Incels vs. Columbiners
By now, many of you have heard about a self-described incel who was arrested for allegedly planning a mass shooting where he had hoped to have 3000 victims. Again, for those of you who may not know, incel is a portmanteau of ‘involuntary celibate’. Incels are toxic young men who believe a woman’s only purpose is for sex and that incels are owed sex by females, or foids as they call them.
Many incels have carried out violent acts against women and innocent bystanders due to hateful attitudes toward women. Eliot Rodger is considered by many to be the first incel. Rodger infamously killed six people and injured 14 near the campus of UC Santa Barbara. Rodger’s lone motivation was that he wanted to punish all women for rejecting him and men for being sexually active.
Another incel that was documented on this site was Chris Harper-Mercer. Harper-Mercer was 26-years old when he killed nine in a school shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. In his writings, Harper-Mercer bemoaned the fact that he was a 26-year-old virgin. He was also an admirer of the Columbine cowards, but we’ll get to that shortly.
Probably the most notorious incel attack was that of Alek Minassian in 2018. On the streets of Toronto, Minassian drove a van into a crowd of people, killing ten. Eight of the victims were women. He was known to self identify as an incel on places like 4chan and Reddit.
These are only a handful of violent acts that have been attributed to incels, but just in those three incidents, 25 people were murdered just because some entitled and self-centered misogynist couldn’t get a girl to talk to them. But I digress.
Our latest entrant into the Mom’s Basement Hall of Shame is 21-year-old Tres Genco of Hillsboro, Ohio. He was recently arrested on charges of attempting to commit a hate crime and illegally possessing a machine gun.
Before all you gun nuts get your camouflage panties in a bunch, it wasn’t an actual machine gun. He was said to actually be in possession of a bump stock that can convert a semi-automatic rifle into an almost fully automatic rifle. A bump stock was used at the Mandalay Bay shooting in Las Vegas, where a gunman killed 60 people attending a concert. This was after the gunman had fired over 1,000 rounds from his hotel window. In the wake of this mass murder, bump stocks were made illegal.
Anyway, getting back to Genco, he described himself as an incel and had an admiration for Eliot Rodger. Genco is also said to have hung out on a well known incel forum. It is the one you’re thinking about if you’re in the know. I won’t mention it here, as they don’t deserve the traffic.
Of course, like just about every other incel with a gun, he had a manifesto. As I’ve said in a previous post, I hate using the word manifesto because it lends credence to what these assclowns are trying to accomplish. Maybe they should be called you’re-not-really-a-man-ifesto. Or just call them what they really are, the incoherent scrawling of a failure.
Genco had this to say…
Genco wrote a manifesto titled “A Hideous Symphony,” by “Tres Genco, the socially exiled Incel.” In it, he said he would “slaughter” women “out of hatred, jealousy and revenge…” and called death the “great equalizer.” Investigators say they discovered another note, allegedly drafted by Genco, that said he hoped to “aim big” for a kill count of 3,000 people.
“I would hope these words resonate in sweet familiarity to fellow incels, either cognizant of their situation or not,” it read, according to the indictment. “I am already set to go into the U.S. Army… this training will be for the attainment of one reality, the death of what I have been deprived most, but also cherish and fantasize at the opportunity of having but has been neglected of; Women. I will slaughter out of jealousy, hatred, and revenge… I will take away the power of life that they withhold from me, by showing there is more than just happiness and fulfillment, there is all encompassing death, the great equalizer that will bear all of us into its seductively calm velvet of silence and serenity.”
That’s right. Genco enlisted in the army in order to hone his ‘killing skills’. He was drummed out for poor performance and conduct. Gee, who would have thought that a social miscreant would wash out of basic training. I really hope his drill instructor was a woman.
Genco was also said to have scouted out universities where he allegedly planned to carry out his massacre. Hillsboro is almost equidistant from Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus. So, his target could have been any one of the large universities in those cities.
Genco was arrested when someone at his home called police after Genco locked himself in the bathroom with a gun. The caller said that Genco had been acting violent and that the caller had found Genco’s writings and was worried he was going to hurt someone. When police searched Gecno’s car, they found an AR-15 with a bump stock, several loaded magazines, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. While the caller is never identified or what their relationship to Genco is, I hope it turns out to be his mom for the sake of this story. Incels say they hate women, but are usually never too far from the apron strings.
This story got me thinking about how similar incels are to columbiners. Columbiners are people who identify with the shooters at Columbine High. They’ve been around almost since the day after Columbine. To me, it almost seems that columbiners gave birth to incels. There is also some overlap between incels and columbiners. As mentioned above, Chris Harper-Mercer was both. If you want to apply the incel term retroactively, it could be argued that Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was also both. While I don’t think the Venn diagram of incels and columbiners is a perfect circle, there is definitely a lot of overlap.
Here are the similarities.
- Both are prone to violence due to their own inadequacies.
- Both think that their failures are due to other people and won’t take responsibility for themselves.
- Both have imaginary enemies. For incels it’s the ‘Chads’ and Staceys’ while for columbiners it’s unnamed ‘jocks’.
- Both have certain days that they plan their attacks for. For columbiners, it’s April 20th, the date of the Columbine school shooting. For incels, it’s May 24th, the date of Eliot Rodger’s cowardly attack. Genco is even said to have planned his attack for 5/24.
- They both hangout in online echo chambers where they can reinforce each other’s abhorrent behaviors.
- They both have ‘martyrs’ for their cause in Eliot Rodgers and Eric Harris, respectively.
However, incels have some ‘advantages’ over columbiners, if you will.
- While there have been several columbiner forums and hangouts over the years, they were largely disorganized and the diaspora of columbiners was spread all over the internet. Meanwhile, incels, for the most part, have one centralized forum where the majority of them congregate.
- There’s also a more significant amount of incels than there ever were columbiners. It almost seems like any awkward kid that can’t get laid by the age of 13 is becoming an incel.
- While columbiners seemed to be apolitical, incels appear to be just another arm of the alt-right, giving them even larger numbers.
- Incels essentially have their own language. If you go to any incel forum, you’ll end up referring to Urban Dictionary to try to find what the hell they’re talking about.
If it wasn’t for the fact that incels don’t have a living central figure, I would almost classify them as a cult and a hate group.
Sadly, what I say here probably isn’t going to change the mind of a columbiner or an incel, but I’m going to say it anyway. You can’t expect a better life to just drop into your lap. You need to work on your own life in order to improve your situation. Just because these people online are telling you what you want to hear, that doesn’t make them your friends. They just want other people to be as miserable as them. Nobody owes you anything. The world doesn’t owe you anything. Society doesn’t owe you anything. You get what you make out of life.
Take it from someone who’s been there. I may be in my fifties now, but when I was young, not only was I bullied mercilessly, I also couldn’t find a girlfriend. It also didn’t help that I had a shitty home life where my dad regularly beat my mom in front of me.
I could have easily turned to violence, but what would that have solved? Either a cell with bars or a pine box. Those aren’t solutions, they’re cop-outs.
Unfortunately, you can’t reason with an incel. They’re zealots of the highest order. You can try to offer them help, but they’ll probably reject it. If you’re a parent and your son starts exhibiting incel-like behavior, get them help. As I’ve said before, there’s no shame in getting them psychological help. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. Would you rather have a son in therapy or one who will be forever known as a mass-murderer?
