By David Futrelle
The incels have evidently raised their standards for mass shooters. On Tuesday, two high school students opened fire in the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, wounding eight other students and killing another. On Incels.co, the largest incel hangout outside of Reddit’s Braincels, the regulars reacted with a collective “meh.”
The biggest problem? The shooter’s “weak score” — with “only” one death reported. “What’s with all these amateurs lately smdh,” one commenter complained.
“Is it really that hard to get kills?” another wondered.
Still another lamented that the shooters hadn’t gone after the right targets.
When is one of these guys going to show up to a slut walk to congratulate women and help them celebrate female empowERment. They keep missing the chance to make a huge diffERence in women’s lives
The inappropriately capitalized “ERs” are a reference to mass killer Elliot Rodger, whom incels still regard as a martyr for their cause, a righteous incel executioner of “normies” and “foids” (females).
Another commenter fantasized about taking out some “significant” target like “the corporate offices of Buzzfeed or Visa or something.”
Still, there were a couple of incels on the site who thought the older of the two shooters, 18-year-old Devon Erickson, could turn out to be, in the words of one of them, “a fellow incel who went ER.”
But not many on Incels,co would bite. Some dismissed Erickson as a “prettyboy, normie-tier,” or even “a high tier normalfag or a chadlite.” Others, noting his decidedly non-macho appearance, dismissed him as “a fucking f*ggot” with “fucking dyed pink & purple hair” and “a literal f*ggot liberal soyboy.”
Erickson’s accomplice was described by police as a “female juvenile,” which struck the Incels.co regulars as inherently hilarious. “Well now we know why it failed so badly LOL !” wrote one commenter. “She got mad she couldn’t get a chad probably,” a second joked.
Still another added:
foids can’t do anything right.she didn’t have that high T rage that other shooters have tbh
After hearing reports that Erickson’s accomplice was not actually a “foid” but rather “a transgender male who was in the midst of transitioning from female to male,” one commenter mocked him as
a tr*nny, this has to be one of the biggest fails of a school shooting ever tbh
Another laughed that “this is kind of like an lgbtq+ version of columbine kek.”
The only person involved in the incident that the Incels.co regulars regarded with more contempt than the shooters themselves was 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo, reportedly shot dead while attempting to wrestle the gun away from one of the shooters. As one commenter wrote:
this fat f*ggot lunged at the shooter instead of running for his life, he was either blackpilled and wanted to die or a cuck
Most of the other commenters agreed that Castillo was the latter. “[H]is face screams cuck,” wrote one.
Another mocked anyone willing to risk their life to protect others.
JFL if you’re not using a foids body as a human shield in 2019. Fuck putting your life on the line for cucks and foids … throw them into the line of fire.
Even when incels aren’t cheering on murderers they somehow still manage to have the least humane responses to killings humanly possible.
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@Cyborgette – Thank you, hugs are much appreciated. It’s getting to the point where everyone in the U.S. is only 2 or 3 degrees separated from a school shooting. “The Lottery” was supposed to be a horror story, not an NRA instruction manual.
To add salt to the wounds, the Denver Post spun the incident as a “spontaneous protest”, as if the students walked out of their own accord rather than being tricked into leaving.
@numerobis – I recognize incels’ pain and what drives it, but compassion truly is wasted on them. Whenever anyone tries to reach out to them with understanding, they get viciously spat on and mocked. Incels’ whole identity is invested in being as shitty and nihilistic as possible. No amount of outside intervention is going to fix that. They have to want to change.
50 years of playing nice with right-wing authoritarian demands is exactly how we ended up with Trump.
The thing is, their goals aren’t remotely sympathetic. They aren’t asking for the right to vote, or to be heard, or loved. They’re not being discriminated against. They’re men, claiming victimhood in a society that already gives men a head start in numerous ways. Men complaining that they didn’t get the biggest and best head start. Men competing to see who can be the most antisocial, damaging human being. “Get our dicks wet or we’ll kill you” is not a reasonable (or even new) demand. “Burn down the entire system” because it doesn’t automatically dispense sex and respect: no one should even seriously entertain that for a second.
No, I don’t think incels should be jailed (unless they’re inciting violence), but I do think they should be quarantined, in the same way that trees deal with diseased wood: seal it off with a protective, callused boundary. Their views should be made clearly unacceptable and they should be embarrassed to admit to them in public.
It would help if we didn’t have
1) an orange trash fire in the White House openly telling bigots there are no consequences to shooting people on Fifth Avenue.
2) journalists who earnestly debate both sides
3) universities that give “palatable” misogynists like Milo Y. and Jordan Peterson a platform, a bullhorn, and the veneer of academic respectability
4) print and digital media so desperate for eyeballs that they’ve monetized hatred and controversy
5) a society that treats celebrity as currency, with shooters getting their faces and life stories plastered all over the news while the victims are remembered only by their family and friends.
That would be a start. We can’t fix incels from the outside – they’re a cult – but we can make the soil a lot less fertile.
Wow.
Just. Wow.
I’m not a violent person and I have hyper empathy, but hells bells, these creatures push my buttons.
Between the incels and the FARTs, a strong case could be made for building desert islands out of garbage to house all this human waste.
Boyan Slat, could you get on it, please?