Within hours of the recent shooting in Montréal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, arguments about the gunman’s 104-page manifesto had already split along familiar lines.
Most Canadian outlets called it an incel manifesto. Right-wing sites fired back that the media had buried the obvious and that the document was really Marxist and anti-Zionist.
Both sides are partially correct, which is exactly the problem.
‘Salad bar’ of grievances
I have read and analyzed more than six decades of violent extremist manifestos , and the Montréal text is a tidy example of what researchers call mixed, unclear and unstable ideologies, hybrid extremism or “salad-bar” extremism.
A lone attacker builds a world view the way you build a plate at a buffet — a bit of racism here, some antisemitism there, a scoop of anti-government conspiracy; whatever fits his grievance. It doesn’t hold together as a doctrine. It holds together as a feeling.
That’s why trying to file the Montréal shooter under “left” or “right” keeps producing a mess. He borrows the language of Marxist revolution and calls for the overthrow of capitalism. He also rages against feminism, dating apps, pornography and “degeneracy,” a vocabulary of the online manosphere and part of the far right.
He attacks a “Judeo-bourgeois class” and names “influential Zionists” as targets — old-fashioned antisemitism wearing an anti-capitalist coat. Asking whether he was left-wing or right-wing is the wrong question.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov
Misogyny at the root
Here is the part the left-versus-right debate keeps stumbling over. There is, in fact, a base layer to the killer’s manifesto, and it’s misogyny.
Everything else grows out of male sexual grievance. The author’s organizing idea is “hypergamy,” the incel belief that women want only a small minority of desirable men and that the ordinary “common” man is “sexually left behind.” He calls these men “the dispossessed.”
He then reaches for Karl Marx, casting lonely men as a “proletariat” robbed by a powerful class. The antisemitism answers who rigged the game. Take the misogyny out and the whole thing falls apart. There is no grievance left to revolt about.
Author, Author provided (no reuse)
This is the bit my field sometimes gets wrong, and I have said so in my own work.
The salad-bar image makes the mix sound optional, as if every ingredient were equal. But misogyny is rarely just another item on the bar. It is the lettuce the whole salad sits upon. It supplies the anger and humiliation that allow racism, antisemitism and anti-government paranoia fuse into one story of betrayal.
American terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman and colleagues made this point years ago; my own data backs it up across six decades.
Read more:
I analyzed more than 100 extremist manifestos: Misogyny was the common thread
Written to recruit
There is something else worth noticing about how the manifesto was written. It was built to be read.
At one point, the author explains that he dropped the usual academic citation style so the text would be “more accessible to men” who do not read scholarly work. He asks for it to be translated into seven languages and spread in plain words anyone can read. A manifesto like this is a performance, and its job is to recruit.
In my research, I call these ideological batons that are meant to be picked up by the next person. That also explains the salad bar.
A text built to recruit lonely men has reason to toss in a little of everything, to find more to hook. The mix is aimed at reaching more men. The argument to potential followers never changes — that the lonely man’s pain is not his fault. He ended his manifesto with the words:
“I have laid out the required tactics, targets, and preparations here and elsewhere. Be resilient, be pragmatic, be implacable, and be perceptive. Remember everything that they have taken from you, and remember all of the pain that they have caused …Be unflinching, go forth, and KILL THEM ALL!”
That is the true objective of the manifesto, and the attack confirms this interpretation.
Police are investigating whether the gunman was targeting offices of Aylo, the company that owns Pornhub, across the street from his hotel in Montréal. Pornography is one of his named targets, and his hatred of it runs back to the grievance at the centre of the text.
A police officer and a member of the local Jewish community were killed in the gunfight that followed. The manifesto frames dying at the hands of police as a worthy end — a common pattern in gender-driven attacks.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Charlotte Glorieux
More than a label
So can we call it a left-wing manifesto? The manifesto uses left-coded language. But if “far-left attack” becomes the headline, investigators and researchers are hunting for the wrong warning signs and ignoring the young men who have never read any Marx and are radicalizing in manosphere forums.
The same goes for anyone calling the manifesto right-wing. What predicts this violence has little to do with the political spectrum. Its foundation is misogyny, and we are still reluctant to treat that as a serious threat in its own right.
Read more:
Toronto van attack: Guilty verdict, but Canada still needs to tackle ideological violence
Canada has been here before. The 2018 Toronto van attack was carried out by an incel, and a 2020 Toronto massage parlour attack was “the first terrorism prosecution in Canada involving incel ideology.”
Whether this shooting is ever classified as terrorism is a separate question from what drove it, and that process is only beginning. The RCMP’s national security branch has opened an investigation into ideologically motivated violent extremism.
The legal label is one thing. The analytical one is not hard once you stop arguing about left and right. A lonely, furious young man built an ideology to justify killing, and its bedrock was a hatred of women. The Marxist language is just something he poured on top.
