It began with a video. On the evening before the 2014 Isla Vista killings, Elliot Rodger looked into a camera and promised a “day of retribution,” a violent reckoning against a world he believed had denied him love, status, and happiness. The next day, he murdered six people and wounded fourteen others. In the manifesto he left behind, he framed his attack as a fair exchange: “They denied me a happy life, and in return I will take away all of their lives.” It would be easy to dismiss Rodger as a lone madman, a disturbed young man whose cruelty had no meaning beyond his own pain. But more than a decade later, his words have become scripture inside incel communities, where he is celebrated as the “Supreme Gentleman,” and where subsequent attackers have studied his writings as an ideological guide. This pattern has now reached Canada. A shooting in Montreal left a civilian, a police officer, and the perpetrator dead; the attacker, Seth Hatfield, left behind a manifesto identifying with the incel subculture and calling for violent revolution against what he called the “hypergamy state.” For years, incels were treated as a joke, a collection of lonely young men venting in obscure corners of the internet. But that caricature misses something far more dangerous. These spaces are not just support groups for the romantically frustrated. They are self-reinforcing disinformation ecosystems that teach members to distrust democratic institutions, to blame women for their suffering, and to see violence as a legitimate response to an unjust world. They mix statistics, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories into a worldview that is resistant to challenge. And their consequences are not confined to the digital realm: since 2014, incel-related violence has been linked to roughly ninety deaths and more than a hundred injuries worldwide. These attacks are often carried out by lone individuals, but the radicalization that precedes them is deeply collective, born in transnational online communities that normalize hatred and celebrate the killers who act on it.
To understand how ordinary loneliness can curdle into extremism, it helps to understand the language of the incel world. Incels are a subgroup within the broader manosphere, a network of male-oriented online communities united by resentment toward feminism and modern gender relations. Their worldview is built around the metaphor of “pills,” borrowed from The Matrix. The “blue pill” represents the unawakened masses, people who accept the world as it is. The “red pill” represents those who believe they have seen the truth: that feminism has brainwashed society, that men are oppressed, and that women hold the power to grant or withhold intimacy. Red-pilled incels may try to improve their chances through “looksmaxxing,” a range of practices from skincare and exercise to extreme cosmetic surgery and even “bonesmashing,” in which men strike their own faces to reshape their bones. The goal is to “ascend” to a higher level of attractiveness and escape involuntary celibacy. But there is a darker path: the “black pill.” Black-pilled incels believe that their fate is sealed by genetics, height, race, and appearance, factors entirely beyond their control. They see themselves as condemned to failure in a society that rewards only the genetically superior. As extremism researcher Dr. Amarnath Amarasingam has observed, fatalism alone does not lead to violence. The danger comes when that hopelessness is fused with conspiracy narratives that blame external forces. Once incels come to believe that their suffering has been deliberately imposed by a rigged social order, hatred turns outward. Pseudoscientific claims, such as the idea that women are naturally hypergamous and biologically driven to pursue only the most dominant men, are presented as objective truth. Rejection is reinterpreted as evidence of systemic oppression. Women are dehumanized, referred to as “foids,” and democratic efforts toward gender equality are recast as proof that society is fundamentally hostile to men. This is how incel ideology becomes an anti-public sphere, a space where democratic institutions are rejected, where gender equality is seen as a threat, and where violence is reframed as a necessary act of revenge against a corrupt world.
The Canadian case studies in this report show how these beliefs translate into bloodshed. On April 23, 2018, Alek Minassian posted “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” on Facebook, then drove a rented van onto a crowded Toronto sidewalk, killing ten people and injuring fourteen others. During his police interrogation, Minassian described the attack as part of a war against a social hierarchy dominated by “Chads” and “Stacys,” terms incels use for conventionally attractive men and women. He named Elliot Rodger as his inspiration, calling him the movement’s founding father, and said he was proud of Rodger’s “acts of bravery.” When asked how he felt about what he had done, he replied, “I feel like I accomplished my mission.” Two years later, in February 2020, seventeen-year-old Oguzhan Sert walked into a Toronto massage parlour carrying a sword inscribed with the words “THOT SLAYER” and a note declaring “Long live the incel rebellion.” He stabbed and killed Ashley Arzaga, shouting misogynistic abuse as she died. Sert had spent months isolated in his father’s basement, consuming incel content and alt-right conspiracy videos, and he identified Minassian as an inspiration. In sentencing, the court recognized the attack as an act of terrorism, the first time in Canada that incel-motivated violence was legally classified as such. Then, in June 2026, Seth Hatfield opened fire in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, killing a police officer and a civilian before dying in an exchange of gunfire. His manifesto was more intellectualized than those of his predecessors, complete with footnotes and references to anti-capitalist and conspiratorial thinkers. He described modern society as a “hypergamy state” in which women’s supposed innate nature was unleashed by the collapse of traditional monogamy, creating an appallingly unequal distribution of intimacy. For Hatfield, violence was not just revenge; it was the only rational response to a rigged system. Each of these attackers acted alone, but none of them acted in isolation. They were radicalized in the same digital spaces, spoke the same language, and drew inspiration from the same martyrs.
What connects these cases is a process of collective radicalization that is easy to miss if we focus only on individual perpetrators. Incel violence looks like a series of lone wolves, but the wolves are all members of the same pack. Online forums and social media platforms function as a kind of connective tissue, where misogyny becomes a marker of belonging. In these spaces, hatred is normalized, harassment is coordinated, and dehumanizing language becomes routine. Research has found that more than eighty-two percent of discussions on incel forums contain misogynistic language, which shows that these ideas are not peripheral to the community but central to its identity. The worldview constructed in these spaces reframes personal rejection as systematic oppression, and violence becomes conceivable, even necessary, as a response. The Montreal case also reveals how incel ideology can hybridize with other belief systems. Hatfield blended incel ideas with anti-capitalist and anti-Western narratives, drawing on a “salad bar” of ideological traditions that resist conventional left-right categorization. This makes the movement harder to understand and harder to counter. Security agencies are accustomed to dealing with organized extremist groups with clear hierarchies and manifestos. Incels have no formal leadership, no official structure, but they share an information ecosystem anchored by a deep commitment to misogyny. That ecosystem is the movement. And because courts and policymakers have struggled to define what counts as an ideology, incel violence has often been treated as individual pathology rather than as terrorism. The Sert case was a breakthrough, but it also highlighted how much legal ambiguity remains. If democratic societies are to respond effectively, they must recognize that these attacks are not random acts of madness. They are the logical endpoint of a belief system that has been cultivated, reinforced, and celebrated online.
It is important to remember that the vast majority of incels never commit violence. Many are deeply unhappy people, struggling with isolation, mental health issues, and a genuine sense of rejection. But the threat lies not in the violent minority alone; it lies in the ecosystems that make violence thinkable. These communities do not simply vent. They teach members to see women as enemies, to view society as irredeemably corrupt, and to interpret their own suffering as evidence of a conspiracy against them. When governments, academics, or journalists challenge these beliefs, the challenge is absorbed into the conspiracy itself, proof that the system is trying to silence the truth. This makes deradicalization particularly difficult. As Amarasingam argues, ideology is central to radicalization, but confronting ideology directly is rarely the best starting point for intervention. What works better is addressing the personal vulnerabilities that make people susceptible in the first place: loneliness, lack of purpose, mental distress, a desperate need for community. Only after those foundations are addressed can the beliefs themselves be gently questioned. This approach is urgent. Anti-feminist movements have become one of the fastest-growing extremist ideologies in recent years, and the online spaces that nurture them are expanding. If we want to prevent the next van attack, the next stabbing, the next shooting, we need to stop responding only after the bodies have fallen. We need to understand how ordinary young men, often already hurting, are drawn into these communities and gradually transformed into people who believe that killing is justice.
In the end, the story of incel violence is not just a story about hatred of women, though it is certainly that. It is also a story about the failure of shared truth. Incel communities have constructed an alternative system of knowledge, one in which pseudoscience is presented as fact, conspiracy theories are treated as revelation, and democratic institutions are dismissed as corrupt. This is why conspiracy-driven misogyny should be understood not merely as violent extremism, but as a product of transnational disinformation ecosystems that threaten the foundations of democratic societies. For Canada and its NATO allies, this is a national security concern. But it is also a human concern. Behind every manifesto is a person who was once just a lonely teenager searching for answers. Somewhere along the way, they found communities that offered them a story: your suffering is not your fault, women are to blame, and violence will set you free. That story is a lie, but it is a powerful lie, and it will keep spreading unless we find better ways to reach the people who are listening. We need to take incel ideology seriously, not because every incel is a terrorist, but because the ecosystem that radicalizes them is real, and it is growing. If we only see monsters, we miss the machinery. If we only punish attacks, we never interrupt the path that leads to them. The challenge is to see the humanity in these young men while still holding them accountable for their choices, and to build a society where no one feels that the only way to be heard is through violence. That is the difficult work ahead, and it begins with understanding the world through their eyes, not to excuse it, but to change it.