,
is how these sexual anxieties and frustrations
feed into right-wing extremist political ideology.
Online communities which mix toxic misogyny, conspiracy theory,
and fears around sexual inadequacy
have become a key recruiting ground for right-wing extremist ideologies.
This is why the far right are so weird about sex.
[DECADE OF HATE]
Incels are just one branch of a much larger online subculture
known as “the manosphere,”
comprised of many different groups, all with one thing in common:
the belief that men are the victims of a society set up to favor women.
Within the manosphere, there are different factions
and different beliefs.
With pickup artists, they believe that they can manipulate women
into being romantically interested.
I usually have three renditions.
One for the girls that are ripe and ready.
Those girls, less is more.
They’re looking at you and say, “Oh, who are you?”
You say, “I’m the guy you’re kissing now,” and you go in.
There are Men Going Their Own Way, who generally refuse to interact,
work for, work with women.
I found that you guys are just not extreme enough.
You’re not going far enough.
Men must go our own way.
We must separate from the world of women and government.
I think they are all focused on the idea of males losing traction.
I think this group of men in particular
feels particularly left behind.
What unites all these groups is their virulent misogyny
and hatred of feminism.
They believe that feminism has ruined modern society
by creating a world in which women are supposedly equal agents,
thus denying men the dominance they believe is not only natural
but essential for their happiness.
Feminism is seen as something that’s eroding the rights of the white man.
And so it has allowed both incels and the far right
to create an enemy, to create an outgroup,
and feminism and women fit relatively neatly into that framing.
I’m now trying to turn the tables of equality
on the feminazis who have changed this country.
A disgusting communist, anti-Trump female feminist
got a taste of the gender equality that they clamored for
at the Women’s March.
I thought women were so strong.
I thought women were so strong and empowered.
Feminism is cancer, thank you very much.
This is where the manosphere starts to bleed into
the broader conservative movement
and becomes a key recruiting ground for the far right.
The internet has created people that may not have otherwise
had the opportunity to meet without technology.
So we’ve seen this in other arenas
with hate groups and organizations through recruiting.
Some analysts have suggested that
those most likely to join extremist movements
are often not the most marginalized in society
but those who feel their positions of relative privilege are under threat.
This tallies with an anxiety among some men
that their historically dominant role is being eroded,
and among white supremacists
that the white race is under threat from minority groups.
Birthrates are kind of falling apart.
We’re losing our nations.
We're being flooded with immigrants.
We think of threats in terms of intent and capability.
And the nexus where intent and capability meet,
that’s where you’re really in danger.
With incels, you always have a high intent.
The capability isn't always there.
When you have a high intent with not necessarily high capability,
that means you have an active threat that you need to be focused on
because if somebody develops that capability,
then an attack is pretty much inevitable.
Mass shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch.
At least 49 people are dead, many others seriously wounded.
The gunman moves from room to room,
firing his automatic weapon for some six minutes,
killing at least 41 men, women, and children in the first mosque.
When the white supremacist Brenton Tarrant
killed 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand,
he released a self-justifying manifesto.
The first line: “It’s the birthrates.”
This anxiety over so-called racial fertility
runs deep in white supremacist movements,
often spilling into unhinged conspiracy theories
like the so-called great replacement.
Thinking about gender roles
is absolutely central to thinking about what fascism is
and what far-right politics is
because you can’t really think “race” without thinking “reproduction.”
There's an obvious crossover here with many religious conservatives,
men’s rights activists, and incel communities.
It comes down to controlling women's bodies
and insecurities about them choosing other sexual partners.
On the forums, there are many discussions about
what women should and shouldn’t do,
that they are looking for a woman who will stay at home,
raise their children,
kind of be barefoot in the kitchen and cook.
But at the same time,
they still refer to women using these degrading sexual terms.
Women, their physical fitness and their beauty and perfection
and everything that they are expected to do
is very much oriented around a passionate and beautiful submission
to the joys of motherhood and domesticity
so that they can take on one of the most important roles:
the reproduction of the race,
the reproduction of the nation.
Jews will not replace us!
If you use the term “replacement,”
if you suggest that the Democratic Party
is trying to replace the current electorate,
the voters now casting ballots, with new people,
more obedient voters from the Third World.
But it’s not just women’s sexual choices
that right-wing movements seek to control,
but often those of their own members.
The Proud Boys,
one of the most prominent radical conservative movements in the US,
discourages its members from masturbating
in a policy known as #NoWanks.
#NoWanks is pitched as a way of overcoming porn addiction,
developing discipline,
and giving members more time to focus on their families.
But policies like these are more than just a bizarre form of self-help.
This is about control.
Having daily practices that connect you to a broader movement
is a very effective strategy.
So you’re not just saying to people, you know,
“We’ve been swamped by immigrants.
The feminists are in charge.”
It’s saying, “You need to take action daily in your life,
and you will see the benefits.”
It's now time for the return of men.
The 2010s witnessed the rise of the so-called alt-right,
and the pipeline between the manosphere
and radical conservative and white supremacist movements
went into overdrive.
The online space really is characterized by
intermingling between these various factions.
And it’s the factions have intermingled.
Languages have intermingled. Culture has intermingled.
Jokes have intermingled.
And this is partly deliberate
because it makes it much more difficult
to draw distinct lines between them.
And it means that when an attack happens,
it’s very difficult to nail down the ideology.
And if you can’t do that,
it’s very difficult to nail down the enduring threat.
It’s also probably not a coincidence that
when one member of the alt-right
accuses another of being not committed enough to the cause,
the word they use is “cuck,”
a sexual fetish and porn category
where men watch their partners have sex with other men.
You are seen as weak, minuscule men.
I tell my boy men like you, those aren’t men, you understand?
You will be weak, miniscule men the rest of your lives.
And I’m not going to let you influence
the other boys in this community to be little cucks.
This is all a pretty neurotic tangle of sexual insecurity
manifesting as political ideology.
In Russia, the connection has become explicit,
with the emergence of the violent extremist group Male State,
who literally call their ideology “national patriarchy.”
They're so violent that they've been officially banned in Russia,
though they’ve still emerged as some of the loudest supporters
of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
This crossover of the manosphere, sexual anxiety, and the far right
can lead to very serious violence.
In 2018, Scott Beierle murdered two women
and injured four more at a yoga studio in Florida.
This is brand new video from the scene
from just moments ago.
Two of those people died,
21-year-old Maura Binkley and 61-year-old Nancy Van Vessem.
I’d like to talk about mongrelization.
When I see an interracial couple, I think one of two things:
either the guy couldn’t do any better
or the girl’s a ****.
In 2021, Lyndon McLeod,
a rising star in the manosphere
and frequent guest on alt-right podcasts,
went on a shooting rampage in Denver, killing five people.
Going into a business holding a gun,
seconds later, he calmly walks out.
Three people were shot and two women were killed at that location.
And the list goes on.
Five people of Plymouth who have lost their lives overnight,
including a particularly young child.
We begin this morning here in the UK, where six people have been killed
in the worst mass shooting in the country in over a decade.
This all leads to the question:
when you see right-wing extremists ranting on YouTube,
posing with guns, or marching with tiki torches,
are you simply seeing a bunch of scared, sexually insecure men
afraid of real contact?
We’re fed a steady diet of
particular visions of who we are supposed to be as men.
And I think a lot of that kind of messaging
and the sort of problems it creates for society and for young men
leads people to start looking for
consistent ways of explaining the world.
But none of these things are going to be solved by
scapegoating women and immigrants,
wallowing in misogyny on the internet,
or most of all, by acts of brutal, nihilistic violence.