Part Two: From Elliott Rodger to Clavicular: The Story of Incel Evolution

Robert explains how incel terminology met the social internet, particularly reddit, and became tied inexorably with Gen Z slang. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about incels. Or at least, that's what we're talking about this week. The pipeline that led us, as a society, from Elliott Rogers and the Isla Vista shooting in 2014 to clavicular and the trend of looks-maxing, which includes hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to get hotter. We'll be talking about all of that and explaining the rest of it. But first, let me reintroduce my wonderful guest for these episodes, Kat Abouguazela. Kat, welcome to the show.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Robert, thank you so much for having me.

• 0:40Robert Evans?

  How you doing, Kat? Are you, are you running for something? A marathon, right?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  A marathon, yeah. There you go, there you go. No, I actually haven't worked out since I launched my congressional campaign, which is what I'm running for. So, anything beyond the flights of stairs it takes to get to my apartment wins me. I'm so weak now. But only, only physically. Mentally and spiritually, we're strong. But yeah, I'm running for Congress in the 9th District of Illinois. So if you are in the Chicago area, that goes from Uptown up to Evanston, over to Skokie, and then all the way to Crystal Lake and Algonquin. Election Day is March 17th. You can find my website at katforillinois.com. That's Kat with a K. We are a progressive populist campaign. That's the only one in this race supported by majority small-dollar donations.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Of the three most viable candidates in this race, I'm the only one that hasn't met with AIPAC, and I also have an orange cat named Heater.

• 1:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  And if everyone's really good, I'll bring you on camera.

• 1:36Robert Evans?

  You're also the only person we have ever had as a guest for this show who is actively, like, running for office. You know, this being what it is, it's not a, like, not a thing we normally do, but you have been a friend for quite some time. And before you started running, I've always respected your work as a journalist and as a researcher. And if anyone's going to be in Congress, I would prefer it be you.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Thank you. As we all know, electoralism is the only way to get out of this. It's the only thing that we do.

• 2:06Robert Evans?

  Nothing else will fix this.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  I thought you were gonna say, "The only guest under federal indictment." And then I was like, "That can't be true."

• 2:11Robert Evans?

  No. I feel like we've had more than one.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Hilarious.

• 2:15Robert Evans?

  We have, we had Chelsea Manning on the show. I mean, she wasn't actively under an indictment, but...

• 2:24Robert Evans?

  Speaking of indictments.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:27Robert Evans?

  Actually not. There's not really much in the way of indictments as a result of incel stuff because they don't tend to get caught before they commit their crimes.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  You made me nervous at the beginning because you said Behind the Bastards, a podcast about incels, which is exactly what'll get clipped into the Google algorithm when people look up what Behind the Bastards is.

• 2:44Robert Evans?

  Classic incel podcast.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Look, maybe we can, we might be able to deradicalize them this way.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Maybe, that might work.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  I've had multiple, multiple guys who have jacked off to my video explainers that were like, I was a Nazi and then your words got through to me.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  You don't need to share that.

• 3:00Robert Evans?

  I guess whatever works.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Keep it to yourself, but go off.

• 3:05Robert Evans?

  That's really one of those like, okay, I mean, what are you gonna do?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  This podcast is about incels.

• 3:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Listen to this podcast if you are an incel.

• 3:16Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  I, if the AI summary of Google does come up saying that, I'm gonna die, just gonna die.

• 3:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Great.

• 3:28Speaker 03

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• 4:01Robert Evans?

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• 4:36Robert Evans?

  So the first key moment, if you're kind of like doing the big bullet points of incel history.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:42Robert Evans?

  The first key moment would probably be the 2009 founding of PUahate.com. The second and most defining probably moment for the subculture was the 2014 mass killing by Elliot Rogers. However, kind of just jumping between those two points does leave out something very important. It's just a, it's, I mean, it's an act of violence that just isn't as famous as what Elliot Rogers did. But in 2009, the same year that PUahate was founded, George Sodini, a financial employee at a law firm, opened fire on a women's fitness class at a gym, and I think this was in New York City. He killed three women and he injured nine other people and then shot himself. At the time, The Guardian wrote that Sodini, quote, "kept a webpage in which he wrote

• 5:26Robert Evans?

  about years of rejection by women and left behind notes describing his inability to get a girlfriend." So Sodini wasn't in the strictest sense of incel, right? As far as we know, he wasn't a member of any of the incel online communities. That was barely a term, right? This was still, at the start of 2009, mostly people who would like, kind of were descendants from Alana's original incel forum, right? This had not, PUahate had not even really turned into a fully incel thing quite yet. But this is also very clearly still an incel killing spree. You know, it's the same set of motivations. He's blaming, he's shooting anonymous women he doesn't know because he's blaming women as a whole for the fact that he hasn't found anyone and isn't happy, right?

• 6:11Robert Evans?

  So it's very relevant. And incels, whether or not Sodini knew the term incel, incels that, the incels that are like gathering and starting to form a community on PUahate, adopt him as one of their own. Before Elliott Rogers' killing spree, the term "going Sodini" was in semi-regular use on PUahate.com, right? Instead of, like, today, they would say "going ER" to talk about someone who's going to like have a break and go murder a bunch of people because they're a black-pilled incel. Before Elliott Rogers, they would use the term "going Sodini," you know? And a lot of people don't know about this guy.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Just one slight correction. It wasn't New York. It was actually a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

• 6:50Robert Evans?

  There you go. Pittsburgh, the New York of Pennsylvania.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Sure. This is the thing about mass shootings and it's like there are a lot of like Venn diagrams here of extremism, but almost every mass shooting in the 21st century has to do with the great replacement theory, which is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that is antisemitic. It's that's its roots, essentially saying that liberals, which is often used as a stand in for Jews are trying to replace the electorate with black and brown people and/or, but usually and blatant misogyny. And that's often also matched with stalking. I say, as someone that has had to deal with stalkers in the past, this is something that so many women deal with and it's not really talked about. There are very few legal restrictions against it.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  It is one of the number one indicators for violent crime, for murder, for extremist events. And it's one of these things like in DC, when I used to get an anti stalking order, you literally have to figure out a way to serve the order to your stalker. But it has, you have to find someone in your life because the police won't serve it to the person that is stalking you.

• 8:00Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep. It's, it's fucking sick. I, I can remember during one of like the times when I lectured to a class at the American University about this kind of stuff. And these are all mostly, some of them were people who were going to become generals. These were mostly people who wanted to go and become like federal law enforcement, right? And it was very young class, primarily female. And so I'm talking about like right wing mass shooters, talking about the tree of life shooting was a big one at the time, but I'm also talking about some of these incel killings. And I specifically bring up someone I knew who was being harassed by a right wing podcaster who is on, I played audio of him talking to a caller who called into his show who was

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  clearly unwell and him trying to goad him into attacking and raping a specific activist, like mentioning her by name, saying where she lived and say, no, no, I think she really wants to date you. I think if you just go up and like grab her and kiss her or whatever, like she'll be into it. Like, so I played this for them, this very, and he was talking, he went a lot darker than that. Like he was insinuating like rape and murder very directly. I wouldn't even say insinuating. And I played this for them and I'm like, can anyone tell me what law was broken here?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:10Robert Evans?

  Cause there's nothing illegal about it and nothing happened to the guy over that, you know?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:14Robert Evans?

  It's disturbing. It's cool. It's good.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  It's so cool. It's so sick. I mean, like the amount of crap, especially like as a woman online, but especially as someone covering the far right online. I remember I did like a collage after, Phil LeBont, who is a Tim Poole contributor, posted my Tinder profile that he randomly saw because he had like the Tinder premium so he could get past my age measures. And it was just like weird shit about like sexually enslaving me, raping me, like weird stuff about my feet. And like my mom used to get really screwed up about it. And now like after years of doing this, she's just like, that's kind of like, it's good training for running for Congress. But like, also, you're so desensitized. I remember talking to a lawyer and having to be like, oh yeah, that post where someone said they were gonna throw me into a wood

• 10:00Speaker 01

  shipper and then masturbate over my remains. Like, yeah. And they were like, you just said that really normally. But that's what women have to deal with.

• 10:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it's this, when I hear fucking Tom Homan or whatever complain about like people saying mean stuff about ICE online, like, brother, the meanest shit I have seen, like the most unhinged and opsec, incautious leftist say about ICE does not compare to like the most middling shit my co- my female coworkers have dealt with in like YouTube comments.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Hold on, I have to read this fucking quote to you. This is written by, like, I think it's one Chicago cop that pretends he's a bunch of different people on this website called the Chicago Contrarian. It's a literal post that he made where he calls me the Wonder Woman of Woke. He also wrote another one that was like really horny about how seductive my voice is. But Kat has a dangerous opinion of ICE. This week, while she was a guest on a local podcast, Abigail Denegradi denigrated ICE absurdly. Most of the violence that ICE seems to commit on camera, especially in the most aggressive and egregious instances, are against unarmed women. And it's because these men are weak, they feel incompetent, they're angry because they're not as big and strong as they'd like to be. They sure look big and strong to me. And her sob stories about enduring pepper balls and being tear gassed by ICE deserve no sympathy. And Abigail Denegradi admitted to the host that she openly

• 11:15Speaker 01

  mocks ICE agents at the Broadview protests with years such as this one. Did you get your outfit at Spirit Halloween? Those ICE officers are putting their lives on the line every day they report to work. What does this tell you about Kat and how she would conduct herself as a legislator? Like, they can't, men are afraid of being mocked, women are afraid of being murdered.

• 11:35Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, uh, yeah, I wish I had more to add to that, but yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Just, yep.

• 11:42Robert Evans?

  That's all very tied to this, right? Because these are, these incels are the women murderers, right? That's what they get famous for doing. That's why we just talked about like, the kind of three key early moments in incel history, and two of the three moments are mass killings of women by angry men. And that is, that's the whole reason people know what incels are, is Elliott Rogers. You know, pre Elliott Rogers, the only people who are aware of the incel subculture were like, really incredibly online weirdos. And, and this was even to the, the point like, there were not, in 2014, nearly as many people who were like extremism researchers

• 12:22Robert Evans?

  in digital communities. I was kind of tangentially aware of PUahate.com, because I was interested in like, the pickup artist community and those weirdos. So I was aware that there were like, people who were radical and very like misogynistic and angry that pickup artistry hadn't worked for them. But I don't think, I, I think probably 99% of people learned about incels for the first time because of Elliott Rogers', like, spree killing, right?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  I did, right.

• 12:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it, you gotta remember too, that's earlier in 2014. Gamergate doesn't start until August of 2014. So for the public, even the idea that there were huge organized groups of men online who just wanted to harass and do violence to random women they don't know, that was not common knowledge. If you were a woman who made stuff for the internet, you were aware of aspects of this, certainly. But a lot of this becomes really clear to people for the first time because Elliott Rogers doesn't just kill a bunch of people, but before he does it, he posts his 141-page manifesto on PUahate.com, immediately before he starts his rampage. And-

• 13:32Robert Evans?

  I've had to read this thing several times over the years. I mean, I've reported on aspects of it a bunch, and I hate having to quote from it, but it is integral. It's like a foundational document for the incel subculture. And the whole thing is written, if I had to describe like the tone of the prose, Elliott Roger wrote like the villain from a Saturday morning cartoon or a really badly written anime. Here's the opening lines of his manifesto. "Humanity. All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women. It has made me realize just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species. All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst humanity, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance,

• 14:15Robert Evans?

  all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me." And that really, that's almost a perfect one paragraph summary for black pilled incel ideology as a whole, right?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:29Robert Evans?

  That's, that's all of it, pretty much, right there.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:33Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had, I had friends that were at UCSB at the time, and it changed their lives forever.

• 14:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. It's fucking horrifying.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  It's horrific.

• 14:45Robert Evans?

  And one of the things that kind of frustrated me, because this happens, I catch myself up, I read the manifesto, and I noticed that a lot of normal people's reaction to the shootings and, and the videos Roger posted, because he didn't just post a manifesto on poahate.com, he also posts like a video manifesto on YouTube before his spree. And he had a bunch of videos. He'd been posting videos for like months or years beforehand. And people were shocked when they see them because they're like, wait, but this guy's like an incel, which are like weird nerds who can't get dates, but he's like a reasonably good-looking guy. That doesn't make any sense. And then they find out, his dad was rich. His dad's like a producer in Hollywood, so his family's got money. So I see a lot of responses being

• 15:30Robert Evans?

  like, well, why is this guy an incel? Right? You'll see a picture if you, if you're not, if you haven't seen one of Elliott Roger, we'll have one up on the screen right now, but like, he's not, like, you wouldn't think twice seeing this guy in public.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  It's kind of like clavicular.

• 15:41Robert Evans?

  He looks a little like Levicula, right? Like, he's not a, he's not a bad-looking guy. He's like, but he, he's, he's certainly not someone you would like notice, you know? Whereas, prior to this, if you had asked someone like, for like, the stereotype of a basement-dwelling, you know, incel virgin or whatever, which was an insult people made about people who were too online, right? I'm not saying that's a good thing to call someone. There's nothing wrong with being a virgin or whatever. There's nothing wrong with not having sex. But those, these were terms people used. They were confused by the fact that he seemed to look pretty normal and they didn't expect that. And I think that's evidence of one of the biggest shortcomings with a lot of early coverage of incels, which is that, that coverage did not emphasize enough, this is not a community

• 16:24Robert Evans?

  for guys who just can't get a date and who just aren't very social. This is a community for men who have constructed an ideology that tells them it is mathematically impossible for them to find love, and that fact makes some of them homicidal, right? That is a really key aspect of what's going on here, is how delusional it is. Elliott seems to, as far as we can tell, you know, based on what we know from people who, you know, interviews, people who knew him and from his own writings, he's had a lot of trouble connecting with people from a young age. His father is very successful, and Elliott grows obsessed with the trappings of wealth and fame. He will, on his videos, he'll always point out his nice watch, his nice clothes, he's

• 17:06Robert Evans?

  driving like, a nice new car, because he thinks that having these things are all you need. If you're wearing nice clothes, and you have a nice car, and you look like you have money, women should just come up to you and tell you they want to be with you, right? That's how it's supposed to work. And he doesn't put any more work to it than that. Like, he dresses up, and he'll show up at like, bars and clubs and parties and stuff, and he'll just stand in a corner and not talk to anybody. And he feels like something is wrong, because based on his understanding of the world, all he should need to do is be rich and good-looking. And the fact that that isn't enough is what starts him spiraling, right?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Can I just interject here on this?

• 17:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  So like so much of this, I know I just keep being like sexism, like obviously yes, they're incels, but so much of this is like just putting the burden on women.

• 18:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Like you want women to come up to you. You want women to immediately like you. You want women to do X, Y, and Z. Like when people are like, the male loneliness epidemic is like when people talk to me about it, I'm like, what are you doing to connect with the men in your life?

• 18:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  I mean, we have a lot of young male volunteers and I don't think it's because they're like, it's because we give community.

• 18:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I remember asking in our Discord, we go to spaces where they are, like Discord, and being like, hey, does anyone want to help us build some shelves? And we had like eight dudes, all under 30, show up and help us build shelves and they barely talked to me. They all just built shelves together and then they're all still volunteers to this day. That's awesome. There's just like,

• 18:44Robert Evans?

  That's great. Yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  There's, but there's so much of it that's like, we tell men that their only worth is what they can provide and how they can, you know, project strength. And then we punish vulnerability and we say, we took away all the ability to be able to provide. We say, you can't have a good income. You're going to be stuck with student debt. You aren't able to even afford to get married or to have a family. And then people like Steve Bannon were able to capitalize on that in these online spaces. And now by saying like, look, it's because of brown people or black people or women, usually women. And it's just so fucked up how every single part of incel ideology puts the onus on the woman. It's the woman's responsibility to find you attractive. It's the woman's responsibility to come up to you. It's the woman's responsibility to make your dick feel good. It's the woman's

• 19:30Speaker 01

  responsibility to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, with absolutely zero responsibility for yourself.

• 19:36Robert Evans?

  That's the fucking thing that is most toxic, I think about it. And also most explains most which go, what's going on. Cause I think back to when I was a young man, when I was like a teenager, like I was a huge nerd who spent all his time online. I wasn't good at talking to women. Like I had trouble getting dates and I could have, I think, if I'd come across different people and fallen into different communities, wound up in a much darker place. And I got, I got lucky enough that I've talked about this before through like World of Warcraft. I made friends online with a bunch of like women in their twenties and thirties who, and this is key, it's not just that like there were women who were friends with me.

• 20:16Robert Evans?

  When I said something fucked up because I was like a 17 year old boy in 2005, they would call me out on it.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:24Robert Evans?

  And part of my responsibility was that I listened to them. It was my responsibility to listen to what they were saying and make changes to myself based on the feedback. Once people explained to me, hey, saying that's bad. Hey, saying that's messed up. Hey, doing that makes people not feel comfortable around you. I changed the way I behaved because that's like

• 20:47Speaker 02

  And I have

• 20:48Robert Evans?

  how you're supposed to grow as a person.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  I have that experience all the time and sometimes it's it's in the sense where they they listen, they hear, they take accountability. And sometimes it's not. And it's it's trending more towards not lately. Um, and especially on the internet. And I I just think that we really need to start listening to women. We really

• 21:12Speaker 01

  It's patriarchy at its worst. Yeah. And it's like very indicative of the modern conservative, all conservative movements, frankly, where it's like this persecution complex that is inherent because other people are getting equality or because there are material conditions that the ultra wealthy have made worse. And you need someone to blame instead of taking responsibility for yourself. And if you are already, especially like a white heterosexual cisgender man, it is a lot easier to just blame it on someone else again.

• 21:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I I think the thing that is most frustrating to me is that that lack of any sort of personal accountability, right?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  You have to be able to take

• 21:50Robert Evans?

  You as a man. And that was and that was so weird to me. It's like I was raised with some pretty toxic attitudes about masculinity, about like a man's responsibility.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 22:00Robert Evans?

  But it was never taught. I was always taught that like it is important that you listen to other people when they tell you, hey, that made me feel uncomfortable or hey, that made me feel bad and alter your behavior because it's bad to make people feel uncomfortable. And if someone tells you that you fucked up and you need to look at yourself and take make changes, right?

• 22:20Speaker 02

  For sure. And I've had many

• 22:22Robert Evans?

  I don't understand how that has just Not a thing for so many people.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  For so many people.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say, I've had so many interactions where it's like, I take into account that maybe they don't know better. And so when somebody says something that's like inappropriate, but I don't think, I even give them like benefit of doubt where you're like, hey, I just want you to know, I don't think you meant it in this way. But the wording you used made me and XYZ feel uncomfortable. I think you should really think about how you're choosing to use words so that you're not coming across this way. And it's like, that's nice. That's normal. That's a, if somebody said that to me, I've been like, oh shit. You're right. I didn't fucking mean it that way. My bad. And learn from it.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  But so many people, if you say that to them, instead of them being like, oh shit. They're like, fuck you bitch. And it's like crazy, but it's so common.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I think a lot of it, as like a, as someone that was born in 99, like older Gen Z, a lot of it comes from like the complete elimination of third spaces. Like we just don't interact with people anymore. We don't like, I wasn't allowed to play in the front yard because my dad was worried I'd get kidnapped. Um, which definitely wasn't going to happen. Uh, and so there's just like all of this distance. And so I spent a lot of my, you know, middle, high school time, like on the internet, like pre Yahoo Tumblr. I made so many friends there. And for me, the spaces I was in actually opened my eyes to a lot of things that uh, were different from like my conservative upbringing, but it's not the same for others. And if you end up in these spaces, and I'm sure, I know we're going to go into algorithms later.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  But like algorithms that are geared to make sure that you get into these toxic spaces, then those are the people that are shaping who you are and what you're thinking. If that's the only experience you get, because you're not doing anything in person anymore.

• 24:15Robert Evans?

  Yep, at that, yeah, yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  And my god, and my god, is it okay to say that you messed up and learn from something and change? And work on yourself and evolve?

• 24:27Robert Evans?

  How can you understand stuff like how working out works, right? Which is like, you try to do something and it's too hard for you. So you like make changes and build up steps until you can do the thing that you previously couldn't do. How can you understand that about like lifting weights, but not that like, well, everything kind of works that way? Like, you need to be evaluating yourself and how you are influencing and impacting people and how people are responding to you. And if you're like making people uncomfortable or sad or scared, or you need to like change, like.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  That's the voids.

• 24:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't get the, yeah, anyway, but we've talked enough about this. I think we've gotten the point across. Back to Elliott Rogers.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 25:10Robert Evans?

  So when he wrote about his experiences in college, like he gets to college and he's very clear from his writing about college. He's not interested in learning anything. He's not even interested in having a social life in the traditional sense. He's only interested in the girls at college and his only thought at all times is that they are not having sex with or dating him. Right? Like, that's his whole college experience is being frustrated that he's surrounded by young women who are not interested in him. Like, and this is all of college to him. There's no other point to being there. Quote, "In my history class, I had a crush on a really pretty girl, only to find out that she had a boyfriend. And in my psychology class, there was this group of popular kids who acted obnoxious the whole time.

• 25:52Robert Evans?

  One of them was a very pretty blonde girl and she actually enjoyed associating with the obnoxious boys in her clique. The injustice, I hated them all." And yeah, that's like the inability to see that, like, okay, yeah, you think they're obnoxious, but like, they're having fun. Like, maybe she just likes having fun with these guys who aren't like weirdly staring at her from the corner and clearly furious at all times.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Or maybe you thought they were obnoxious and they actually weren't.

• 26:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or maybe, yeah, maybe you're just being a dick.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Maybe they have similar hobbies.

• 26:23Robert Evans?

  Making friends or getting a date is that like, anytime he sees a woman he finds attractive at school or out in public, he's driven into visible fits of rage. Like, this is a guy who is upsetting to be around because you can tell he's like one step away from committing violence anytime he sees a girl with another guy. He wrote about one time when he went to lunch with his dad and flipped out after seeing a mixed-race couple. "The sight of them enraged me to no end, especially because it was a dark-skinned Mexican guy dating a hot blonde white girl. I regarded that as a great insult to my dignity. How could an inferior Mexican guy be able to date a white blonde girl while I was still suffering as a lonely virgin? I was ashamed to be in such an inferior position in front of my father. When I saw the two of them kissing, I could barely contain my rage.

• 27:08Robert Evans?

  I stood up in anger, and I was about to walk up to them and pour my glass of soda all over their heads. I probably would have if father wasn't there."

• 27:16Robert Evans?

  Just every red flag there could possibly be. And you see, that's the result of this weird look-ism, race-science stuff is like, "Well, but it's impossible for a blonde girl to love a Mexican man. And I am whiter than he is. I should be in line before he..." Like, these weird... They've created this system of physics about how relationships work, and the fact that it does not reflect reality at all is part of what drives these people mad. Not in like a clinical sense. I'm being, you know, it's a euphemism, but like that, yeah. Speaking of Elliot Rogers' dad, probably not.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 27:55Robert Evans?

  Here's, hmm.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  That was dark.

• 27:57Robert Evans?

  Here's ads, anyway. That was a failure.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Didn't like it.

• 28:00Robert Evans?

  Kind of like Elliot Rogers' dad.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 03

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• 28:34Robert Evans?

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• 28:58Speaker 04

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• 29:34Robert Evans?

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• 29:44Robert Evans?

  So, we're back. As should be obvious from that last quote, his parents are aware that something is wrong. Like, his dad sees him, like, overcome with rage to the point of trying to, like, physically accost a couple for kissing. But they don't, they also, like, they're not good parents. They don't spend a lot of time with their kids. They're certainly not spending a lot of time communicating honestly with Elliott. And in fact, when his dad sees this and is like, "Oh, my son might be on the verge of doing something crazy and violent", his solution is to give Elliott Roger a copy of The Secret.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 30:18Robert Evans?

  That's the most California shit I've ever heard. Incredible stuff. Now, the core of The Secret is what's called the Law of Attraction. This is the pseudo-scientific belief that by thinking and stating your intentions, you can literally make things happen because your thoughts magically shape the nature of reality. Elliott is initially drawn to this idea and immediately declares, "I'm going to become a millionaire", quote, "So I could live a luxurious life and finally be able to attract the beautiful girls I covet so much. I wish to make up for the years of youth that I wasted in bleak loneliness. And by doing so, I would get revenge on everyone who thought they were better than me, just by becoming better than them through the accumulation of wealth. I believe that the only way for me to attain this wealth at the time was to win the lottery, and that is what I visualize doing." Yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  I know this isn't the point, but he's such a bad writer.

• 31:05Robert Evans?

  He's such a bad writer, and he's such a, just a dummy. I don't want to spend more time on him, but this irrational mindset, this is a very irrational mindset. It's important to get inside and both see that, well, this isn't all irrational because of bad internet stuff. The, The Secret was the most popular book in America for a while. And that played a role in how, like, and, you know, his dad is rich and successful. And in, like, a lot of this is not just a failure. And I don't want to paint what happened to Elliott Rogan. What he did is, this is just because of the mean old internet. This is a kid with deeply toxic parents, who's also been exposed to a lot of very toxic things through other elements of the culture that have nothing to do with the internet. And it all forms part of what happens next, right?

• 31:49Robert Evans?

  Now, obviously, The Secret doesn't work for Elliott. He also tries to work out in the gym and get buff, and that doesn't, you know, help him pick up any ladies. He spends a lot of time, though, on bodybuilding.com's board. And he presumably tries pick-up artistry, because he winds up posting regularly on PUahate.com. Now, he doesn't say much about pick-up artistry. Like, there's not, not really anything that directly about it in the manifesto. You know, I did, I don't remember anything, and I did like a word search. I couldn't find any related terms. So the only way that we kind of know there was, he was, other than the fact that he's posting in PUahate, the reason we know that he, he at least was familiar with pick-up artistry tactics, is that in his videos and manifesto, he would make regular references to betas,

• 32:33Robert Evans?

  a term that he would use to insult men he disliked. And he wrote about, like, "I need to act cocky and arrogant to try and attract women", which is a common pick-up artist strategy. So there's, there's evidence that, again, that he's in this community, but we don't know, did he, did he, like, pay for classes? How into it was he? That's kind of unclear. But for whatever reason, PUahate, the website, appeals to him immediately. He saw it as, quote, "A forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like me." He starts reading up on look-ism, right? And he becomes aware of, like, some of these theories that they've started to craft. And he writes that these, quote, "Confirmed many of the theories I had had about how wicked and degenerate women really are." The members of PUA hate wrote a lot about Elliott Roger, too, in the wake of his spree

• 33:18Robert Evans?

  killing, per an article about the online reaction to his shooting in Slate. "When news of the shooting broke, PUA hate members attempted to absolve themselves by critiquing Roger's sex appeal. 'Short lower third and gay mid-face with zero brow ridge,' one decided, ridiculing his mother's looks and scrambling to assert authority among themselves. 'Only high-T guys should be allowed to give advice here. Can you add that as a rule?' one poster said. Another poster suggested that Roger was such a beta that no one would care if he'd murdered people. 'No one gives a shit about some socially deprived, narrow clavicle twink with a delusional sense of self. He's a poser,' he said. 'Nothing will come of this, you sensationalist losers. Certainly not national coverage.' Just one of the wrongest incels to ever be a wrong incel.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:03Robert Evans?

  Now, there are also some very gross responses from the pick-up artist community, because the fact that he posts his manifesto on PUA hate.com means that there's a lot of initial blame to like, oh, this guy, like, did pick-up artistry help cause the Ila Vista shooting, right? And then, when you look at the manifesto, he says very little about it. So, a lot of these guys are like, well, he just wasn't into it enough. Slate's Amanda Hess reported at the time that one website, Strategic Dating Coach, posted that Roger, quote, "should have gone to our website and got our personal dating coaching or purchased one of our products." Great stuff. I love the idea of just like, wow, there's been, this, this, this guy just went on a killing spree and murdered a bunch of people. I should advertise my dating coaching system.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  I mean, that's everyone's first reaction.

• 34:49Robert Evans?

  Of course, of course. That's what I do after every tragedy, right? Soon as COVID hit, I was like, look, guys, I know this, this plague's a real problem, but I can teach you how to pick up ladies. Didn't make a lot of money off of that one. I don't know why. 2020, bad time to be giving dating advice. Shocking stuff. This is a bad way to lead into what I'm gonna talk about next. But, yeah. "Four years after the Ila Vista shootings, Canadian Alec Manassian drove a rental van into a crowd in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding 14 people. Police noted the victims were predominantly women." Before launching his attack, Alec posted this to Facebook.

• 35:28Robert Evans?

  "Private recruit Manassian infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sergeant 4chan, please. The incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys. All hail the supreme gentleman, Elliott Roger."

• 35:42Speaker 05

  That's.

• 35:43Robert Evans?

  That's, you know, it's the kind of thing that would be more worthy of mocking if he hadn't killed 10 people, but he did.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:50Robert Evans?

  You know, like it's this, this, this fucking thing with the internet, whereas this mix of, well, that's just absurd. And also so many people are fucking dead and have their lives forever changed because of this fucking asshole. Um, so these are the only three attacks that we're discussing these episodes, but they're not the only incel related killings. But it is important that the massive media response to specifically Roger and Manassian spree killings cemented the public image of an incel and ironically guaranteed the incels a shocking degree of cultural influence from then on, especially because Roger does this while posting a manifesto, it gets inceldom's foot in the door culturally in a very weird way. And part of what's happening is people are horrified by these attacks, but they're

• 36:34Robert Evans?

  also reading shit like what Alec Manassian posted. And they're like, well, that's just ridiculous on some level. The way these people talk is like very silly, as scary as it is. And for whatever reason, that kind of makes people adopt, I think initially ironically, but a lot of people start adopting the elaborate terms that incels are using and it starts filtering out even a chunks of the internet that have nothing to do with incels. One of my sources for these episodes is the 2025 book, Algo Speak by linguist Adam Alexic. His book is broadly about internet slang and particularly how algorithmic censorship on social media has altered online speech patterns and how that has changed the way that people talk in the real world. He spends a lot of time though, in his book, talking

• 37:18Robert Evans?

  about incels because it turns out they hit way above their weight class when it comes to linguistic influence. In forums like P O A hate and specific sections of 4chan, which also becomes a major incel hub, it's later than like those first couple of big, uh, like web forums, but it's also like larger in a lot of ways. They start cooking up new terms. This is where we get words like moggling, which simply means to best or to outclass someone in a visible way. Merriam Webster notes, it was originally used to praise one man as being taller, more muscular, or more stereotypically handsome in direct comparison to another man. This is really a result of the deep insecurity at the core of a lot of these guys. Anytime they see a photo where there's like a very muscular guy and then like someone who's

• 38:03Robert Evans?

  not as muscular, oh, he's getting mogged, like that the Chad is mogging on this beta, right? As opposed to like, well, these are just two guys of slightly different sizes standing next to each other. They can kind of only conceive of human relationships in patterns of dominance and violence, which is a really important thing to note. But this idea of like a Chad mogging a beta is not just influential in like online terminology. It gives us some of the like, to this day, widest spread memes online. Like there's a bunch of major like Chad versus beta meme formats that all come out of the incel culture in this period. We'll have a couple on screen, but you've definitely seen these. One is, on one side, you've got like a drawing, usually like without any color of like a bald guy

• 38:48Robert Evans?

  with glasses who's like yelling and crying. And then next to him, you've got like the guy with the beard and his hair is well coiffed and he's got like a strong jaw and a thick neck and he's like, that's the Chad, right? And you'll have the crying beta saying something ridiculous and the Chad will say something cool. There's a million ways that this meme format gets used. Everyone's seen it, right? And there's the other version of it that I'm sure you've all also seen is you've got the illustration of like the beta dude who's got like his shoulders slumped and he's walking forward. And then you've got the Chad who's got like fucking golden hair in a triangle and he's like buff and it's kind of a funny drawing of like a Chad too. And you'll have like both of them labeled in different ways. These can refer to anything. 99% of the time when either of these memes are used,

• 39:33Robert Evans?

  they have nothing to do with the incel subculture, right? I've seen this shit dressed up for like fucking arguments about what engine is best, you know? Wow. But these are also, if you, you know, those of you seeing these online or recognizing them for what I'm saying, these are some of the most widely spread meme formats today and they come out of the incel community. That's very interesting. The incel community also invents using the term "cell" at the end of a word to add a negative context to another word. This starts with terms to help members of the community differentiate various types of celibates like vol cells, voluntary celibates, or fake cells, which are people who pretend to be incels but really have had sex at some point. And then of course,

• 40:16Robert Evans?

  there are true cells, which are obviously the real incels, you know, who actually have no hope. This turns into a broader trend, too. You can find, just the other day, I was like talking about like prepping with someone and they mentioned that like, well, gasoline only lasts like six months. And I was like, well, yeah, if you're a gas cell, of course, you're gonna have to deal with gas expiring. Diesel Maxers stay winning, right? Yeah. You know, bits like that are all over the fucking place now. And again, generally completely detached from any of their original usage. The term "cucked" also owes a great deal of its modern use to incels. Although there's a lot of cross pollination with the alt-right there, I don't know that I'd say that predominantly comes in as an incel term, because I do feel like a lot

• 41:01Robert Evans?

  of it comes out of like the alt-right, too. But I don't know. We can, linguists can argue over that one. Another incredibly influential term was "maxing", which starts being used by the non-blackpilled chunks of the incel community to describe a variety of activities meant to increase their sexual market value. Working out a lot and taking steroids is gym-maxing. Going under the knife to improve your looks is surgery-maxing. And the broader trend of "look-ism" eventually evolves into "looks-maxing", which will bring us to clavicular before too much longer. But before we get there, I had to emphasize, so many of these terms are not just in use across the internet, they're like common slang for a lot of very normal Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids.

• 41:43Robert Evans?

  Adam opens his book "Algo Speak" by talking about a viral 2024 TikTok meme that's just somebody walking down a sidewalk in Arizona with the text above on the screen, "It's so hard being a walkpilled cardio-maxer in a car-cell-gas-cucked state like Arizona." And like, it's a joke. You're kind of both making fun of Arizona being so fucking focused, like, depend, car-dependent, but you're also making fun of incels and the way they talk, right? That's part of the bit. It's kind of fun to talk that way.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it sounds so fucking stupid.

• 42:16Robert Evans?

  Because it sounds so fucking stupid and silly, right? And the fact that incels have invented all these terms, so many bespoke words, and that they're always making new ones, isn't weird. I want to say that much right up front. For one thing, subcultures like this are heavy on the cult part.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 42:30Robert Evans?

  And a major dimension of cult dynamics is creating unique terms and phrases that only mean something to people in the cult. This is how you separate cultists from the rest of society and also isolate them. Now, there's not a cult leader in the case of incels, but they do use these terms as a way to determine who's a true cell or not, right? If you know how to use the lingo right, you know, then maybe you're one of them. But if you make an obvious mistake in how you're using it, then they can tell you don't belong here, right? You're either new or you're an infiltrator. This is an old thing in online communities. I can remember similar stuff happening on different boards and something awful, where it's like, if you post there and you don't know the posting style and the in-jokes they use, you'll immediately get like found out as someone who doesn't belong, right?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:15Robert Evans?

  So this isn't weird that incels do this, but what's confounding and is novel is how successful incel terms and memes have been at spreading in normie culture. Adam's book, Algo Speak, traces how this happened, starting from incel-only spaces like Pickup Artist Hate and expanding out to 4chan's R9K board, as Adam explains in Algo Speak. Let's start with how philosophy began in earnest, 4chan. Despite the forum's earliest importance, it remained a place where incels mixed with normies. The incels Wiki page for R9K, their main discussion board on 4chan, calls it a pseudo-incelospherial space. Although it was a medium for some genuine incel discussion, it was never purely an incel forum and also served as a place for people to pretend to be incel and troll actual true cells.

• 43:59Robert Evans?

  Now, this is interesting to me because the fact that 4chan is bigger and more vibrant as a community and thus is a better place to post in a lot of ways than these tiny little incel forums that don't get as much attention is always at war with the frustration at the fact that it's also polluted by normies, right? You get more attention, you can spread your ideas to more people, but you're also going to talk to a lot of folks who aren't incels and who just want to make fun of you. And this kind of leads to an interesting variant of what's called the toothpaste tube effect. And that's really what's going on with all of this. And if you haven't heard that term applied to online communities, I'll explain it here. So the toothpaste tube effect comes out of research that was done on pro anorexia

• 44:41Robert Evans?

  and eating disorder content, which was some of the first stuff online that got banned in an organized way. AOL and Yahoo start banning pro anorexia content in 2001 and 2002. And this is among the earliest concerted efforts of online censorship of harmful communities. This continues for years and between February and March of 2012, Tumblr and Pinterest, both of which hosted a lot of Thinspiration memes, announced that they were also banning all such content. But no matter how many big websites or how many social media companies banned pro anorexia content, such sites and communities spread and proliferated across the internet, indeed across the world. And this stuff in the aughts starts to spread over into Europe, particularly into France,

• 45:25Robert Evans?

  where it sparks panic among legislators. In the EU, they start pressuring social media companies and web hosts to censor content that used specific terms associated with pro eating disorder content. Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect. Rather than reducing the prevalence of such content and the size of such communities, it merely pushes them to adopt new terms in order to escape censorship and to find new hubs for their content. In 2012, researchers at the University of Greenwich published a paper in which they mapped the French pro anorexia community over two years using a web mining tool. They used this to build a graph. Those of you on the video side of it will see it right now. I'll describe it in a second. But this graph represents communication patterns between different nodes of the pro anorexia

• 46:10Robert Evans?

  community, showing how users could start from a single website with a relatively mild pro eating disorder stance to escape censorship. So something that's soft enough that it's not going to get banned, but from that source get connected to nodes with much more and much more extreme content. And you see how this happens, kind of the way that it's called the toothpaste tube effect in part because it kind of looks like you've got a big mass on one end and like a tiny chunk of like the initial nods on the other, and it looks like they've been squeezed in the middle to like push the big glob out, right? That's kind of where the name comes from.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 46:44Robert Evans?

  Now- The authors of that paper wrote, "Of the sites that have successfully escaped attempts at censorship: Survival involves turning inwards as these communities become more entrenched. Survivors control major flows of information within clusters but do not bridge them. In terms of information circulation, that favors redundancy. Subgroups of pro-anorexia bloggers will exchange messages, links, and images among themselves and exclude other information sources. Consequently, any health information or awareness campaign is now less likely to reach out to pro-anorexia bloggers. If in 2010 such a campaign would target the websites in the middle of the graph so that they relay the message to the margins, in 2012, the middle is virtually deserted, and the chances of spreading public health-relevant information are lower."

• 47:28Robert Evans?

  Now, again, this has all come to be known as the "toothpaste tube effect," but what that means is that there's a documented history of attempts to crack down on digital subcultures that just turns those subcultures more extreme and makes them more resilient to positive intervention. And we definitely see this within incels. Yeah. In the wake of these initial killing sprees, there are numerous attempts to ban incel content, right? Especially after Manassian's attack, there's a bunch of crackdowns and bans of different, you know, incel communities online. Several big forums actually shut themselves down because the people running them are worried about attracting the attention of law enforcement. But the first stage of the incel response to this was pure toothpaste

• 48:11Robert Evans?

  tube effect. They find new places online to gather, and they start coming up with new terms that the algorithms aren't looking for so that they can keep talking openly without people noticing. Incels who'd tired of socializing with normies on 4chan's R9K board moved to Reddit, where the incel subreddit quickly accrued a huge audience. As Adam Alexic writes, "From there, they slowly began pushing their philosophy in other subreddits. Forums like these were evidently fruitful recruiting grounds, but the incels found their greatest success on the Rate Me subreddits, where people would post pictures of themselves and ask for feedback. Here, incels were able to promote a more accessible version of their philosophy by disguising looks-maxing language as helpful suggestions."

• 48:53Robert Evans?

  And this is where things get interesting.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Wild. Yeah.

• 48:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy, right?

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 49:00Robert Evans?

  And how much of this involves incel language, meeting relatively normal people and just being like, "Oh, that's kind of funny," and adopting it? So the incel subreddit gets purged in 2017. At the time of its death, it had about 41,000 members.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Not soon enough, Reddit.

• 49:18Robert Evans?

  Not soon enough. And after incel, our incels died, as Kat noted earlier, Brain Cells becomes the new incel gathering hub. They just changed the name, right? It's the toothpaste tube effect. And that is able to stay in action until like 2019 is when Brain Cells gets banned.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  It was a big deal, too.

• 49:36Robert Evans?

  It was a big deal, right? And it's like, it attracts a lot of outrage from incels at the time. And obviously, these companies are proud of what they're doing. But it doesn't stop anything, right? Like, that's kind of the issue. These are whack-a-mole attempts.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:50Robert Evans?

  But they don't actually deal with the central problem.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:53Robert Evans?

  Like, yeah, not that I'm against shutting down communities like this, but it's simply not enough.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  They're shaving, not waxing.

• 49:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, and it's also, they wait so long. You know, at a certain point, the damage is kind of done, right? By the time anyone with power cares enough to try to crack down on this stuff, the terminology and some of the ideology has gone terminal within the internet's collective mind. It's broken containment. The creepy incel obsession with statistics behind, the statistics behind attractiveness meets this well of deep insecurity at the center of social media, and very strange stuff starts to happen on the Rate Me subreddits. Quote, "Posters were evaluated on pseudoscientific lookism beauty standards, like interocular distance and cantal tilt and hunter eyes. They were encouraged to improve their facial structure through mewing and jaw surgery so they could mog others.

• 50:43Robert Evans?

  Even once the incel subreddits were eventually shut down by Reddit, forums like Rate Me continued to normalize incel jargon." Mewing is basically putting your tongue in a specific place so that like your jaw is more prominent. They believe that like breathing through your mouth leads to you having like a smaller jaw and stuff like that.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  So fun fact about this, mewing is actually like, I believe it technically is like an orthodontic measure.

• 51:09Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  By a guy whose last name was Mew.

• 51:11Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  So like, I have a lot of jaw issues and I had an appliance that broke because I've been grinding my teeth so much and I can't afford to get a new one till after the campaign. So like technically at night when like I'm trying to make sure my jaw is in the right place, that's like technically mewing.

• 51:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, it is a real thing and like.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  I'm always mewing to mog Ben when we go to sleep, you know?

• 51:33Robert Evans?

  You're doing it to mog, yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 03

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• 52:09Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients, or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 53:08Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 53:20Robert Evans?

  So Adam goes on to note that ironically, looks maxing and a lot of its terms and ideas get brought to TikTok first, probably by young women who had picked up the terminology from rate me and similar subreddits. Beauty influencers start adopting a lot of these terms in order to rate each other on their application of eyeliner or whatever, right? Oh, this did a good job of reducing the interocular distance or whatever. You know, like, that's the way in which it's being used. Often, this is ironic and satiric, right? Like, these ladies are kind of making fun of this stuff, right? And kind of making fun of themselves a little gently. But it's also done genuinely sometimes. And it doesn't really matter whether it's being done ironically or genuinely in any individual case, the words and some of the concepts are spreading.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of really cool community on the internet where like, there's like, people being like, hey, I have a big event coming up and I'm doing my own makeup. Like, what do you think I should change? Like, what's my blindness on this? And like, people are, you know, of course, there's assholes everywhere, but people are generally like, pretty cool about it, nice. And it's like a cool, like, internet community. Not this.

• 54:28Robert Evans?

  No. Well, and it's, you know, again, most, I'm not trying to blame either, like, fucking some beauty influencers using these terms because they're funny. It's not bad. It's just, it also is part of this process by which these terms get more normalized. And it does increase the reach of some of this stuff. And a lot of these people probably don't even know where a lot of these terms entered the vernacular for the first time. Who's doing that kind of research? It's just something you saw online. It just seems like organically changing terminology.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:57Robert Evans?

  Now, while incel terms and phrases are taking off with normies, looks maxing grows increasingly popular. The dedicated true cell communities online are also getting more toxic at this point in time, right? These are the guys who reject looks maxing. These are the guys who believe I'm doomed because I'm just too ugly to be helped. Per that study from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, quote, "By 2016, incel forums had largely moved away from the red pill philosophy towards the black pill. That shift coincided with a sharp increase in the toxicity of the language used in these forums, a phenomenon that was measured by the Google-developed machine learning tool Perspective API in 2021."

• 55:33Robert Evans?

  And we're not going to be talking a lot about kind of what happens to the black pilled incels, you know, after this point, but I don't want to leave them out entirely because periodically you do see gasps from that community that go viral for something besides mass murder. One of the weirdest examples of this is the so-called Oxford Study meme. Starting the summer of 2024, the phrase Oxford Study started popping up all over social media accounts owned by young Asian women. Per The Guardian, quote, "An Asian woman vlogging about her dating life and particularly about dating white men gets commenters reacting to her updates with the words Oxford Study. A young Asian student showing off her prom dress with her white boyfriend sees obligatory Oxford Study comment on her TikTok. I can already hear the Oxford Study comments coming." One

• 56:18Robert Evans?

  Asian woman captions a video of her dancing with her white partner. Now, what does this mean? Well, this purported Oxford Study is an academic paper that is said to show that Asian women are increasingly dating white men instead of Asian men. This isn't real. The study doesn't exist. It's fake. It's a lie. Incels and MRAs created memes that claimed to quote from this fake study with like fake quotes from it to spread this idea that because it's not like a real thing in any way that's like a problem, but they want to argue that this is like one of the biggest issues in society is white men dating all of the Asian women. And so they start like lying and making up a fake study and it spreads widely enough that people will just start posting Oxford Study

• 57:02Robert Evans?

  whenever they see like a mixed race relationship like that.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  I've seen that online and I had no idea what it meant and that's

• 57:08Robert Evans?

  That's where that comes from.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  So dumb.

• 57:11Robert Evans?

  Yep. Anyway, let's get out of the black pill crew and talk about the real reason for the season. Looks maxing influencer Clavicular, AKA Brayden Peters, who is now one of the most viral assholes on the internet.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Wait, Clavicular isn't his real name?

• 57:27Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, which is tragic. It makes me want to have a son and name him Clavicular.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  He does. He's totally giving Brayden.

• 57:36Robert Evans?

  He does look like a Brayden, strong Brayden energy. So to return to the viral post that started all of this. Clavicular was mid jester gooning when a group of Foids came and spiked his cortisol levels. Is ignoring the Foids while munting and mugging moids more useful than SMV Chad fishing in the club? Now, this post, as ridiculous as it is, was, may have been a joke, probably was a joke. And it's a joke, probably a joke because it's making fun of something that definitely happened on one of Clavicular's live streams in February. He was hosting a live video on Kick while at ASU and he went to a frat party. About three hours into his stream, he goes into this frat house. I think he's just trying to get away from people for a second, like talk to his audience.

• 58:19Robert Evans?

  And he takes a selfie while he's in the house with the frat leader. And the frat leader is like, really buff and he's wearing like a muscle shirt. And Clavicular is just like, oh, you've got me by a lot. I stopped jimming, right? And it's a friendly interaction in the video, I think. But this gets written down, like people online are like, oh, that guy frame mocked Clavicular, right? Like.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  This is the dumbest shit ever. Yeah.

• 58:43Robert Evans?

  Cause he's buffer, you know, he mod, you look at him, he's like, yeah. Now, no one at the time thought this was significant, right? But a couple hours after this happened, someone on Twitter posts a clip of this interaction with the description, "Clavicular ran into a frat leader at ASU and got brutally frame mocked by him." And this comparatively simple sentence is so seemingly crazy that the internet starts talking. And that's where you get that really ridiculous post, right? He's making fun of the other post, kind of. Like, that's at least one theory about it. Cause he's invented some terms here, right? Jester gooning, I don't think really existed as a term before that post. It's a combination of pre-existing terms.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  So I'm naming my child.

• 59:22Robert Evans?

  Oh, jester, sure, of course.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:25Robert Evans?

  It, as far as I can tell, it's a combination of jester maxing, which is an incel term, as we've talked about, for being funny or entertaining to get attention from women and compensate from not being hot. Gooning is a term that initially meant masturbating to porn without coming for long periods of time and is now just kind of a general term for like degeneracy, sexual degeneracy, a lot of, like masturbatory sexual degeneracy, a lot of the time. So gesturgooning, despite the fact that it is a different term from gesturmaxing, kind of seems to mean the same thing as gesturmaxing. It's used in an identical case. And as I noted, the cortisol thing is based on an understanding that elevated cortisol levels reduces testosterone, right?

• 1:00:06Robert Evans?

  So these are, you know, I think at this point, everyone at least understands what's being said in both of those posts. Sure. I want to talk and kind of close these episodes out by talking a little bit about Clavicular himself, right? And I want to quote first from an article in The Loyola Phoenix by Carlos Soto Angulo. Shout out Loyola in the district. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. El Pi has documented Clavicular's public discussion of drug use, specifically meth and cocaine, extreme dieting and body modifications as tools for maxing, raising alarms about how such messaging influences young audiences. In this sense, Clavicular is the prime example of monetizing insecurity by selling routines and advice, such as the Clavicular system.

• 1:00:49Robert Evans?

  And he does all this while reinforcing the incel belief of worth being fixed by facial structure. So what you have, coming full circle here, is what starts as this organic attempt by people who just are having trouble connecting with other people and are not having the kind of relationships they want, and really just want to help each other, turning into a bunch of men who are getting increasingly angry that women don't like them, who invent this imaginary, like, set of rules about bone structure and all this other stuff that, like, determines whether or not you can be loved. And that gets so out of hand that a bunch of people commit murder as a result of it. But because the terms are so ridiculous, they enter the mainstream and become used in all these, like, online rape me subreddits.

• 1:01:34Robert Evans?

  And a group of grifters like Clavicular, who want to sell workout routines and, you know, dieting routines and guides to becoming better looking, realize that there's a lot of money in incel shit, right? So you go from incel start because a bunch of guys get pissed off that pick-up artistry doesn't work, to incel ideology is now being used to sell what is effectively the next generation of pick-up artistry. Right? It's a circle. It's a circle of hell. It's a circle of hell.

• 1:02:10Robert Evans?

  So we're gonna end by talking about bone smashing, Sophie.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yay.

• 1:02:13Robert Evans?

  Cause you had a strong reaction to that. Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Yay.

• 1:02:17Robert Evans?

  So obviously, bone is alive, like it's a living tissue. And it, it does regenerate itself, right? There's a process that goes on in your body.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  It regenerates itself so much harder and stronger and more masculine.

• 1:02:30Robert Evans?

  Exactly. That's the idea. Like, the reality is your bones regenerate over time, right? And the idea behind bone smashing is if you like bash your face with a hammer around the jaw area, it will, like, it will grow back stronger. Your bones will get stronger and your jaw will get bigger, right? That's, that's bone smashing. Yeah, yeah, that's how it works. And this is, I think, misunderstandings on working out. Cause like lifting, like weight training can make your bones larger and stronger, right? Given enough time.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Wait, really?

• 1:03:04Robert Evans?

  But, huh?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Your bones?

• 1:03:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, your, but like, yeah, like exercise, like strength training. That's part of why, like, women deal with like bone density loss as they age. And are often advised, like, that's why strength training is so important. It's why, male or female, as you age, one of the biggest factors on whether or not you like maintain mobility and independence is whether or not you do strength training. Because in part, it keeps your bones strong, which makes you much likely to like break them as you get older, right?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:03:34Robert Evans?

  So from that actual science, they take, well, then obviously, if like working out over time and eating right makes my bones stronger, I can just bash my face with a mallet and my jawbone will get bigger, right?

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  And you just keep doing it. And like the way that some of them describe it is almost like gua sha, where like you're just like, kinda like going

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  all over your jaw, which is fucking crazy. Like, guys, what are we doing here?

• 1:03:59Robert Evans?

  Don't, don't, don't do it.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Don't do that. I'm not even a doctor, but I can tell you not to do that.

• 1:04:05Robert Evans?

  Absolutely not. And there's a good article in the conversation on bone smashing, bone smashing broken bones, tooth loss and blood vessel damage, or just a few of the harms of this bizarre tick doctrine. And I want to lead a brief, I want to read a brief quote from that. "There's no evidence that repeated blows to the face alter bone structure in humans. Although research shows it may lead to changes in rats, their bone structure and biomechanics are vastly different to humans. Not to mention, the animals in this study developed traumatic brain injuries as a result of these repeated blows." Which first like-

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  It makes me so sad, thinking of like a little rat getting its bones broken.

• 1:04:38Robert Evans?

  Why are we doing that to rats?

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Robert Evans?

  Wait a second. Are we hitting rats in the face with mallets to see if bone smashing works? Why?

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  We want to make sure those rats can mog us.

• 1:04:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, those rats are hot as hell, though. I mean, you can't take that away from the rats.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:04:54Robert Evans?

  Like, those rats, fuck. I mean, definitionally, they're rats. Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Is that a definition? Is the definition of a rat-

• 1:05:04Robert Evans?

  Kinda.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Being able to fuck?

• 1:05:06Robert Evans?

  Well, I think breeding rapidly is kind of a core trait of rats.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  See, I associate that with more with like rabbits.

• 1:05:12Robert Evans?

  Well, it do. I don't know.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Sophie, what about you?

• 1:05:16Robert Evans?

  Send that out in the comments. Do you think I'm a rat racist?

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  I don't have a take on this.

• 1:05:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  I think you should, and if you don't, then you're on the wrong side of history.

• 1:05:24Robert Evans?

  That's right. The wrong side of history.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Complicity, complicity. Like, there's so much complicity here. I forget what I'm trying to say because I'm starving, but-

• 1:05:31Robert Evans?

  Kat, once we deal with the fascists, this is the next big fight in American culture.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  This is the next big fight. Yeah. And Robert and I are going to be on opposite sides.

• 1:05:39Robert Evans?

  That's right. Do rats fuck? This is the next big culture war.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  I'm not saying they don't fuck. I'm just saying that like the first thing that people think about when they hear rat is fuck or trash. I think trash.

• 1:05:51Robert Evans?

  Trash, yeah. I mean, I will say trash is definitely first on the rat list.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, see?

• 1:05:56Robert Evans?

  All right, everybody.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  I think of the word snitch, but that's just me.

• 1:06:00Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, that too, I guess.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's fair.

• 1:06:03Robert Evans?

  All right, Kat, that's what I've got. I just wanted to end by talking about bone smashing. That's more fun, right?

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  It's so much more fun than Elliott Rodger.

• 1:06:09Robert Evans?

  It's a lot more fun than Elliott Rodger.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  It's a, no, it's an honor to be back, and I'm, thank you for picking something that's so up my alley that I got depressed at how many words I knew you said.

• 1:06:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I really hate it. Well, thanks for, uh, pod-maxing with me.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Do you want to pod-gooning?

• 1:06:32Robert Evans?

  Couple of mic chads here.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Do you want to, do you want to goon your campaign for us real quick?

• 1:06:37Robert Evans?

  Okay, Sophie, no, no, no. No, no, no. I'm going to stop you right there. We don't need to be using that term that way here.

• 1:06:45Speaker 05

  I'm blocking out. No, um, yeah. So ignoring what Sophie just said, Robert and I are back on the same side and we're, we're against Sophie, which is not something I ever thought I'd say. I am running for Congress in the Knight District of Illinois. That goes from Uptown Chicago up to Evanston, west of Skokie, and then all the way to Crystal Lake in Elgonquin. My website is catforillinois.com. That's cat with a K. The election is March 17th. Uh, so vote, go vote. It's the primary. It's one of the most progressive districts in the country and, uh, you can help make it even more progressive.

• 1:07:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, all right, everybody. That's gonna do it for us here at whatever podcast this is. You just listened to it. You remember the name. I don't. I'm tired and also need to eat.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  Robert's gotta go buy some face mallets.

• 1:07:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go face smash and then lunch max.

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:07:34Robert Evans?

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:07:35Speaker 05

  Bye.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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