I'm linking to this article rather than the many others that have more information here (Daily Beast has choice quotes) because the terrorist in question took his own hand off and turned his face into a colander and almost everyone is running with a photo:
Richlands Man Pleads Guilty to Possessing and Manufacturing An
justice.gov
The most relevant quote from other pieces being that: "A Virginia man inspired by notorious 'incel' mass shooter Elliott Rodger fantasized about blowing up a shopping mall and killing 'hot cheerleaders,' according to an FBI affidavit."
A relevant old piece
We Should Really Stop Ignoring All the Terrorists on 4chan
The anonymity of chan culture creates a destructive feedback loop of loneliness among young men, which leaves them easy targets for radicalization.
whitehatmag.com
One of the more wearying aspects in my life is how often I mention something like this, or some "op" from the chans making life miserable for people online, and seeing a bunch of people say it's "like that Gamergate thing from a few years ago." Because no, it isn't "like that..."
It just IS that, continuing to be a thing. The chain of shootings mentioned in my old article there, starting with Elliot Rodger (if not earlier) and continuing at a fairly regular pace as people on "incel" forums continue to follow in his footsteps hasn't actually stopped at any point. The infrastructure radicalizing these terrorists still exists, and mostly in the exact same places I specifically named years ago in that article. It remains connected to the absurd nazi-lead "culture war" stuff I have at no time ever shut up about and the death toll keeps rising (53 people killed by "incels" according to conservative estimates), and people still have their heads so buried in the sand I'm reading articles aghast at how this one has a girl he's been dating for 2 years (and planned to murder after setting this bomb off). Just exactly how many people do members of a terrorist organization have to kill before reporters quit taking their cutesy self-applied name at face value and dig into what actually motivates them.
I wrote a fairly long-winded thread breaking that down over here
https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/1298829604904464384 but the short form is there's a whole multi-level propaganda engine that teaches them that the proper order of the world is for all women to be their personal sex slaves who are also their surrogate mothers, and if any given woman they find attractive doesn't fall in line with that, the most depressed world-hating loser in the club needs to take one for the team, write a manifesto, go on a killing spree, and hopefully that'll finally be enough to cow us into submission or convince the government to start lobotomizing us and passing us around.
So no it's not a community of uncharismatic losers with an alarming tendency to snap and pick up guns. It's a violently misogynistic ideology egging each other into becoming "soldiers for the cause," and even the ones who aren't taking that last step are a pretty damn pressing threat.
And if you have it in your head that this WAS a really serious issue back in 2014 that's died down since, no. It's just as much of a thing as it ever was, it's just that the media largely lost their taste for discussing it, and a few of the people perceived as "right on the front lines" never really were, used the spotlight for some personal enrichment, and walked the hell away. The rest of us never stopped having to deal with a bunch of nazis trying to kill us constantly.
