A Tragedy in Montreal

Two days ago there was a shooting in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood. The culprit was a 25-year-old incel philosophy student from Alberta who travelled to Montreal concurrent with sending a 104-page manifesto to a number of media outlets. Early indications are that he was targeting the office of a well-known porn purveyor.

It seems that the shooter had much higher ambitions for his spree. And while it’s still a tragedy that a police officer and a civilian died in the mêlée, it is one of those situations that could have been much worse.

The manifesto can be found online, and as always people race to glean some sort of slant that allows them to bunch this murderer with the “other side”. I’ve seen the shooter described as “left wing”, “far-left” and so on by right wing outlets (such as the cesspool that is RebelNews), desperately trying to vilify and simplify. Other outlets have rightly declared the shooter an incel, and there is something perverse and telling about how offended this makes some communities.

I think the weirdest are those who keep trying to frame this as antisemitism, when the isolated bit about Zionism/Israel occupies approximately 0.05% of the text and almost seems incidental.

This is one of those situations where the horseshoe theory applies. The manifesto heralds communism as a solution to what it declares as the corruption of “high capitalism” – which he calls a bastardized form of socialism – yet simultaneously it espouses many views that you predominately find among the far right: destroying liberalism, that women should fulfill trad-wife roles, that there are only two sexes and gender is a myth, that porn and other vices need to be crushed, that all drug dealers and criminals need to be removed from the living, and so on.

If I had to categorize the politics of the shooter, it would be Nazbol. Economically far-left, but socially extremely far right. Trying to categorize this into contemporary notions of left and right is foolish nonsense. And to go further, “MAGA” is shockingly similar to Nazbol in almost all meaningful ways, and have been fully onboard as Trump has declared himself Chairman Trump and as the US has pushed capitalism aside to instead favour whatever bizarre economic abomination they currently have in place.

Regardless, about 99% of his manifesto consists of rationalizations and ruminations on why the world conspired to stop him from finding a girlfriend, and everything circles that basic nucleus. Porn, crypto, the rich, the few men who are apparently getting all the girls, and so on: All of it was rationalized as why this guy was lonely, and they all were his targets.

And let me be clear that I absolutely believe there is a male loneliness crisis and there is a tinderbox of social disorder that threatens peaceful society if it isn’t confronted. Male loneliness awareness has been a campaign of Scott Galloway, and bizarrely many leftists attack him for this, usually by grossly misrepresenting what that means, or by doing the whataboutism1 bullshit that signifies that someone has nothing. Many “progressives” are revealed to be vile, hateful creeps when it comes to dismissing issues facing males.

Solving male loneliness doesn’t mean enlisting women in forced companionship. It means men engaging in clubs and friendship groups, finding true meaning and purpose2, stopping the desperate cycle as outsiders spiral into a world where pathetic losers like Andrew Tate become their heroes and their lot becomes infinitely worse. The moment some lonely man fills that vacuum with pick-up artists and other misogynistic garbage, they cement that their situation is going to get worse. Rinse and repeat.

But this guy seemed to seek comfort in all the wrong places, and some of the perversely ridiculous narratives in his screed betrays this deluded view that comes from the incel space. For instance “their prevails in the average western high school itself a sinister and brutish sexual culture, in which many girls – even those of the younger grades – are brought quickly into the hypergamous social practice, especially so at the hideously vile events known as ‘parties’, where favoured males, who are often out of high school, in their twenties, and very socially dominant, violate countless girls, commonly many young girls in one single night”.

This is pathetic business.

The Misogyny Response

I first came across this incident via a Reddit video of a part of the event. The misogyny within the comments were staggering, and they overwhelm every venue I’ve seen it discussed.

One of the officers happened to be female3. She responded to an active shooter, had her partner killed right beside her, and was inches from being killed, but instantly almost all the comments were denigrating and mocking her performance.

“DEI!”

This is the rhetoric they picked up from a political movement, where anyone not a white male must have unfairly earned their position, and for whom the standards are nothing short of absolute perfection.

What irony. An incel goes on a shooting rampage and kills a cop and directly or indirectly a civilian, and in the tragic aftermath most of the comments make jokes or slurs about a cop doing something they would never have the bravery to do, because she is a woman.

Christ, what are we doing? Something has gone seriously awry.

During the event, and over just a few seconds, the following happened-

  • the killer rushed behind a beam just a dozen feet away from two officers.
  • the killer shot and mortally wounded her partner, she ducked behind another beam.
  • the killer was reloading or dealing with a jam of some sorts for a brief moment, it seems, while the shot officer struggles to drag himself away.
  • a civilian suddenly pops up beside the female officer.
  • the female officer spins towards the civilian, and rightly so because only two seconds later the gunman appears in exactly the same spot.
  • the civilian falls to the ground.

Many immediately assumed that she shot the civilian. And unfortunate shootings precisely like this happen frequently in such high intensity situations, overwhelmingly with men doing the wrongful shooting. Sometimes it’s over a falling acorn.

But this time it was a woman, and with that suddenly nothing short of perfection is allowed. Instant awareness of everything was absolute and expected. Never for male officers, but this is different, you see.

So if this was an errant police shooting during a tense event, it would be terribly tragic, but not unprecedented by a long shot, and it certainly won’t be the last. It would legitimately be an understandable tragedy in the heat of the moment, and a deeply unfortunate accident.

But here’s the wildest part: I don’t think the female officer shot the civilian.

When the civilian is shot it is decidedly the sound of an SKS long rifle firing. Secondly the civilian’s head moves perpendicular to the shooter who is now moving in on the officer. The civilian falls away from the officer because of how they were standing when their body went limp, not because of some enormous momentum of a 9mm bullet. A 9mm carries less than 3kg of momentum, and it isn’t going to throw someone backwards, though someone falling limp will often fall backwards.

The misogynists just couldn’t stop themselves from immediately attacking the officer – they’re pro-police so long as they’re male police – and from my analysis they’re probably wrong. And their attacks were unmerited and disgusting even if they were right.

That officer is a hero who just saw her partner killed. She is infinitely better of a person than any of those critics will ever be.

Footnotes

  1. Whataboutism is a cancer in discourse, and needs to always be recognized as such and dismissed on sight. The purveyors of whataboutism are almost always insincere garbage tossers that are just throwing whatever they can into the ring.

    Whataboutism isn’t always a deflection, but often it’s to dismiss the good will or efforts of others, or to pretend that an organization or government is only capable of one initiative at a time. Oh the police stopped a speeder? Well what about car theft! Oh some group provided homes for the poor? Whatabout veterans! Someone worries about males? What about females! And on and on.

    It’s just bottom-tier idiot rhetoric. ↩

  2. Organized religion often filled this need in people’s lives, giving events, groups, and purpose. I’m agnostic and certainly don’t believe you should play along with mythology just to have a group – though let’s be real and observe that a heady percentage of church adherents clearly don’t believe the teachings of their religion – but we would benefit from basically having churches minus the religion. ↩

  3. There are some groups that cluck and point whenever someone uses the word female, reacting like poorly trained bots. It’s weird and incredibly stupid. If the gender were reversed and the adjective male was appropriate, then female is the correct word. ↩