Study of ‘incels’ explores the nature of their terrorism threat, disp…
archived 16 Mar 2022 10:16:31 UTC
One of the key reasons that authorities have had difficulty wrapping their heads around the incoming tide of right-wing-extremist political violence is that they’ve been long reliant on outdated models for understanding terrorism that had their origins in the early-2000s “War on Terror”—primarily focused on foreign-based organizations and Islamist radicals. This has played a role in the mishandling of various cases of obvious terrorism—such as the 2017 Las Vegas massacre—due to investigators’ insistence that an organizational connection had to exist in order to consider it a terrorist act.
A new report from the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC), however, raises hope that these outdated and counterproductive models are becoming a thing of the past. It examines how the men who call themselves “incels”—short for “involuntary celibates”—or “anti-feminists” have proven capable of unleashing horrific levels of lethal terror, and in doing so demolishes some of law enforcement’s longstanding peccadillos about recognizing terrorism when they see it, as well as acting astutely beforehand in a way that can help deter it from happening in the first place.
Titled “Hot Yoga Tallahassee: A Case Study of Misogynistic Extremism,” the report delves the case of Scott Beierle, the 40-year-old self-described “incel” who in 2018 walked into a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, and opened fire, killing two women and injuring five. He is one in a series of angry “red-pilled” men radicalized online into misogynistic and fascist belief systems who have escalated their violence into the real world with lethal results.
The report argues that early intervention and behavioral threat assessments could make a life-and-death difference for the women who inevitably become the targets of hateful “incel” ideology, noting that "there is no one profile of an individual who plans or executes an act of targeted violence." Instead, it recommends thwarting attacks by, first, recognizing the potential threat, considering multiple potential targets, and finding ways both to divert the nascent terrorist in pursuing violence and to protect others when that diversion fails.
One of the themes running through the report is the major role played in encouraging and enabling the violence by the failure of accountability in the system for young white men like Beierle, and how the lack of consequences for his mounting litany of miscreancy finally culminated in a mass killing. Beierle had been charged multiple times with battery, but charges were dropped, the report notes, and had previously been fired from multiple teaching jobs, and barred from bars and apartment buildings.
"During his teen years, the attacker was accused of stalking his classmates, and he wrote stories that centered around violent themes," NTAC research specialist Steve Driscoll told reporters in a briefing on Thursday. "One of those stories was 81 pages long and involved the protagonist murdering several girls before committing suicide. The female characters in the story that were killed, represented the attacker's actual classmates from his high school, but he slightly changed the names in his writing."
Beierle told his classmates as well as social-media interlocutors that he openly admired the Aryan Nations and Hitler, so that people who were familiar with him often referred to him as "Nazi." His rantings became so violent that his parents, with whom he lived, began locking their bedroom door at night; his brother kicked him out after Beierle entered his wife’s bedroom while he thought she was sleeping and stood over her for 30 minutes.
Yet he rarely ever faced serious consequences for any of this, and even had encouragement. When he ran for election as vice president of his 1997 senior class in high school in Vestal, New York, he ran against a female candidate with the slogan: “Vote for Scott, because we don’t need no woman.” He won.
While taking courses at Florida State University, he was known to partake in open mic nights at a local comedy club, where he told offensive, racist, and antisemitic jokes. Beierle was arrested three times for incidents of groping women in public, and the women he attended school with avoided him because of his inappropriate behavior.
As the report notes: “A superficial look at [Beierle’s] personal history reveals an individual who pursued higher education, served in the military, and held highly regarded professional positions of trust. However, a more complete and interdisciplinary assessment reveals objectively concerning behavior that continued for decades.”
"You often see a crossover between misogynistic views and White supremacy, far-right ideology, as well as in some cases far-left ideologies," Driscoll said. "The body of research examining misogyny as an extreme ideology and incels specifically, as well as its intersection with other ideologies like White supremacy, as a field of research, is growing."
The report also discusses other recent incidents of violence linked to misogynistic extremism, particularly in 2020. In July that year, self-described "anti-feminist" attorney Roy Den Hollander attacked the family of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas at her home, motivated by a belief that "manhood is in serious jeopardy in America." He shot both her son and her husband before fleeing and later killing himself. In dossiers later found by law enforcement, the 72-year-old called for a "revolution."
There were other incidents in 2020 linked to "incel" terrorism: a shooting at an Arizona mall targeting couples, a machete attack at a Toronto massage parlor, a New York man who targeted a couple with violent threats, and a 23-year-old Virginia man who blew his hand off while tinkering with a bomb that investigators believe was meant to target a cheerleading performance. And in 2021, a 22-year-old man named Jake Davison who frequented “incel” social-media channels embarked on a lethal rampage in the British town of Plymouth and murdered five people, including his mother, before killing himself.
The report highlights strategies for defusing these lethal attacks before they reach the stage where they become inevitable, particularly in identifying the nascent terrorists in their formative stage, and channeling their anger and frustration into less destructive paths.
The NTAC’s approach to the issue represents a significant step forward for American law enforcement, since it sheds much of the outdated framing that grew up around “War on Terror”-era counterterrorism.
Understanding how “incels” think and finding ways to defuse their violence preemptively, however, does not mean allowing their behavior to be greeted with a slap on the wrist; rather the opposite, since, as the NTAC report notes, the lack of accountability plays a major role in their spiraling violence.
“Though misogynist incels are often perceived as a movement without political aims, violent perpetrators have the same type of far-reaching aims that white nationalists have: to completely change the culture and politics of society to favor their own group,” Alex DiBranco, the executive director of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, noted in a February report from New America.
“This is an ideology. It’s not a psychological disorder,” she said. “There’s a lot of undue sympathy.”
