Cops, headshrinkers and the public are trying to untangle what motivated the gunman whose bloodlust left a police officer and an innocent bystander dead.
Monday’s brazen daytime shooting in Montreal has shocked the country.
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Western University criminology professor and former cop Michael Arntfield has read suspected killer Seth Scott Hatfield’s bizarre 104-page manifesto in which he lambastes Jews, women and pornography along with a multitude of other grievances.
“Not since the Unabomber ( Ted Kaczynski ) have I seen a killer so clumsily and arrogantly attempt to intellectualize and justify violence,” Arntfield told the Toronto Sun , adding that the treatise was “clearly augmented by AI, if not written mostly by AI, given all of the usual stylistic and editorial markers.”
Shooter a ‘general salad bar hater’
The murder expert — who authored a book on manifestos and also trained law enforcement around the world on the incel movement — said that like Kaczynski, who murdered three people and injured 23 others between 1978 and 1995, the Montreal shooter is a “general salad bar hater” with a wide array of perceived adversaries.
On the one hand, Hatfield called for death squads made up of former cops and military personnel to “clean up scum,” but at the same time revealed a deep antipathy toward law enforcement.
Arntfield noted that the maniac’s manifesto lacks incel buzzwords that typically accompany slayings connected to the movement.
“It doesn’t have the traditional incel words, known as metonyms, like “Chad” and “Stacy,” he eschews that and uses more neutral language,” the former cop said. “This then raises the question whether the purported incel adherence is more of a false flag — albeit just as dangerous.”
No clear incel hierarchy
In the incel lexicon, “Chads” are men who are successful with women, while “Staceys” are the women they have sex with. Incels hate both groups.
Incels have no clear membership or hierarchy unlike other groups, Arntfield said. The Montreal murderer was a scattershot hater, who blasted his grievances far and wide.
“I call them ‘salad bar radicals’ and these are people with more than single hatred and I think that’s what we’re seeing here,” Arntfield said. “He’s anti-criminal, but ambivalent about the police. He’s anti-bourgeoisie, hates Jews, hates porn, but at the same time admits he’s been relegated to watching it.
“There is none of the nomenclature to incels in general. There is no mention of the incel attacks in Toronto and Vancouver or Elliot Rodger (the patron saint of incels.)
“This may also be the product of the reliance on AI, which for now will not prepare violent or sexual content, and he otherwise lacked the facility of language to properly articulate this himself. There is much more biographical information yet to come.”
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Manifesto a genocidal document
What the manifesto is in the end, Arntfield argued, is a genocidal document.
“He’s calling for the mass execution of criminals, but he’s also trying to give the impression he’s legitimate with footnotes, annotations and academic-style citations,” Arntfield said. “He’s talking about a new world order and faux intellectualizes his ideas.
“He revels in his own bulls—. Ted Kaczynski’s thesis also called for a new world order and discussed economic policy. He started out against the airlines and universities, then moved to anyone affiliated with those institutions.
“Anyone he could and would blame for having a sub-optimal life. That makes the Montreal shooter more like Kaczynski.”
Arntfield added: “He’s more of, at first glance, what’s known as an ‘injustice collector writ large’ than an incel. He has accumulated a wide array of grievances. And a wide cross-section of people.
“This is how disordered fantasy, malignant narcissism and intellectual imposterism can, once combined, lead to tragedy — how these lives, including a dedicated police officer, were senselessly lost essentially as part of some malcontent’s vanity project.”
X: @HunterTOSun