The Radical Right During Crisis - Группа авторов

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2020 did not mark the first time that incels have targeted Canada. In 2018, a man drove his van into pedestrians at a busy street in Toronto, later telling police that he belonged to an ‘incel rebellion’, but he failed to be charged with terrorism.5 The teenager who attacked the massage parlour knew about the Toronto attacker, but also about other key incel figures like Elliot Rodger. Rodger, who killed six people and injured fourteen at a California university campus before committing suicide in 2014, is probably the most well-known figure in the incel movement, to the point that experts have likened his position within the incel community to Anders Breivik’s regarding the wider radical right.6 He too, as Breivik, wrote a manifesto entitled “My Twisted World” in which he vowed revenge against women at sororities for refusing to have sex with him.7

      In a sense, the incel movement is the ultimate expression of the decentralized nature of the wider radical right, down to the way the discourse is often driven by memes, jokes and “shitposting” on online forums and message boards. Therefore, banning or targeting a specific group is unlikely to yield success. As such, we require a multifaceted response that understands the nature of the incel threat and how it relates to the dynamics of the global radical right movement.

      The difficulty of fighting diffuse ideologies: incels and the radical right

      The manosphere—the umbrella term that brings together all misogynistic movements—includes not only incels, but men’s rights activists, “pick up artists”, and the so-called movement “Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW)”, the latter of whom intentionally avoids contact with women.

      Many differing, and often contradictory, extremist movements are covered under the term “radical right”. From the manosphere to accelerationists, through anti-government patriot militias and anti-Muslim protest movements all the way to Russian ultranationalists and Satanic-inspired neo-Nazis; it is not always clear-cut that these movements share a common ideological ground. As such, the battle against a diffuse threat with no clear leaders and high levels of infighting ends up being reactive and fails to keep up with how the threat develops.

      Yet, seeing as how the incel threat continues to wreak havoc, it is imperative that we start to understand more about how terrorism materializes in the radical right, including what ideological trends are connected to acts of violence, how do strands relate to each other, and how attackers radicalize and mobilize for action.

      Cristina Ariza is a Policy and Practitioner Fellow at CARR and an analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

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