An Incel, a Rabbi and a Female Police Officer: Was the Montreal Shooting Left- or Right-Wing Violence—or Neither?

An incel, a rabbi and a female police officer meet outside the headquarters of the world’s largest porn website.

If that sounds like the beginning of a very politically incorrect joke, it isn’t. That’s exactly what happened a week ago in Montreal, Canada, when unfuckable incel nutjob Seth Scott Hatfield travelled from Alberta to attack the headquarters of Aylo, owner of Pornhub and other adult websites.

Chaos ensued.

Hatfield, clothed in Rhodesia-pattern camo and armed with an SKS rifle, opened fire, killing a police officer; a female police officer killed a rabbi by mistake (I guess he was just in the area, huh?); she was shot; and then Hatfield was taken down himself. Another civilian suffered minor injuries.

If the target of the attack didn’t provide an obvious motive, authorities soon discovered a 104-page manifesto in the shooter’s hotel room. Hatfield was, as I said, an incel—an involuntary celibate, a dude who simply can’t have sex because he’s too ugly, too short, too bald or some unholy combination of the three—and he had been nursing murderous hate against women and something referred to as “hypergamy,” where a small number of 10/10 Chad men have all the sex with all the women, and the rest of the men have to satisfy themselves with their pillows or an apple pie like in that famous teen movie.

It sounds stupid, and it is. But that’s not really the point.

In the “definition” section of his manifesto, Hatfield defines “hypergamy” as “the opposite of monogamy, or namely a phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically and culturally to just one male.”

But it isn’t just sorority girls with triple-figure bodycounts who need to be brought to heel, Hatfield says. Because today we live in a “hypergamy state,” a society where hypergamy is “the dominant mode of intimacy,” for reasons that are political, economic and ideological. In short: It’s capitalism, not women themselves. And so the entire system needs to be destroyed if incels are ever to have a chance to enjoy the loving embrace of a woman who isn’t their mum or grandmother.

Among Hatfield’s specific targets are the porn industry; pickup artists; plastic surgeons; prominent businessmen; real-estate brokers; politicians responsible for mass immigration; fur farmers; polluters of the environment; Zionists; figures in the crypto industry; automobiles (cars let women drive places and have sex with random men); and me—although he doesn’t call me by my name.

There are at least three related categories in Hatfield’s bizarre schema into which I obviously fit: three groups who he claims sell fake solutions to the fundamental problem of the hypergamy state. Hatfield calls each of them “swindlers.”

First there are the “weightlifting swindlers:”

These are often barely distinguishable from ‘alpha male’ / ‘masculinity’ swindlers, if they are not themselves also of that category that is. The main difference between them is that weightlifting swindlers place most or all of their emphasis on weightlifting itself, sometimes even to the point of holding the laughably stupid belief that only males who lift weights can have valid opinions. They sell instructive programs, and products such as supplements and weights to their victims, and profit thereby. They are very common, and have a very large number of victims simply because weightlifting is an easy and mindless activity that practically any male can do, and because weightlifting generally is marketed to us as an elementary and firm solution to involuntary celibacy. The bourgeois class wants it to be this way, because many of them are essentially weightlifting swindlers themselves, who profit off of the colossal quantity of desperate males who buy their supplements and other products in an effort to look better, i.e. to obtain intimacy. People greatly underestimate the wealth and influence of the gym/weightlifting industry.

Then there are the “diet swindlers:”

These come in many varieties, preaching to us that this diet or that diet is the ultimate and true one, and is the only one that is actually healthy and natural for humans. Diet swindlers make their money from the food products that they sell, or directly from the donations of their followers.

Finally, there are the “Nietzschean swindlers:”

This is a category that has only appeared relatively recently, and perhaps it is only a subcategory. They base their teachings heavily on the writings of Friederich Nietzsche and other similar thinkers; and their advice to men basically comes down to weightlifting and the adoption of a Nietzschean outlook on things. Those who fall under the influence of this category like to style themselves as hyper-reactionaries, and they pretend that they are somehow similar to the chariot-riding warriors of the bronze age, when in reality they are mostly sexually starved men of the present day. They are sometimes also quite dissolute and obnoxious. The main problem with Nietzsche’s philosophy is that it boils down to empty egoism and meaningless praise of the haughty, aggressive, and confident people simply because they are ‘successful’. We ourselves, the dispossessed, are not that however, that is not what we are; and no amount of lifting weights and trying to think like a bronze age warrior is going to make us that. This isn’t the bronze age anymore, and so bronze age solutions do not work for today’s problems. What is needed rather is a sound scientific understanding of the material conditions around us, and the willingness to take effective action to combat the hypergamy state. Such action goes far beyond the level of weightlifting and idle Nietzschean fantasizing. Because there are not many Nietzschean swindlers, they are not as great of a problem as christianity or speculation swindlers, but they should still be denounced and refuted like all other swindlers should be.

Chillingly, Hatfield suggests a campaign of “selective, decentralized mass terror… comprised of calculated, surgical strikes against the most culpable elements of society.”

Basically, that means killing porn stars, pickup artists, plastic surgeons, prominent businessmen, real-estate brokers, politicians responsible for mass immigration, fur farmers, polluters of the environment, Zionists, figures in the crypto industry—and me.

Given the limits on self-defense imposed by British law, I shall be sleeping with a sharpened spoon under my pillow from now on, and carrying a folding travel fork and whistle with me wherever I go. Incels, you have been warned.

When I first heard the killer was an incel, before I read his manifesto, I expected there to be yet another moral panic about right-wing extremism, the manosphere and maybe even about me, since I’ve recently been pegged as one of the world’s most prominent “masculinists” in an Atlantic cover story entitled, “The Men Who Fear Women.” But that hasn’t happened, and the truth is, I don’t think it will. The shooting story has already all-but disappeared. There simply isn’t a way to spin Hatfield’s beliefs as a coherent worldview that could link him to groups Western governments and the media want to demonize and use to justify further curbs on freedom of expression. I mean, the guy wanted to kill the Raw Egg Nationalist, author of the Raw Egg Nationalism Cookbook, The Eggs Benedict Option and The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.

So what should we make of all this?

The whole thing is, of course, ridiculous, risible, the product of a mind warped by fantasies of victimisation nursed in some of the darkest corners of the internet.

I don’t think the correct frame of reference is political, certainly not in terms of the usual left-right binary. Hatfield assembled a grab-bag of ideologies, concepts and memes to justify his all-consuming rage at being unable to get his end away. Since the main target is capitalism itself, it’s not a wonder the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels feature heavily throughout, and the language is of revolutionary violence, which we typically associate with the left, for good reason. The moral themes, especially “degeneracy,” may appear to be right-coded, and incels are generally portrayed as right wing, but Hatfield couches these concerns in a left-wing way. He rails against inequality and competition among men, and blames the “bourgeoisie” and capitalism for making us believe those things are natural and good—applying the logic of the marketplace to all of social life, including what goes on in the bedroom.

Absent completely is the notion of personal responsibility, replaced instead by a cosmic sense of grievance and injustice: Everything you were owed, everything that was yours, was stolen from you. In a striking passage at the end of the manifesto, Hatfield writes,

The girl who was supposed to be your girlfriend was taken from you a long time ago, sodomized out of reality. Nothing is going to bring her back, and nothing is going to suffice for the warmth, the harmony, and the love that has been viciously ripped away from you. It was ripped away from you before you even had a chance to defend yourself.

Christopher Rufo coined the phrase “radical normie terrorism” to describe a new kind of extremist who exists beyond the coordinates of traditional political movements. Radical normie terrorism, he says, has nothing to do with leftist liberation or right-wing acceleration, not really. Instead, it’s about the nihilism of modern culture, the sickness at the heart of our society, lost boys who dress up in anthropomorphic fox suits and spend all their time playing video games, jerking off to porn and browsing forums like 4Chan.

These people are “perpetually online,” Rufo says, and as a result, they lose track of what’s real and what’s not. And then they 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.” These radicals of yesteryear, profiled in the fantastic book Days of Rage, were proper radicals. They were “radical but largely lucid, justifying their actions with appeals to a larger cause.”

Radical normie terrorists have no ideology, are part of no organization, have no “concrete political aim.”

Yes they’re radical—radical enough to kill—but that’s it.

Rufo wanted to apply the term to Tyler Robinson, the man who murdered Charlie Kirk, which I took issue with, since the murder was obviously a left-wing murder for left-wing reasons. Who else would it have benefited? But in this case, I think the term is apt; although it still has its limitations. Seth Scott Hatfield did have an ideology and a political aim. He was hopelessly confused, dressing himself in Rhodesia-pattern camo as he attempted to destroy capitalism by shooting at the headquarters of a porn website. But he did know what he wanted. He justified himself with appeals to a larger cause—the suffering of men all over the world.

I often call people like Seth Scott Hatfield “the raped.” They are the psychic casualties of modern society and in particular modern technology, especially the internet, social media and free-to-view 4k high-definition pornography.

Their plight and their suffering are real, but their response is pathetic, embarrassing and self-destructive.

They lash out, but only to make themselves the punchline of a terribly bad joke.

An incel, a rabbi and a female police officer meet outside the headquarters of the world’s largest porn website…