Within hours of the recent shooting in Montréal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, arguments about the gunman’s 104-page manifesto had already split along familiar lines.

Most Canadian outlets called it an incel manifesto. Right-wing sites fired back that the media had buried the obvious and that the document was really Marxist and anti-Zionist.

Both sides are partially correct, which is exactly the problem.

‘Salad bar’ of grievances

I have read and analyzed more than six decades of violent extremist manifestos , and the Montréal text is a tidy example of what researchers call mixed, unclear and unstable ideologies, hybrid extremism or “salad-bar” extremism.

A lone attacker builds a world view the way you build a plate at a buffet — a bit of racism here, some antisemitism there, a scoop of anti-government conspiracy; whatever fits his grievance. It doesn’t hold together as a doctrine. It holds together as a feeling.

That’s why trying to file the Montréal shooter under “left” or “right” keeps producing a mess. He borrows the language of Marxist revolution and calls for the overthrow of capitalism. He also rages against feminism, dating apps, pornography and “degeneracy,” a vocabulary of the online manosphere and part of the far right.

He attacks a “Judeo-bourgeois class” and names “influential Zionists” as targets — old-fashioned antisemitism wearing an anti-capitalist coat. Asking whether he was left-wing or right-wing is the wrong question.

Here is the part the........

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