Some men in the “incel” (involuntary celibate) community want the state to intervene in their dating lives. These sexually frustrated men believe that society is biased against them, so they should be given a “government-issued girlfriend.” Incels have attracted attention from the authorities—just not in the way they would like.
This week, the California Specialized Training Institute is advertising a training session for police across the state who want to learn more about domestic terrorism. Alongside anarchism, radical environmentalism, white supremacy, and the sovereign citizen movement, the flyer lists “involuntary celibate extremism” as one of the threats. It went viral after independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared it on social media.
For several years now, U.S. authorities have treated incel-related mass shootings as a serious security risk. The phenomenon of incel counterterrorism is an interesting window into how the U.S. government makes sense of newfangled threats and how far its surveillance reach goes.
The training session this week is hosted by the Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center, one of the many “fusion centers” created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to share intelligence between local and federal law enforcement. Although the fusion center has not yet responded to a California Public Records Act request for course materials—the law gives it 10 days to do so—other leaked documents hint at what the class might teach.
In 2020, hackers released millions of fusion center documents in an incident known as BlueLeaks. Some of these documents include federal intelligence bulletins and educational materials on the incel menace.
The Colorado Information Analysis Center’s 2019 slideshow on “violent extremism,” like the Orange County class on terrorism, lists incels alongside white supremacists, black separatists, anarchists, sovereign citizens, environmentalists, and anti-abortionists. It defines incel ideology as the belief “that women cannot be trusted and are not entirely human, but robot-like androids who only crave sex with attractive men. They believe they are ugly and no amount of self-improvement will attract women. They want access to women’s bodies without their input.”
As possible ways to deal with incels, the slideshow suggests “intervention” by their “online community,” “authorities,” and “acquaintances.” The next slide cites the case of a Utah man who was sentenced to prison for posting on Facebook that he was “planning on shooting up a public place” and “killing as many girls as I see.”
Law enforcement puts a lot of energy—perhaps more than the public realizes—into tracking down violent online fantasies. In August 2019, the Portland Police Bureau’s Criminal Intelligence Unit put out a bulletin seeking information on a Reddit user who wrote (and then deleted), “People ask ‘are you ok’ – but never ‘Are you planning to commit mass murder at the Black Lives Matter march in downtown Portland, OR on August 18, 2019 ot 19:00 local time with an Ruger-556 AR-15 style rifle and ammunition purchased from Northeast Arms in Salem, OR?'”
The bulletin says that the user is “believed to be 13 years old, going into the 8th grade,” includes his alleged photo, and reports that he has “has posted content consistent with the incel movement.”
In May 2020, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center uploaded a memo from Verizon about a Yahoo Answers user who posted that he felt “like bringing a gun to school” because he is “white and racially bullied on a daily basis” and called an “incel loser.” The memo includes the user’s name, date of birth, email address, and I.P. address, which placed him somewhere in Canada.
Verizon did not respond to a request for comment.
The first known act of real-life incel violence was the Isla Vista massacre of May 2014, when a man named Elliot Rodger posted a YouTube video complaining about his virginity, then committed a series of murders around a local college campus. Copycat attackers, who all named Rodger as their hero, shot up an Oregon community college in October 2015, ran over Toronto shoppers in April 2018, and shot up a Tallahassee yoga studio in November 2018.
But judging by the volume of bulletins on BlueLeaks, law enforcement interest in incels really picked up after May 2019, when the FBI issued an intelligence bulletin stating that “violent Incel rhetoric, expressed online in Incel community forums, likely is partially responsible for some individual Incels’ escalation from grievance to violent, physical, and revengeful acts.” The bulletin cites Reddit posts and memes about “Stacys and Chads” along with examples of real-life incel attacks.
In June 2019, the U.S. military made personnel sit through a briefing on incel threats, which included images of those same memes.
A few months later, the U.S. Secret Service issued a public report on mass shooters, stating that many “attackers’ beliefs were multifaceted and touched on a range of issues, including white supremacy, anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, sovereign citizens, animal rights, and the ‘incel’ movement.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray later described this phenomenon as attackers picking from a “salad bar of ideologies” in testimony to Congress.
And in September 2019, the FBI issued an infamous intelligence bulletin warning that the new Joker movie had inspired “online threats” from the incel community and “a subset community known as Clowncel.” Fusion centers in Fort Worth, Texas; Austin, Texas; and central Florida all distributed up their own bulletins on the potential for Joker-related violence.
Parts of the FBI bulletin were leaked to the press, as was an internal U.S. Army warning, feeding into a moral panic about the Joker movie. Fortunately, none of the predicted violence materialized in real life. A 2023 study by two professors at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln concluded that feminist backlash to the plot of the movie, sensational media coverage, and government warnings all fed into each other.
A few weeks after the Joker premier passed without incident, the Southeast Florida Fusion Center revived the “clowncel” menace for its pre-Halloween situational awareness bulletin. “In previous years, there have been various clown-related threats and hoaxes, known as ‘clowning,'” the bulletin warns. “Recently, there has been an increase of clown-related online threats made by the involuntary celibate (Incel) community and a subset community known as ‘Clowncels.'”
To round off the hodgepodge of unrelated dangers, the bulletin also mentions the threat of Islamic State group car rammings and drug-laced Halloween candy. It cites a 2018 report about an Ohio child who had meth poisoning after trick-or-treating—the police later arrested his parents, concluding that the drug did not come from Halloween candy—and a 2019 article about Florida preteens who accidentally ate marijuana edibles at school.
The fusion center is an incredibly powerful system for disseminating information to law enforcement. When a bulletin goes out, police across America jump to attention. But all that information is not always put together in a coherent way.
A Senate report in 2012 concluded that fusion centers had “forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality—oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
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