In the world that porn has built, young men’s efforts are literally infertile: explosions of violence or otherwise that yield a big, pleasurable nothing. Hatfield’s anti-porn crusade paradoxically embodied this fundamental impotence.

The man was clearly unstable, and his manifesto, with its frequent references to knowledge of secrets that remain “almost entirely hidden from people,” betrays delusions of grandeur. But the manifesto is also of cultural significance, considering the ascendancy of the incel ideology among swathes of the online Right and the percolation of many similar ideas about men, women, and dating in the mainstream. Its Right-Left ideological flattening — Hatfield was both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist; he rails against transgenderism and Western cultural supremacy  — is significant, too, representing the bitter end of Christian metaphysics, even on the Right. 

Hatfield’s manifesto is the first, but possibly not the last, appearance of hypergamy, a new buzzword of the online Right, in a mass-shooting. The word has its origins in an Indian caste law that required women to marry men of the same or higher caste and, in modern parlance, means “dating up.” The desire to “date up” could generically be assumed to be shared by both men and women — aspirational mating is a universal human urge, after all — and to include desires for partner-benefits like social status and finances. But in today’s manosphere and as embraced by Hatfield, it concerns only physical attractiveness. In Hatfield’s definition, this is the only quality that matters when a woman chooses whom to have sex with — which she can do freely in contemporary culture. He defines it as a “phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically [sic] and culturally to just one male.”

As the theory goes, a man’s height and physical attractiveness are signs of “health” and “genetic quality” which are desirable qualities in a mate because they suggest healthier offspring. Hatfield is cribbing from evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are more invested in any individual child than men are, since men can have hundreds of children, and women only a few. Thus women are supposedly especially motivated by attractiveness — which signals health, meaning a better chance for survival of the offspring — in their choice of sexual partners. Women are also choosier about partners than men are for the same reason: the sum number of chances a woman has to pass on her genes is very limited; men have hundreds, or theoretically even thousands, of such chances, no childbearing or nurturing work required. 

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When you combine the female preference for tall, attractive men with a liberal sexual culture, according to the incel theory, you get a situation in which tall, attractive men are having lots of sex with multiple female partners, and the other men are having no sex at all. This, supposedly, has nothing to do with the men’s habits, personalities, or physical presentation, but is purely genetic. In the “hypergamy state,” as Hatfield writes, the “common man” is hopelessly “cast out of the divine realm of truly intimate love and attraction” through no fault of his own. “The only things that matter when it comes to experiencing love as a male … are the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” 

All this takes many wild leaps, but it is to some extent — and more than Hatfield actually references — based on theories of evolutionary biology and psychology that are becoming increasingly popular. One such popular, biology-based idea about the psychology of dating is the conviction among very-online Zoomer young women that the birth control pill “makes you choose the wrong guys.” A groundbreaking work on the matter is evolutionary psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill’s book, How the Pill Changes Everything, which focuses on the Pill but also provides a fascinating walkthrough of the evolutionary view of modern dating. According to Hill, the preference for healthy offspring is — and in many more ways than Hatfield’s manifesto suggests — encouraged by female biology, and gene-maxxing in fact does play a significant role in women’s partner choices, though the standard seems more likely to be highly complex issues of genetic compatibility, which is predicted by sexual attraction, rather than brute height-and-looks measurement on some objective scale. Hill would also argue that social and psychological traits such as female partner-choosiness are hardwired by evolution. 

Hill’s research doesn’t support incel conclusions throughout. She has found that women in the pre-ovulation phase of their menstrual cycles are more likely to choose men they find sexier or better-looking. Post-ovulation, the preference switches to men they find rich, nice, or reliable. Her argument is that since hormonal contraception sets female hormones at a permanent “post-ovulation” state, it may be skewing partner choice toward provider types,  and away from the men women are most attracted to. The skew is bad in that it affects birth rates and marital happiness, since couples who have good sexual chemistry also seem to have better child-health outcomes (due to genetic compatibility) and lower divorce rates. Given that around 30% of women in their 20s are on hormonal birth control of some kind, with the share presumably higher among the sexually active, many women in the dating pool, artificially influenced by hormones, in fact should be seeking personality over looks. 

Still, the underlying premise that sexual behavior follows rules of hard science is shared by both men and women. And distorted through a million video clips and Reddit threads, such material could make the position of short, unattractive men seem desperate indeed. Hatfield calls it the “ghastly state of things that the Western world has found itself in” and a “situation of terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation.” 

In his theory, this problem for men is particular to the modern world, because while hypergamy ruled in the state of nature, the misty dawn of agriculture and civilization somehow naturally produced monogamy, supposedly a great leveler against the tyranny of female choice. He discounts or is unaware that Christianity was the foundation of monogamy in the West, and that it substantially improved women’s cultural position. Instead, he views monogamy as a spontaneous “stabilizing” development that served the purpose of bringing formerly discarded men into useful social participation by giving them something to live for — subservient wives. “Having gained secure and steady access to intimacy through the institution of monogamy,” he writes, “these men could now experience copulation and romantic love, thereby attaining self-actualization, something which was previously inaccessible to them.” 

Now, Hatfield says, capitalism has eroded monogamy, pushing women into the workforce and giving them the freedom to return to their preferred state of hypergamy. Hence, his call to social violence seeks to end “high capitalism,” and to return women to enforced monogamy with the type of men he refers to as “common” — not tall and attractive. The manifesto concludes with a list of 12 categories of  “class-A targets” that would hasten this state of affairs; section V — yes, he uses Roman numerals — addresses targeting the headquarters of players in the porn industry. “Be unflinching, go forth and KILL THEM ALL!” he commands.

It’s nothing new to say that incels hate and dehumanize women, viewing them purely as sex objects. A description of one woman as a “vaguely female-looking clump of humanoid biomass” in Hatfield’s manifesto is fairly typical. Nor is it new to say that for all their talk of love and intimacy, what such men are really focused on isn’t even sex, but instead status and self-worth. Hatfield’s rant is clearly envious of the kind of dominant man he claims to despise. His fever-dream descriptions of the vile and disgusting life of pleasure and bliss lived out by attractive men are almost touching in their transparency. “And let nobody convince you,” he writes, “that the more wealthy of these males do not occasionally indulge in the blackest depths of depravity and twisted perversions, together with countless attractive women of differing backgrounds, within various orgies and other such hideous events, that take place in their skyscrapers, mansions, and at many luxury hotels in major cities.” Sounds terrible! 

Moreover, the length of the section in the manifesto where Hatfield responds “in dialectical format” to “objections” that he could get a girlfriend if he just changed his behavior, suggests that the whole thing is a desperate cope to avoid accountability, and that the incel project really is just the Right-wing version of progressive victim culture. 

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However, the fully consumerist, materialist understanding of love and dating is, to some extent, a new and unwelcome development. Materialism, according to natural-law philosopher Heinrich Rommen, “regards man as nothing more than a highly evolved animal” and puts “in place of a personal God … a doctrine of impersonal eternal force or of perpetually recurrent changes of matter in accordance with the blind necessity of the laws of nature.” Marxism is one form of materialist metaphysics — society is determined by “the conditions of production” — though Marx, unacknowledged, retained much of Christendom’s old framework of good and evil. What Hatfield calls “biological consciousness” is another kind of materialism — everything happening between men and women is in accordance with our lower animal natures. 

That such a philosophy serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it. 

In this sense, Hatfield is one of an emerging cohort of young people — and not only men — committed to violence for causes that are either overtly or covertly in search of self-esteem. The confusing new reality in which the political sides seem to be getting mixed up is often attributed to “internet extremism” looking the same in any flavor, but it actually represents a deeper convergence. Is Tyler Robinson — the pro-trans youth accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk — on the Right or Left? It’s hard to tell. Is Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot an insurance executive, a Left-wing freedom fighter? Is he any different than the failed Seth Scott Hatfield, his Right-wing-ish doppelgänger? And don’t the armed or violent ICE protesters in Minneapolis feel like they’re on the same continuum, despite their arguments of righteous civil disobedience? 

The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless. 

Journalists wrote alarmed pieces about nice boys and girls being transformed into jihadist monsters. Politicians made speeches about the “disease of Islamic extremism”. Academics constructed entire theses on the etymology and evolution of Jihad. Former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz even seemed relevant. This all now seems a distant memory. How did this happen? Did the jihadists go away, or did we just get bored of them?

Unfortunately, the jihadists haven’t disappeared; Isis, for example, is reportedly resurgent in sub-Saharan Africa, as are its rivals, al-Qaeda. But global jihadism as a movement is in grave disarray . The Isis caliphate is gone, and doesn’t look set to return anytime soon. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis leader, is dead: he blew himself up in October 2019 when US Special Operations forces raided his compound in Idlib, Syria. His replacement, Abu Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi, is also dead, biting the Syrian dust earlier this year. But few Western journalists took much notice, and nobody was writing op-eds on a posthumous “martyrdom bump” for Isis, or how they would come back stronger after his demise.

Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, is arguably in better shape, maintaining footholds and some measure of success in ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and the Sahel. But its capacity to stage attacks against the West is greatly diminished, thanks to a sustained and successful counter-terrorism operations by the US and its allies, and a shift in the group’s strategic vision, which now prioritises local grievances over global contention. The killing of leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year in a US drone strike has further weakened its internal solidarity and outward prestige.

According to terrorism scholar Daniel Byman, the last significant jihadist attack in the US was four years ago when a Saudi Air Force trainee working with al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate shot and killed three sailors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida. We have to go back even further to locate the last jihadist attack in the US that resulted in mass-casualties: that was in 2016, when Omar Mateen, inspired by Isis, went on a shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people.

The last deadly Isis-inspired attack in America — Florida again — was in March 2018, when a 17-year old stabbed to death a 13-year old at a sleepover. And while several individuals, including a teenager, have recently plotted in the name of Isis, none have been able to successfully convert inspiration into competent lethal violence. It certainly doesn’t compare to the 2014-2016 period, when Isis-inspired individuals were responsible for more than three-quarters of all deaths (107 in total) caused by jihadist terrorism in America since September 11, 2001.

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A similar downward trajectory can be seen in Europe, although the threat there remains far greater than in the US. According to a recent report by Scenor, there were 105 jihadi attacks in Europe between 2014 and 2022, involving 133 perpetrators and resulting in 405 deaths, far exceeding the death toll of all deadly jihadist attacks in the US since 9/11. The vast majority (90%) were carried out by so-called lone-wolves and most were Isis-related. But the tempo and lethality of attacks has changed. The deadliest (Paris, Nice, Brussels, Manchester) were carried out by Isis attackers, both directed and inspired, between 2015 and 2017, resulting in a collective death toll of 270 victims. But since losing its caliphate, Isis has neither been able to coordinate attacks in Europe nor inspire attackers there in any great number. And when those attacks do happen, they are often amateurish and of limited lethality.

As the threat of jihadist terrorism has receded in the West, so too has media interest in it. And it is hard to exaggerate what a sea-change this represents. “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” Zawahiri wrote in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the spiritual founder of Isis, in 2005. A decade later, the consensus was that Isis had conclusively won that war. “They’re using the internet better than we use the internet,” as Trump put it in November 2015, simplifying a widely held view that Isis propaganda was far more sophisticated and “slick” than anything the US State Department could come up with.

But the victory was jettisoned as rapidly as it was acquired. By July 2017, the Isis horror show was almost over: in that month, it lost Mosul, its de facto capital in Iraq, and three months later it was to lose Raqqa, its de facto capital in Syria. At the same time, new horror-shows were vying for our attention, much closer to the nascent obsessions that now polarise the political landscape in the West. In April 2018, Alek Minassian drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10. It had all the hallmarks of an Isis attack, except that before his attack, instead of proclaiming to be a “soldier of the caliphate”, Minassian had declared the arrival of an “incel rebellion” on Facebook. All of a sudden, incels seemed to be everywhere. Then, in March 2019, just as Isis was losing its last sliver of territory in Syria, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

All of a sudden, white supremacists seemed to be everywhere too. And then something strange happened: journalists and extremism experts who had once made careers out of covering jihadists started to cover the far-Right in almost exactly the same way. Just as Isis had been a transnational, “networked” threat, so too were the white supremacists. And just as Isis had been radicalising children in their bedrooms over the internet, so too has the far-Right. Almost overnight, Brenton Tarrant became the new “Jihad John”, Andrew Tate became the new “charismatic” jihadist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, and 8Chan became the new radical mosque, incubating hate and inciting violence.

The broader context for such a dramatic transposition was the culture war and its insatiable demand for new folk devils with which to wage symbolic battle. For one side in this war, a malevolent progressive ideology, promoted by Left-wing activists, is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life. For the other, a no less toxic ideology of white male supremacy is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life.

Correspondingly, the chief bête noire of anti-progressives are radicals who embrace gender non-conformity and who want to abolish the patriarchy, prisons and much else, while for progressives, the root of all evil lies in the figure of the toxic white male. Jihadists, however, resist assimilation into this classificatory scheme for the obvious reason that they’re Muslims and (mostly) from minority backgrounds. Indeed, in some respects they serve to threaten this scheme, because they’re both anti-LGBTQ and militantly opposed to classical liberalism.

Hence jihadist violence has become a symbolic cul-de-sac for both sides in the culture war, affording neither the opportunity to bring attention to or amplify the concerns — pre-eminently around race and gender — that so preoccupy them. This new hermeneutic regime was sharply in evidence in the lethargy which marked the response of both progressives and conservatives to the murder of the Conservative MP David Amess two years ago by a British Isis supporter. The very day after his killing, the Metropolitan Police declared it an act of terrorism with “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. But among British elites there was little appetite for exploring that link; instead they chose to focus on the proliferation of online hate speech aimed at MPs.

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Two months prior to Amess’s murder, a 22-year-old British man from Plymouth went on a shooting rampage, killing five, including his mother, before fatally shooting himself. Devon and Cornwall Police did not categorise this rampage as a terrorist incident. But that didn’t prevent many British journalists and commentators from trying to turn it into one. This was because the perpetrator, Jake Davison, supposedly had links to the incel subculture: he was a self-confessed virgin; he believed that women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance; he had made references to the “blackpill”; and he had ranted that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

Within 24 hours of the attack, The Guardian had described Davison as “a hate-filled misogynist and ‘incel’”, and speculated that “Plymouth shootings may be a sign ‘incel’ culture is spreading.” A day after the murder of Amess, an editorial in The Observer sternly reprimanded anyone who was in mind to “politicise this tragedy” on the basis of “scant details”. No such reprimand was issued by that paper in the days after Davison’s killing spree, despite the considerable uncertainty surrounding his motives. They were too busy politicising it, because they could. By contrast, Ali Harbi Ali, the British-born man who murdered Amess, couldn’t be so readily marshalled for symbolic service in the culture war over race and gender.

It was proof that, in some ways, we have become jaded by jihadists, desensitised to their threat and moral squalor by over-exposure to a media discourse and entertainment industry that, for over a decade and a half, couldn’t get enough of them. If they were once exotic and possessed a certain “jihadi cool“, they now resemble some ageing crooner trading on past glories. We just know too much about them and their shabby pasts as failed rappers, drug-dealers, potheads and porn enthusiasts. Jihadi terror has transmogrified into jihadi triviality.

Yet as Emile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, once observed, society needs its criminals. We just don’t need jihadists anymore, since new and seemingly more forbidding folk have displaced them. And they have done so not because they are objectively more threatening or murderous (they’re not), but because they reflect the shifting existential anxieties of Western elites in a moment of great and rapid change. These anxieties were once focused on the threat of Islamism to democratic norms. Now, they are entangled in fears and loathing around gender and race. And when these moral panics eventually burn out, no doubt a new breed of devils will emerge, too.