What’s inside a blackpill?

Last week, a member of a misogynistic online movement carried out a mass shooting. Who are incels and what do they believe?

An incel meme of Isla Vista killer Elliot Rodger as “St. Elliot.” Incels regard Rodger as something of a folk hero for his deadly attack on women in California. (We Hunted the Mammoth)

CW: Misogynistic language, rape references

In the first couple months of the COVID-19 outbreak, commentators and columnists were pretty hard up for a silver lining, so some pointed to the fact that there hadn’t been a mass shooting since the pandemic began. Because no one was in school or crowding into shopping malls, there were no target-rich environments where misanthropic gunmen could unleash their murderous rage. That all changed last Wednesday, when a young man opened fire at a mall in Glenndale, Arizona, with an AR-15, seriously wounding several people. The shooter Armando Hernandez identified as an “incel,” short for “involuntarily celibate,” and targeted couples.

On the same day, in Canada, another incel was charged with a mass stabbing attack that fatally wounded a woman in February. He claimed that he had been inspired by Alek Minassian, the perpetrator of the infamous 2018…