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The manifesto allegedly left behind by the suspect in Monday’s shooting in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood that claimed the lives of a police officer and civilian expresses violent extremist ideologies aligned with the “incel” movement and anti-feminism, experts say.
And experts in extremism and gendered violence say the manifesto is representative of recent warnings from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, police agencies and parliamentarians about the evolution of ideologically-motivated violent extremism, which poses increased national security risks and is crossing ideological boundaries, making it harder to identify.
“This is not a perfectly ideologically coherent perspective,” said Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor at Carleton University and a former national security analyst. “It is a mix of different views — some are far left, some are far right.
“If there is a continuing thread throughout the manifesto … it is anti-women.”
Authorities on Tuesday identified the shooter as 25-year-old Seth Scott Hatfield of Lethbridge, Alta., who also died in the violent exchange of gunfire.
The 104-page manifesto, obtained by Global News after it was first reported on by various online publications, calls for combatting the “hypergamy state” through violent revolution, including by targeting figures in positions of power like elite bankers, billionaire CEOs, politicians and those working in the pornography industry.
Although the manifesto doesn’t mention the term “incel” — short for “involuntarily celibate” — it does repeatedly refer to “involuntary loneliness” and being “deprived of intimacy,” while expressing jealousy and contempt toward both women and “favoured” males.”
The manifesto focuses on the concept of “hypergamy,” defined by the shooter as women seeking out the most physically attractive males for intimacy, while “the common man is sexually left behind.”
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The shooter blames western capitalism and its promotion of feminism for creating a culture of hypergamy at the expense of monogamy, as opposed to communist societies like China and North Korea that have maintained a monogamous culture and is therefore free of “debaucheries.”
The manifesto is also full of misogynist language, criticizing women for rejecting and ignoring “common” or less attractive men despite experiencing sexual violence and “debauchery” from “favourable” male partners, and engaging in sex work or infidelity.
Women who enter into relationships with “common” men are also degraded as unattractive, abusive and bitter about “settling.”
Jillian Sunderland, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Toronto whose research focuses on incel and male supremacist movements, said there are commonalities between the Montreal manifesto and the misogynist writings left behind by incel-aligned mass murderers like the Toronto van attacker who killed 11 people in 2018.
“It’s always feeding into (the idea that) the common man doesn’t get access to the same sexual or romantic experiences as these highly desirable men, and women are doing the choosing for them,” she said in an interview.
“So we see this as a common theme of not just anger at women, but also anger at this whole system where some people are very advantaged in their romantic and dating lives and other people are very disadvantaged and left with what they believe is no options.”
The shooting occurred days after the House of Commons committee on the status of women released a report on anti-feminist ideology, which MPs warned was spreading among young men and boys and leading to growing real world harms against women.
During the committee’s study, senior CSIS officials said anti-feminist ideology is becoming “increasingly relevant” to Canada’s national security landscape and may lead to radicalization and violent extremism.
The report particular focus to the “manosphere,” an online collective of mostly male influencers who promote the belief that feminism and women’s increasing autonomy are to blame for young men’s isolation, and that society should return to a time when women were primarily homemakers and child-bearers who are subservient to their husbands.
More recently, the “manosphere” space has been popularized by the so-called “looksmaxxing” trend of prioritizing male physical attractiveness through excessive weightlifting and both amateur and professional cosmetic surgeries.
The Montreal manifesto, however, criticizes some of these influencers — particularly those who promote “alpha-male,” masculinity, fashion, diet and fitness, and right-wing content — as “swindlers” who profit off lonely men.
Although it largely blames neoliberalism for the rise of the “hypergamy state,” the manifesto also says free-market conservatives deserve scorn for boosting capitalism that benefits the rich “bourgeois class” at the expense of “common men.”
CSIS officials noted anti-feminism may be one enabling factor among many that could lead a person on a path toward ideologically motivated violent extremism, which the agency’s latest annual report said is fuelled by a “salad bar” of motivating grievances that can cross political and social ideologies.
That’s making efforts to combat extremism increasingly difficult, CSIS officials and experts say.
“Acts of terrorist or extremist violence are no longer fitting into nice, neat ideological categories, and that makes them harder to investigate, harder to prevent in the future, which is why we need to focus a lot on prevention as much as we possibly can,” Carvin said.
Sunderland said that, beyond increased digital literacy tools for children — and young men in particular — to learn how to avoid harmful anti-feminist narratives online, education on healthy dating attitudes and how to treat women with respect could make a difference.
“A lot of the research points to how both incel and non-incel single men really overvalue the kind of desirability of how men look, and they’re kind of underplaying how much desirability (can also come from) emotional literacy, being a good partner, being a friend,” she said.
“That would probably be a good addition into our curriculum: how to have healthy sustaining relationships rather than what they’re being fed on social media, which is if you have the snatched jaw, you’re going to get lots of numbers at the bar.”
—with files from Global’s Touria Izri
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