New Secret Service report details growing incel terrorism threat | Hacker News Reader

New Secret Service report details growing incel terrorism threat

cbsnews.com

55 pointsDocFeind90 comments

FWIW, for the people rolling their eyes at the "waste of government time", the actual report is very interesting:

https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/20...

As far as I can tell, the word "terrorism" appears nowhere in the document, though it's possible my pdf search is broken (certainly I didn't notice it in my read of the document). Nor does it really say that it is "growing", though that's a little bit more subjective (it talks about the rise of online misogyny, but doesn't directly tie that to violence, per se). That seems to be all created by the news website.

Instead, the point of the doc is to say "here are signs that were missed in this particular case, and you should consider keeping an eye out for them".

Those signs, for what it's worth, do not seem particularly subtle:

- the killer's parents were so concerned about him that they slept with their door locked

- he was fired from multiple jobs for inappropriate touching

- (dishonorably) honorably discharged from the military for inappropriate behavior

- sentenced to court ordered counseling on four different occasions for interactions with women

- a friend's wife reported him to law enforcement with concerns that he might be violent

I could go on and on - this is not some poor, sex-deprived misfit who just couldn't hack it in the cutthroat world of modern dating - it's someone with deep mental illness who happened to turn it towards women, maybe because he was bullied (or maybe that was his post-rationalization).

The real lesson here, as far as I can tell, is that we need to destigmatize mental illness, we need to encourage parents to get their kids mental help, and we need to shift law enforcement from a reactionary system to a preventative system.

Unfortunately, the other thing that would have been really helpful here would be to have one central dossier on this individual that encompassed all of their different negative interactions with law enforcement, their military discharge, etc. - but that very quickly gets into a level of big brother that I am uncomfortable with.

EDIT: I put dishonorably discharged when I should have put honorably - fixed.

>it's someone with deep mental illness who happened to turn it towards women

I don't think this was just happenstance. You don't just randomly become a misogynist because of mental illness. This kind of hatred is cultivated over time through what you are consciously and subconsciously taught and conclusions you are making about the world around you. That level of hatred eventually devolves into something clinically diagnosable sure but I don't think it's right to say that he just "happened" to direct his hatred at women.

I agree with you though on destigmatizing mental illness and that our systems are not set up to deal with cases like this well enough.

When religious people violently attack other people over religious beliefs, is it because of some kind of hatred cultivated over time that eventually devolves into something clinically diagnosable, or is it the other way around? Is it possible that a small subset of people with deep mental illness go into religion, politics, or any other self identity (possible as a form of finding social support), and through that the outgoing violence get focused towards a specific out group.

Cause and effect. It not happenstance since what people choose to self identify with is not random, but the chain of events can just as easily be explain from both directions.

As I understand: Anger is a common pool inside you that is instinctively directed toward the easiest outlet. If your boss yells at you, you yell at your subordinates or get ticked off at the cashier or yell at other drivers or get in an argument with your spouse, etc. (I mean, I hope not and I'm obviously not talking about you in particular, but you know the pattern). You don't direct your anger toward your boss for obvious reasons - not an easy outlet. Simlarly, people who are abused often become abusers of others, not of the people who hurt them.

This person obviously had great emotional problems and for whatever reason directed it at women. If somehow women weren't an option, they would find something else - it's not like they would otherwise be a happy, well-adjusted person.

This is what people need to understand about incels. It's grown and evolved into a political movement, with its own mythology, lingo and aesthetics, a community that actively seeks to radicalize and indoctrinate. People don't "come down with" inceldom, they identify with the propaganda and choose to identify with the movement, just as with neo-Nazism or any other extremist ideology. Then some of them inevitably take those ideals to their inevitable conclusion.

Yet I don't think this is what CBS wants people to take away from this. The CBS headline says terrorism and goes on about the government's report confirming but most folks won't even read past that headline.

Good summary thankyou.

> thing that would have been really helpful here would be to have one central dossier on this individual that encompassed all of their different negative interactions with law enforcement, their military discharge, etc. - but that very quickly gets into a level of big brother that I am uncomfortable with.

Yes. Let's not suppose some "system" would or could pick it up. What the individual needed was one reliable _person_ in their life, who loved him enough to guide him to getting help. Radical individualism plus social meida as a substitute for actual relationships is sowing bad seeds,

I agree with most of it, except this.

"and we need to shift law enforcement from a reactionary system to a preventative system."

Given their track record, this is much more likely to be abused than to help. It's a fairly common issue that PFA orders are abused during divorce proceedings. Things like PFAs and Red Flag laws are civil law which lacks many of the protections and rights associated with defense under criminal law.

Dishonorable discharge is kind of a big deal in the military, it comes with similar consequences to outright criminal behavior in the civilian world. So it would not be a huge violation of privacy if the police could put two and two together, since they've got their arrest/criminal history anyway.

EDIT: Parent comment was fixed, sorry for the confusion.

He wasn't dishonorably discharged - that poster was mistaken. He was honorably discharged.

'On June 9, 2010, SB was honorably discharged for “unacceptable conduct.”'

My mistake - I read the "unacceptable conduct" and automatically parsed that as dishonorably - will fix my post.

Part of the incel problem in general is that we generally don't teach boys how to socialize because society generally doesn't respond to their emotional state except when they react violently.

The problem is, like with many things in our current culture, we teach disruption and trauma. We actively teach people to be disruptive and to create trauma, and congratulate them on it. Some are of course learning.

Here is a link to the case study, Hot Yoga Tallahassee: A Case Study of Misogynistic Extremism.

- https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/20...

And their accompanying news release:

- https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2022/03/secr...

I think with everything that is going on, everyone should be aware of the Russian book "Foundations of Geopolitics"[0]. It is a textbook that basically gives a blueprint on how they should take over the world. On how to deal with the USA:

* Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics"

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

America and "the West" couldn't stomach a communist Russia, so I guess they'll just have to settle for this.

US will do anything but fund free/accessible healthcare, especially mental healthcare. Mass shooters and incels are products of mental health problems.

Not according to pretty much all psychology though so there's that...

If this is a mental health issue, why does it seem to only affect white men? How come we're not seeing minorities (maybe one? two?) doing this at the same rate as whites guys? Is there a shared psychosis that has a particular racial bias? Are the brains of white men particularly fragile? Should we be rounded up and studied in isolation, for our own safety?

Only some of this is sarcasm but all of it is valid. What is wrong with white males that makes us particularly prone to violence against women and in such good and fashion?

I wonder if there are studies about the number of violent mentally ill people in the US vs countries with free mental healthcare.

Again, the poisoned society that produces this is the root problem.

I treat weirdos as a canary. The way current policy thinkers operate is similar to the, "let's think of something literally everyone can be against and rename our agenda items as anti-whatever that is to neutralize resistance to it, and accuse any resistance as being for it," whereas this variation is, "let's pick something nobody will defend to test popular tolerance for our new surveillance powers and encroachments on basic freedoms."

These incels aren't a real problem, they are the artifact of someone inventing a problem they can get funding to never actually solve, but get paid indefinitely to manage and use as a platform for other things. It's the entrepreneurship of things literally nobody wants. What clicked is there is a middle cohort who spend significant mental energy trying to align to shifting narratives of power independent of whether they have any meaningful relationship to truth. It has made me quite disagreeable, but I think good men being disagreeable may be the only remaining way out of this cultural mess.

No idea why you're being down voted. For the same reasons, they're trying to eliminate E2EE due to 'child p*rn', and anonymity due to 't*rrorism'.

Child porn

Terrorism

See, you can type the whole word out.

lol, this is what happens when massive organizations with bloated budgets have nothing to do. Suddenly an extremely small group of sad, disaffected weirdos have been branded terrorists.

I think we need a disgruntled ex postal worker task force too.

Incel ideology is pretty nihilistic and violent. We're not talking "sad, disaffected weirdos" here but people who profess a rabid hate for the female gender, comparable to any other extremist ideology. (And yes, this means that the "not getting any" part of it is pretty much a self-created problem. Who could possibly want to get intimately involved with people who endorse that kind of nuttery?)

Truly varies though on the incel and the ideology changes. From my readings - some of what you said is true but it’d be a mistake to group all incels together. After all - we’re all incels until we’re not.

I think ContraPoints video on this was good at summarizing the themes that are common though - and to be honest - most incels just seem like guys who are down on their luck and hate themselves more than they hate women. Sure - you get some psychos but I think psychos exist in every ideology. I’ve yet to see one that doesn’t have them.

> we’re all incels until we’re not

But that's what makes the "self-proclaimed incel" worldview so strange and twisted in the first place. They make "not getting any" into a part of their identity, so normalization of hate towards women isn't that far behind. By and large, guys who are just "down on their luck" would never self-identify with this "incel" thing.

Once you've experienced 25 years of being down bad, it is a part of your identity. For many of these men, being down bad is their entire life. It's also something that other people label other men as. You don't necessarily get to choose the identity - people throw you into that camp without your choice.

The other aspect of it is that it's not purely mental or what not. It's not like they just need to take a shower and put on a clean shirt. It's something far more fundamental that is broken and many are autists/aspies. Some are normal but the overwhelming case is that many have very unpleasant physical features. So, they're just ugly dudes who might not have anything exceptional to note about them. Add in a bit of social anxiety, awkwardness, etc.

The guys like the Santa Barbara killer and what not are just unhinged psychos. I don't think being an "incel" at that point has any relation. Just as many unhinged psychos going on about degradation of their race of choice, immigrants are yadda yadda, etc. These people just needed something - anything - to latch their psychosis onto. If it wasn't for race crimes - they'd think people were secretly Nazis or something and they were killing them for the good of humanity.

I guess my point is - I find that many people in these communities who have degenerate views of women and what not are also people who have degenerate views of other classes of people too. They have a fundamental brain/belief-system/way-they-were-raised issue. The incel community is just an outlet for that degeneracy.

> we’re all incels until we’re not

Don't speak for me!

Right? Incel is a brand. I don't always have as much sex as I want but I always don't want to murder women. There's a difference.

I don’t think we have Incel stores like we have Supreme, man.

They hate themselves but misinterpret it as hate for women.

I think they hate women, but if they were capable of truthful, meaningful introspection they would hate themselves instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games#Raid_by_th...

I had no idea that that's how the EFF started. Interesting fact. Thanks.

It might also have something to do with that Santa Barbara incident in 2014 that killed 3, and the Toronto van attack in 2018 that killed 11 (and injured 15).

9/11 shows what happens when those weirdos are intelligent and get some funding.

Which is why the secret service started to profile all the Muslims located in the US as potential threats.

The big question that security experts and social researcher ask is if such profiling do anything to actually reduce the number of terrorists attacks, and if it is cost effective compare to just regular investigative police work.

There is also a portion of the population that dislike profiling of religious/political views, and view profiling as a slippery slope towards authoritarianism.

When was the last time a postal worker went "postal?" This type of violent misogyny happens all the time but we only talk a out it when the numbers are interesting. This is not the same thing and to lump the two together is to be dismissive of the problem. Real people are being killed and there's a pattern. Hell, there are forums and a public club with a brand and a manifesto. How many ISIS do there have to be to call them terrorists? Or is it the turbans? Do we change the language because those exhibiting the behavior happen to be white boys?

> Suddenly an extremely small group of sad, disaffected weirdos have been branded terrorists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incel#Mass_murders_and_violenc...

I'm sad for the people who were killed needlessly by alienated young men, but Tylenol kills more people in a single year than all of those cases combined. The fear mongering around this subject is off the charts.

I think some form of compassionate outreach is probably a better approach to that problem than branding them terrorists.

Lots of things kill more people than lots of other things; that isn’t the sole metric that dictates our domestic policies.

I happen to agree re: positive outreach. But outreach is a prophylactic measure, and the incel “movement” (as it were) contains people who run the spectrum from reachable with traditional support to people who merely lack the means to kill at the current moment. Both need to be addressed.

I agree with your last sentence, but the reason why malicious actors who kill fewer than drug overdoses deserve considerable concern is bc at most one person will die if you take too much tylenol. The number of casualties is linear in the number of actors.

Processes of violence have much higher variance in terms of the number of casualties, and the consequences of networks of actors even moreso, because, tragically, the events are not wholly independent and there can be multiplicative effects if one copies another, if a community that leads people toward committing acts of violence forms, etc.

I agree we should remain vigilant about encroachment upon our civil rights, who is being accused of 'future crimes' ex ante, etc., but to treat each as the same kind of statistical outcome-generating process is not the most useful mental model imo.

”compassionate outreach"

Yeah, it's called legalized prostitution.

When they commit mass murder in the name of their ideology, they become terrorists. That isn't off the charts fear mongering. Any group which did the same, and celebrated the people who did, would be called the same.

Not only that, but it's becoming increasingly taboo to talk about threats originating from minority groups. Whether those groups are religious, ethnic, or "racial" minorities, pointing out issues tied to / originating among them could be political suicide. Such issues have to be approached carefully.

Nice whataboutism you have there.

Can we at least right-size the police?

They seem to call a lot of male attackers "incel terrorists", even when the attacker doesn't espouse incel-like views. Roy Den Hollander was undoubtedly misogynistic, but I don't see any evidence he was an incel. The judge in Alek Minassian's case claimed he didn't believe the incel movement was a motive. That's two out of the six examples the article uses to try to establish a pattern. They seem to be stretching to find a pattern that may not be there.

Itt: People blaming Russians, immigrants, parents, BLM, and bloated budgets.

Nothing about the ease of accessing guns compared to other countries. Nothing about the various drug crises. Nothing about the fear based propaganda media hammered into your heads 24/7/365. Nothing about inequality.

We've really had a number done on us, that's for sure.

Don't forget the ease of accessing vans.

Ha very good.

However, America isn't an order of magnitude above the global average in van-based murder though, so it might not be as strong an analogy as you seem to think.

Seems like a particularly USA-centric viewpoint.

Canada is part of America too, and that's where the van was used.

The Boston bombers were mentally ill! Dahmer had emotional problems! Kaczynski was depressed! The 9/11 bombers we're angry because they didn't get enough sex!

Wait... WAT? No.

So why are so many of you doing such wild mental gymnastics to excuse away incel violence as a "mental health problem?"

Damned is the society that churns out this behavior so frequently. For every 1 that is in the news after committing a crime, there is a hundred that feels the same but commits no crime. Yes this problem needs attention, but a better use of resources is to find out what about society is causing this. My guess is that the parent(s) are to blame.

Whatever the cause is, angry young men that can't get any are probably the easiest to radicalize.

I am also interested in how this will be solved since I don't think the status quo is sustainable.

I lack the statistics to really get into the cause of this but perhaps this is caused by the winner takes all economy on dating apps. Perhaps sex is easier to acquire for the majority of women than ever before and increasingly difficult for the bottom n% of males or alternatively it feels this way for those men. A lack of empathy for the challenges that women face (both during their daily life's but also during dating) seems to characterise the incels as a group more than anything.

Add to that a COVID crisis and uncertain economic times and this might get worse before it gets better.

A good way to get into that top n% is to stop thinking of dating as an "economy".

Despite all of the incel talk, women aren't out there seeking the richest and handsomest men. They're looking for somebody to connect with, and feel safe with. A huge fraction of men fail to even try to connect with women as people, instead treating them as a commodity in a market. That makes them feel unsafe, because every woman has met at least one man who wants to take that commodity by force. They never know which one it is, and they have to treat all men that way until they know otherwise.

Be the guy who treats them as individuals, rather than goods, and you'll find that you rise up substantially from that bottom x%. That is the point where the incels totally lock themselves out the market they're so desperate to be in.

> Despite all of the incel talk, women aren't out there seeking the richest and handsomest men. They're looking for somebody to connect with, and feel safe with.

While nice in thought - the issue is that there's no way to connect this way on dating apps. You're on a dating app - you get 3s tops to make an impression. If someone finds you physically attractive then they'll continue to look at your profile and see if they find anything more physically attractive or emotionally attractive.

But this is essentially 4-5 photos and maybe 50 words you have to write for a very general audience to catch their attention. Dating apps are more about how well you can market what you have (or market what you don't have - I guess - it doesn't really matter. You just need to hook someone).

The real world is different. People will give you at least a few more seconds before moving on and being there in physical person is different than on an app. People actually exist as physical manifestations instead of as digital assets. This changes the way people interact.

Point of the parent was that online dating is extremely "economy" based and has a lot of market principles behind it. For the most part - women do go after the most desirable. Men do the same but are more liberal with their approach because they have to. Whereas women don't because they're less than a quarter of the online dating populace and thus are highly desired. You cannot deny the "economics" there.

Some women do treat men as commodity in a market. Both men and women of this type spoil it for the rest of the people who are genuinely looking for connection.

Women used to be essentially forced by society to marry someone, and usually at a pretty young age. So many settled for shitty partners they met in high school and took drugs to cope. Now these women can have good jobs and live how they want to.

You have to have your shit together. Given that, it's pretty easy to score. I know a divorcee who is one her second fiancee in three months. She has know the guy for two weeks and they just bought a house together.

I have read that one-man one-woman was the solution thousands of years ago to deal with this exact problem. Currently, the top X% of men get all the women and the bottom (100-X)% are terrorists (according to this article).

The history of wars is the history of men not getting any. Alexander the Great, a little bit short. Genghis Khan, on the ugly side. Doors wrote a song:

Girl, you gotta love your man

Take him by the hand

Make him understand

The world on you depends

Our life will never end

Gotta love your man, yeah

Those peaceniks in the 60's got few things right with their free love trip. Imagine the misery the world could have been spared if Zuckerberg could have just got laid.

Robots aren't capable of love or lust.

I think the free love thing in the 60s likely exacerbated this by destroying monogamy.

destroying monogamy is a good thing, tho.

I think we're finding out now just how bad an idea destroying it was.

In what way?

> Destroying monogamy

>> I think we're finding out now just how bad an idea destroying it was.

>>> In what way?

I do not wish to interrupt a pleasant conversation evolving in the replies, but think what people see as an attack on monogamy is really an attack on all human relations over the past 60 years. Parents send the kids to boot camp, kids send them to a "care home". Stressed out, underpaid teachers turn education into training for the test, students cheat and complain about their crap tutors. Bosses treat their workers as farm animals and employees see their bosses as inhuman tyrants. Everywhere extreme neoliberal individualism has atomised and alienated people from one-another. Monogamy (between any partners) is just one more casualty of this process. Divorce used to be a serious soul-searching matter. Now you can do it by SMS in your lunch break. Life partners who should love one another "In sickness and health" treat each other as economic ladders, emotional punch bags, and trophies. It's not that reification wasn't always in the air, read Jane Austen, but today that's often _all_ there is.

Yes, they attack our relationships because these make us strong and make the globalist/capitalist/politicians/Propagandists weak.

Monogamy in particular also leveled the playing field to some degree with dating so that you didn't get the "winner takes all" situation you have today. I think the both the death of monogamy and masculinity are the underlying causes of the "incel" phenomenon. The worst part about it is that many of the effected people push for neoliberal ideas harder because they've been brainwashed to think of them as the solution.

You could stop giving out guns to basically the entire population....

Where are guns given out to basically the entire population?

USA

Where do I sign up? I haven't gotten mine yet.

The old testament has a litany of laws that were created to solve for this. We can probably take those off the table.

Modern society is over sexualized, "coomerpilled" in incel terms. Reduce onlyfans, self-objectifying gamer girls, and other bait, and the problems will disappear. This cheap surrogate dopaminogenic entertainment will wither away along with the maladapted behavior it causes.

Any data to support this claim?

Because porn has been on the internet for far longer than the incel thing has been around.

Porn is not entertainment, nor a lifestyle. You can't binge watch it like Netflix or in this case, simp for young gamer girls making uwu sounds.

So no data?

You want data on how dopamine works?

I'm asking for data for this claim that you made:

> Reduce onlyfans, self-objectifying gamer girls, and other bait, and the problems will disappear.

No it hasn’t. It just wasn’t a meme yet.

They say it takes a village to raise a child.

The example is a previously arrested sex offender and child molester writing crazy revenge stories.

From there, potentially guys who can't get laid are suspect of thought crimes? What?

Good to see we still have Pulitzer prize level journalist doing hard hitting investigative reporting instead of writing nonsense with clickbait titles.

Literally all of the examples are violent. This isn't just "crazy revenge stories," it's targeted attacks with high death tolls.

- Scott Paul Beierle - mass shooting

- Roy Den Hollander - murder

- "a shooting at an Arizona mall targeting couples"

- "a machete attack at a Toronto massage parlor"

- "man who blew his hand off while tinkering with a bomb that federal authorities believe was meant to target a cheerleading performance"

- Elliot Rodger - mass shooting/stabbing/vehicle ramming

- Alek Minassian - mass murder

Of all the things civilization has survived so far and the republic falls to a bunch of sex starved WWE fanboys who planned their war from their parents' basement in-between Rick and Morty episodes.

The current civilization survived based on one-man on-woman.

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