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Montreal police on Tuesday work the scene of a shooting that happened the day before.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
The suspect in Monday’s shooting outside a Montreal hotel appears to have been motivated primarily by incel ideology, according to experts who have reviewed a manifesto circulating online.
A national-security source said the manifesto, which is circulating online, is the same one that police have tied to the shooter. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the source because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
The 104-page document, which has been posted online by Rebel News and other outlets, contains the suspected shooter’s name on its title page. He was identified Tuesday as a 25-year-old from Lethbridge, Alta. The suspect, a police officer and a civilian all died in a gunfight that ensued after police were called to the scene.
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The manifesto repeatedly urges overthrowing “hypergamy” as a rationale for unleashing violence against corporate executives, pornography producers and police officers.
Hypergamy means to marry above one’s social status. But experts in online extremism say the term can also refer to the belief among involuntary celibates, or “incels,” that the majority of women are drawn to only a small minority of men.
In online incel communities, the messaging is that young men can overthrow this social order through violence.
“Misogynistic violence is the root of this,” said Brad Galloway, co-ordinator of Ontario Tech University’s Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism.
Mr. Galloway reviewed a copy of the manifesto and said the author appears to have fused incel concepts with strains of radical anti-authority extremism, by demanding attacks against law-enforcement officials and elites.
“The violence against police specifically is an interesting development regarding incels and their violence,” Mr. Galloway said. “Generally speaking, we would see that violence projected towards women.”
Carleton University’s Stephanie Carvin also reviewed the manifesto and said the author appears to subscribe to a “hodgepodge” of grievances that are “a mix of what I would call far-right and far-left ideas.”
She said the wider document is a researched diatribe which criticizes capitalism, pornography, dating apps, hip hop culture and the Hells Angels, but which overall showcases the author’s “obsession with degeneracy.”
The manifesto also decries what its author calls the “Judeo-bourgeois class” and urges attacks against “influential Zionists” and “corporations with ties to Zionism.”
“The only thread that really kind of knits the whole document is this incel ideology,” Prof. Carvin said. “The idea that society is corrupt, that we basically need to remake society in order to create a more equal playing field for men, in particular, and that women should not be working and should be in the home and undergo forced monogamy.”
Similar world views have propelled other deadly attacks in Canada over the past 10 years. In 2018, a 25-year-old launched a cube-van attack on Toronto’s Yonge Street that killed 11 pedestrians. In 2020, a 17-year-old used a sword to kill a woman in a Toronto massage parlour before he was convicted of terrorism offences and a murder charge.
The manifesto circulating this week urges fighting police to the death in Canada’s biggest cities. The RCMP issued a national alert to police across Canada on Monday, warning them to be vigilant for copycats.
Fatal confrontations involving police are growing in Canada. Mubin Shaikh, a former RCMP and CSIS undercover informant who now trains law enforcement agencies, said many extremist groups are urging “suicide by cop” showdowns.
“You also see this with white supremacists and the neo-Nazi accelerationists,” he said. “They like to portray dying in a shootout with police as a final act of resistance.”
Barb Perry, the founder of Ontario Tech’s Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, said in an e-mail that the manifesto’s author “is likely an Incel, but also an adherent of an array of myriad other narratives.”
Prof. Perry said such manifestos should not be widely disseminated because they can contribute to copycat violence. “It is a very dangerous act to publicly share such vitriol.”
Ezra Levant, co-founder of the right-wing Rebel News site said in an e-mail that his organization posted the document online in its entirety because other media glossed over its communist and antisemitic themes.
“It was only establishment media that received those early copies, and 100 per cent of them emphasized the ‘incel’ passages, and 100 per cent of them ignored the antisemitism,” Mr. Levant said.
With a report from Mike Hager