When I heard there had been a violent attack on the headquarters of Pornhub in Montreal, and that the perpetrator was an incel—an involuntary celibate—I expected yet another moral panic about right-wing extremism.
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Of course, aren’t all incels misogynists and therefore right-wing by default?
Isn’t it right-wing men who decry the Sexual Revolution and its baleful effects and want women to go back in the kitchen where they belong—forever?
I have something of a personal interest in this, you see. Not because I’m an incel, but because I’ve recently been pegged, with a cover-story in The Atlantic no less, as one of “the men who fear women.” I am, according to Helen Lewis, a leader of the burgeoning “masculinist” movement, along with Nick Fuentes, Pastor Doug Wilson—Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is a member of his church—some guy called Joel Webbon and other influencers, talking-heads and lifestyle gurus.
Lewis veers between writing us “masculinists” off as trolls and claiming we’re a genuine threat to women’s rights, indeed their physical safety. She ties masculinism to real-world violence against women, such as the shooting of activist Renee Good by a Border Patrol officer she tried to run over in her SUV. I think this is a deliberate ploy, quite clever actually, to suggest MAGA itself is now a danger to women and get them to vote with their feet, just in time for the midterms.
This wouldn’t be the first attempt to make me the subject of a confected scare-story. Three years ago, an internet think tank said my advocacy of raw eggs and raw milk could be a gateway to terrorism, because rejecting industrially produced food is just one step away from rejecting industrial society altogether and going full Ted Kaczynski-mode—retreating to the wilds of Montana and sending mail-bombs to corporate CEOs and pillars of the earth-destroying capitalist system. Thin stuff, I know, but the point seems to be to put such claims in writing, so they can then be cited as authoritative fact by hostile media outlets and activists.
So I thought this latest incel-outrage would provide more grist for the far-right-extremists-are-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-our-democracy mill, and a finger might be pointed at me. Instead, the opposite happened. Or, rather, nothing happened. In the week or so since the attack, it has disappeared from public consciousness. Nobody is talking about Seth Scott Hatfield, the perpetrator, who killed a police officer and seriously wounded another. A female police officer also killed a bystander who may or may not have been a passing rabbi.
The reason, I think, is because the attack simply doesn’t fit the narrative framework of a straight-up right-wing madman. We see this all the time with mass killers who are leftists and especially when they’re transgender and detailed their hatred of white Christian children at length in writing. Such atrocities have a habit of being forgotten, fast.
Yes, Seth Scott Hatfield wore Rhodesia-pattern camo and his target was one of the great temples of “degeneracy” in the modern world—facts that might be used to paint him as unequivocally right wing—but he also left us a rambling 104-page screed, a text that sits somewhere between the Communist Manifesto and a 4Chan greentext and defies easy categorization.
As you’d expect from an incel, Hatfield’s main gripe is his inability to have sex with women, but he constructs an elaborate argument about the nature of capitalism and in particular what he calls the “hypergamy state” to justify his program of “selective decentralized mass terror” against everyone and everything he believes is preventing him from having sex.
And it’s quite a list: porn stars, pickup artists, plastic surgeons, prominent businessmen, real-estate brokers, politicians responsible for mass-immigration, fur-farmers, polluters of the environment, Zionists and cars. Yes, he hates cars. A lot.
He even seems to hate me; although he doesn’t mention me by name. But I think he definitely has me in mind when he rails against “weightlifting swindlers,” “diet swindlers,” and “Nietzschean swindlers.” Basically, he hates anyone who tries to give young men advice, for free or for money, because his entire thesis is that men like him are being deprived of sex and there’s nothing they can do to change that. Lifting weights, eating better and adopting the mindset of an übermensch simply won’t help. The entire game is rigged from the start.
Hatfield blends some themes we’d generally recognize as “right wing,” with a frame of analysis that is clearly left-wing. His analysis of modern society, by his own admission, is drawn directly from Marx and Engels, and he recommends reading a number of authors from the radical-left tradition, all the way from Robespierre and Saint-Just to Chairman Mao. He is anti-competition, anti-biology, and anti-personal responsibility. His language is that of leftist resentment and oppression, the haves vs the have-nots: the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the lumpen mass, laborers, peasants, corporate slaves, the “common males” vs. the bourgeoisie and the “favored males.”
“Hypergamy,” as Hatfield defines it, is “a phenomenon in which females copulate with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically and culturally to one male.”
The “hypergamy state” is “any civilization or civilized nation in which hypergamy has become the dominant mode of intimacy. Thus, both modern Western civilization itself, and individual nations such as the United States, Canada, et cetera can all be defined as hypergamy states.”
Capitalism is the root cause of the hypergamy state for a number of reasons. First, because it serves the interests of a privileged minority of wealthy men. Capitalism also enshrines competition as normal, but lies about human equality, so men believe their problems are the result of their own personal failings—too lazy, too weak—rather than the social order itself. “High capitalism” has “done away with” monogamy, in large part because it has empowered women to enter the workplace and given them social freedom that makes dependency on a single man unnecessary and unattractive.
And so a small number of “favored males” end up having all the sex, experiencing a “blissful” life in which they “develop a vain, egoistic, narcissistic, arrogant, and aggressive attitude towards things,” yet suffer no reprimand from the opposite sex simply on account of their combined beauty and wealth. These favored males “take great delight in ridiculing and humiliating some of the more vulnerable of their common male peers”—men like Seth Scott Hatfield.
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Women are only interested in common males, if at all, after they have been discarded by favored males.
“Practically all women now spend the prime of their lives as the lecherous concubines of brutish scum, and we are then expected to marry them and support them financially once they grow too old to continue their depraved hedonism,” Hatfield writes.
“Such gruesome conditions would not have been remotely tolerated by the working males of classical, feudal, and renaissance societies; and yet we today, with all of our knowledge and technological advancement, have hitherto found ourselves in a state of nearly total submission to this unconscionable horror.”
Otherwise, common males must satisfy themselves with pornography.
Here, and elsewhere, we can see Hatfield dancing around various internet memes and refusing to use their well-established lingo: “Chad,” Stacey,” “Virgin,” “the Cock Carousel,” “Roastie Toastie,” “I’m ready to settle down now.” Perhaps he did this in an attempt to dignify his worldview. Who knows?
Hatfield’s vision of the future, when capitalism and the hypergamy state are destroyed, is an odd blend of command-and-control Stalinism and science fiction. He doesn’t say much about how his utopia will be achieved, beyond a bit of “decentralized terror” directed against the targets listed earlier—which presumably includes me.
He does give some idea of what the world will look like in the aftermath of an incel victory. A world in which automation makes female work obsolete, driving women back into the home and under the control of men. Men will be the only ones to earn money.
Cars will be banned, since they allow women to go places on their own and meet men for sex. Travel will be strictly curtailed. Only people with “state approval” will be allowed to use “advanced trains” for the purposes of industry, the military, family vacations and other “innocuous instances.. that don’t undermine the new societal order.”
The internet must also be strictly controlled: social media, dating apps, pornography. A heavily monitored internet will be a useful tool for “compiling a vast list of undesirable elements, all of which can be quietly apprehended, before being judged and sentenced either to a life of forced labour, or instant death.”
An “extraordinary branch” of cyborg super-soldiers will be created to ensure the “complete liquidation of both the bourgeois class, as well as its degenerated lumpen offspring.” These men will be “politically sound, biologically conscious, and incorruptibly devoted men, armed with the best weapons and technology, and trained to the point of being universal masters in the knowledge and application of state security, covert operations, and all other useful modes of warfare, including psychological and biological warfare.”
I’ve discussed Hatfield’s ideas at length here because they’re strange and compelling, in the same way a car crash is strange and compelling. It’s hard to look away from all the blood, crumpled metal and mangled limbs.
And I think we would be wrong to look away. It is a mistake, I think, to believe the traditional binary of left-right is adequate to describe how radicalization is taking place today, especially online. Christopher Rufo coined the term “radical normie terrorism” to describe a new kind of extremist who, rather than being left- or right-wing, exists beyond those standard coordinates in an irony-infused, massively online world of memes, nihilism and narcissism. A place where it’s all too easy to lose track of what’s real and what’s not—and to kill.
Rufo contrasts these young men with the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s, who “hijacked airplanes, set bombs in government buildings, and assassinated police officers in service of political goals.” Those radicals, profiled in the book Days of Rage, were genuine radicals. They were “radical but largely lucid, justifying their actions with appeals to a larger cause.”
Radical normie terrorists, on the other hand have no ideology, no organization, no “concrete political aim.”
I think Rufo may be overstating the extent to which ideology and aims are lacking. It’s very clear, in Hatfield’s case, that the target is capitalism, and we shouldn’t forget leftism has a near-total monopoly on political violence in the modern world. It’s not a coincidence Hatfield reached for Marx and Mao and not Nietzsche and Evola or Roger Scruton. But the emphasis on internet culture, and on the essential incoherence and memetic nature of radical normie terrorists is correct.
Men like Hatfield, more than anything else, are psychic casualties of the modern world and modern technology. Their grievances, which may have some legitimate basis, are twisted and warped and take on monstrous dimensions far beyond all sense and reason, no matter how much ink is spilled justifying them—in turn, reinforcing them. In a very dark corner of the internet, clothed in shadow, the true horror of these fantasies is disguised. But out there, in the light of day, it’s plain to see.
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A prediction: There will be plenty more to come.
