Every time a man with a jaw like a clenched fist and eyes emptied of empathy commits unspeakable violence, we get the same lazy refrain: “We may never know the motive.”
But we do. We’ve known since 2014, when Elliot Rodger murdered six people in Isla Vista, California, after uploading a video and a 141-page manifesto that reeked of misogyny, entitlement, and narcissistic rage. Rodger didn’t just commit mass murder — he created an ideological blueprint. A template. A recruitment poster for the “involuntarily celibate,” or incel, movement.
And now there’s Bryan Kohberger, the criminology PhD student accused of murdering four University of Idaho students in 2022. The parallels to Rodger are chilling – not coincidental. Kohberger studied Rodger in class. He posted under aliases like “Pappa Rodger.” He tracked his victims, particularly Maddie Mogen, with the obsessive focus of someone who believed he was owed her attention. He planned. He stalked. And then, he killed.
This is not mystery. It’s ideology. And it’s spreading.
A 2023 New America report connects at least 21 deadly attacks to incel ideology since Rodger’s. The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security defines it as violent extremism — a belief system that radicalizes men through online communities and algorithmic feedback loops, then directs their rage toward women. In Canada, incel violence has already been prosecuted as terrorism.
And yet in the U.S., we continue to act shocked. We tiptoe around the word “terrorist” and label these attacks as isolated tragedies — never systemic.
But what else do you call a movement that builds martyrs out of misogynists and funnels loneliness into bloodshed? These men aren’t anomalies. They’re symptoms. They’re what happens when toxic masculinity gets bored and opens Reddit. When entitlement curdles into ideology. When boys are taught that rejection is emasculation, and that violence is restoration.
To say “we don’t know the motive” is to gaslight a generation. Because the real motive implicates more than just the killer. It implicates the platforms that feed him, the culture that coddles him, and the masculinity that built him.
This is not pathology. This is a pattern.