INCELS: The Deepest Dive, Part 1
Preface
Disclaimer: All information contained in this publication is based on established evidence and is true to the best of my knowledge. I am publishing this information because I believe it to be accurate, reasonable, and in the public interest. All opinions expressed are my own.
PREFACE
In July of 2022 I began an independent investigation into the mass shooting that took place on the 4th of July in Highland Park, IL, blissfully unaware of the rabbit hole I was about to stumble into. During the course of that investigation, I ran across another person doing research on this particular shooting. Her name was Naama Kates, and I’d come across her work in an article she wrote for Unherd which dove into the peculiarities of the shooting and its perpetrator, Robert Crimo III. She spoke of “aesthetics” shooters, lacking ideology, and referenced the involuntary celibates, or incels, in the article. Although I disagreed with a few of the points made in her article, I was intrigued that she had come to the same basic conclusion as me - that the newest breed of mass shooter seemed to lack a coherent ideology.
I initiated a Twitter DM conversation with Naama and we discussed this idea for several weeks. According to Naama, her friend Jade had been working in the counterterrorism field for a very long time and had come up with many of the same theories. We both seemed to understand, for example, that the recent batch of mass shooters were being radicalized almost entirely in fringe internet communities. Most of them were relatively normal before their introduction to these groups, although it definitely seems likely that they may also share some particular mental characteristic that increases their propensity towards violence, or even their vulnerability to suggestion.
I have studied cults for a very long time, including a period where I was embedded inside of one as part of an investigation for a private client. While it may seem far-fetched, thought reform, coercive persuasion, and hypnotic suggestibility are very real concepts. Some of these mass shooters seemed to share common features with victims of destructive cults, and I wanted to see if I could identify their “charismatic leader”.
I wouldn’t learn until much later that Naama’s friend was Jade Parker, a counter-terrorism scholar who was the first person to conceptualize an emerging domestic terror threat that she called militant or coalitional accelerationism (not to be confused with techno-industrial accelerationism, as conceived by Nick Land). Militant accelerationists believe that sewing chaos and terror into society will accelerate its inevitable collapse. They encourage acts of domestic terrorism to hasten the process. These acts often take the form of attacks on infrastructure, such as disabling power substations, derailing cargo trains, and committing indiscriminate mass shootings. The goal of these attacks is not just to kill and maim innocent people in order to provoke terror, but also to create in-fighting amid US political interest groups in hope to expand the two-party divide. They hope that by doing this, they may spark a Civil War that will lead to the downfall of western society. One way they attempt to accomplish this is by instigating fights over gun control laws.
These people, working with an agenda to accelerate the collapse of Western society, infiltrate the communities and use the group’s specific ideology to push members to commit violent acts. The accelerationists themselves aren’t incels, white supremacists, etc., they are merely pretending to adopt these ideologies in order to gain acceptance and build rapport with the group. Loosely organized radical groups that congregate online are the perfect vectors for inciting ideologically motivated terror attacks.
Accelerationists have played a role in a wide range of terrorism and violence in the US over the past several years. The 2019 mass shootings at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, the Walmart in El Paso, TX, and the bar scene in Dayton, OH are all examples of accelerationist incited domestic terrorism. Jade Parker believed that accelerationists infiltrated the Q-Anon movement in an attempt to provoke them to commit acts of violence. Another example of accelerationist infiltration, according to Jade, is Lamarcus Small’s incel forum.
Naama knows all about the incels. In fact, she has a podcast about them, titled Incel, with over 100 episodes. When we first started talking, she encouraged me to give it a listen. But as I listened to the first episode, I began to realize I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. My knowledge of incels was limited, apart from knowing they had been responsible for a couple mass shootings, I knew little else about the group and assumed that most of them were just weird online trolls. Naama rejected the notion that incels were inherently violent and advertised her podcast as an attempt to humanize and understand incels and to present this perspective to the general public. But to me, the content of the episodes seemed more like a series of inside jokes and memes. It felt like it was designed to appeal to the incels rather than the public at large. Since I was still very interested in the incel subculture and the possible connections to mass shootings, I decided to make an account on the world’s largest incel forum, incels.is, which is where Naama spent most of her time researching incels and recruiting podcast guests.
Despite Naama defending the forum, assuring me that there had never been any violence linked to the site, and claiming that everything there was protected speech, it didn't take much time using targeted searches of the site to see that what was going on there looked like legitimate terrorism. To make matters worse, excessive pedophilia advocacy and the overt sexualization of children on the forum inspired me to start digging deeper. It wasn’t long before I had located Lamarcus Small, the owner of the website, on Twitter and began to engage in heated discourse with him regarding content of the site. My complaints were simple. First, the forum’s legal terms of service allowed users as young as 15 years old to join and participate. Second, given their welcoming of these underage users, the forum seemed to be disseminating obscene content to minors. And third, many posts advocated for the grooming, kidnapping, and rape of children, along with pictures of young girls that were being sexualized in very disturbing, and oftentimes violent ways.
Lamarcus Small’s brutish and callous response to my concerns about child safety led me to dig even further into this fringe group of Internet loners. I was shocked to discover that incels.is was part of a network of websites set up to exploit the depressed and vulnerable young men who wandered into them. Two men founded this network. One is Small, who goes by the moniker “Master”, and the other is a man from Uruguay named Diego Galante, who goes by “SergeantIncel” or “Serge”. Though Galante claimed to have stepped down from running the sites in 2021, Small continues to own the domain of four websites in this network - Incels.is, NEETS.me, Looksmax.org, and Sanctioned-Suicide.net. Though he refuses to confirm these associations publicly, his ownership of the sites was confirmed by the New York Times in 2021. The NYT journalists had connected Small’s credit card and address to the sites using data obtained via the Anonymous hack of Epik in September of 2021. Lamarcus Small also appeared on multiple episodes of Naama Kates’ podcast where he candidly discussed the day to day operation of the sites. He is listed as the owner of Vokl LLC, a business that is linked to the domains of several of these sites. Small has also used Vokl to issue DMCA takedown notices to competitor sites as recently as October, 2022.
Young men on Small’s websites are pushed the concept of the “blackpill”, the notion that society is to blame for all their woes and shortcomings and that nothing will ever get better for them. They are frequently told that suicide is the only way out, and the site owners have the perfect solution for them - another website in Lamarcus Small’s network called Sanctioned Suicide. Sanctioned Suicide is frequently recommended to users posting suicidal feelings on Small’s incel forum, as are the strange suicide methods sold by users on the site. Small has publicly promoted the concept of “cope or rope”, which is the idea that if an incel can’t “ascend” his inceldom, the only other viable solution is suicide. At first glance, it may seem that Small actually believes in this concept, but when one considers that he also owns a suicide-for-profit website, his intentions begin to appear much more sinister.
The darkest of the sites in the network, Sanctioned Suicide is the only one of Small’s sites that is not exclusive to male users. People of all ages, genders and nationalities find their way to this site while looking for ways to end their lives. Immediately upon posting to the forum, members are swarmed by freshly made, bot-like accounts, many likely owned by staff members and poison dealers, who validate their suicidal ideations, urge them to go through with it and offer advice on the best suicide methods. This website connects users to sellers, individuals that peddle “suicide kits” to the most vulnerable and despairing. The contents of these kits range from poison to “exit bag” devices meant to be filled with inert gas.
Users who are ready to finish the deed post goodbye threads on the website, where cheerful commenters congratulate them and wish them luck in the next life. Some users also urge people ready to commit suicide to do so live via Discord so that others can watch. People who have followed through with a suicide attempt are praised as “brave” and “heroes”. Among the confirmed dead are teenagers as young as 15 years old. The researchers from the New York Times found that an average of two users per week posted goodbye threads and then never posted again.
I’ll never forget the first goodbye thread I read, because the user who made it had narrated his death step by step. He had used the website’s most prolific method - a meat preservative called sodium nitrite, toxic in large doses and advertised as the “method of choice” by the sellers on the site. They tout this method as quick, painless, and virtually foolproof. But the goodbye threads tell a different story. One goodbye thread, titled “FIRST EVER SN DOCUMENTATION”, was written by a third party who had witnessed a user’s death over a Discord video call. Her death, according to the user, took nearly 30 minutes. In that 30 minutes, the observer noted she seemed to be in pain on several occasions. She vomited and had convulsions, and the descriptions given of her final moments are indicative of agonal breathing - a reflex in which the body desperately attempts to get oxygen, making loud gasping or snoring noises in the process. Imagine the feeling of slowly drowning over the course of half an hour, your body desperately trying to stay in the fight the entire time, with or without your consent.
The observer attempted to paint the death in a positive light, despite acknowledging that she appeared to be suffering. He noted that another forum user told him the agonized, noisy gasps for air was a “death rattle”, and cheerfully added that this information made him believe the method was “even more peaceful than I originally thought.” Again, the noise heard by the observer is not a death rattle which is caused by mucus or saliva in the chest, but agonal breathing, a brainstem reflex as the body desperately fights to get oxygen to the brain. It is unknown whether a person experiencing agonal breathing is aware of it or if they are also experiencing discomfort, though this is likely dependent on the cause. Regardless, users flocked to the thread to share their appreciation for the information. Some even expressed excitement at the idea of using the method for their own suicide. “Thank you for this beautiful thread. Really helps me over with my fears,” said one commenter.
Minute by minute notes taken by an observer of a forum member’s suicide by sodium nitrite.
Another excerpt from the SN documentation thread:
Another post, made in June of 2023 by a user named “Unwritten” who’s bio states, “saltier than SN”, provided a list of “successful” cases of SN poisoning by members of the site along with an enthusiastic review: “This blows my mind! I wanted to get a rough percentage of how successful SN is and it’s MIND BLOWING! The failure rate seems to only be 24.3%. This is amazing and we’re probably missing success cases.” This post is one of many that appears to serve as an advertisement by sellers to promote the sodium nitrite method and drive up sales.
103 usernames are listed. Case # 93 is listed without a username. It states, “14 year old male”.
Successful SN poisoning thread (1 of 2):
Successful SN poisoning thread (2 of 2):
The deaths are not slowing. I recently had the displeasure of viewing a list of instructions handwritten on a piece of notebook paper by a 15-year-old girl. The notes were found by her mother at the same time she found her daughter lifeless in her room, dead from sodium nitrite poisoning. The steps written out included ingestion of Unisom and application of an oral anesthetic. “Drink 1 SN mug and lie down on your LEFT side”, it read. Each instruction point was bulleted. The girl had left check marks next to the steps as she completed them. The idea of another human being, presumably an adult affiliated with Sanctioned Suicide, giving step by step instructions to a teenager to help her end her life sends chills down my spine.
Upon discovering this bizarre connection between the incel movement and an apparent suicide-for-profit scheme, I began digging deeper. As it turns out, I was far from the first person to explore this rabbit hole. Despite my alarming initial discoveries, I didn’t go public with any of the information until May of 2023, when I found excerpts from the incels.is forum copied and pasted in the misogynistic online ramblings of Mauricio Garcia, the mass shooter who murdered 3 small children along with several other shoppers at an outdoor mall in Allen, Texas.
That's when I decided I’d finally had enough. I spoke out about the situation on Twitter, which led parents of the Sanctioned Suicide victims to get in contact with me. Information gleaned from these exchanges led me into an even deeper layer of this tangled web. What I found there, at the innermost layer of the highly sensationalized “incel movement”, was something much, much stranger than fiction.