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The Deadly Montreal Shooting Shows Incel Violence Is a Public Emergency

The misogynist ideology is blending into other extremist views

It took mere hours after the June 22 shooting in Montreal for some users in a global incel forum to claim the shooter as one of their own and place him among his supposed peers.

Scholars say the shooting in Montreal on June 22, and the online reaction to it, wasn’t surprising

The key to preventing incel-perpetrated acts of violence is understanding how the movement is changing

CSIS recommends making the terrorist-listing process more adaptable given the rise in online hate groups

That morning, a man carrying a long gun and outfitted in military camouflage was seen in the Côte-des-Neige neighbourhood in Montreal. Police arrived, and a shootout resulted in three deaths, which included thirty-four-year-old police officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, civilian Michel Mizrahi, and the twenty-five-year-old shooter, identified as Seth Hatfield of Alberta.

“He may as well be the Reincarnation of Marc Lepine. 37 years later, he returns to Canada to continue his mission,” reads one post in the forum.

“New Canadian hero who shall sit among Lépine and Alek,” another user posted in the same thread.

Those names, Marc Lépine and Alek Minassian, are frequently evoked in this forum, which boasts more than 40,000 members as self-proclaimed incels and contains more than 23 million posts. (The forum was created in 2017, launched after the Reddit community r/incels was banned.) Lépine and Minassian are often described as though they are luminaries, seminal figures lionized for carrying out two of the worst mass killings in Canada’s history.

Lépine shot and killed fourteen people, all women, at l’École Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989. In 2018, Minassian plowed through Toronto pedestrians, killing ten and injuring another sixteen. Prior to the attack, Minassian declared his allegiance to the incel cause on Facebook.

Scholars who study incel communities say the Montreal shooting, the ideologies seemingly behind it, and the online celebration afterward are not surprising; they also warn Canada will see more of such attacks. Key to preventing them is to understand how the incel movement itself is changing.

The Toronto van attack in 2018 raised widespread awareness of incel ideology and the forums that fuel it. At the time, media outlets........

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