You may remember recently that revelations came out where people who were identified as lockdown and mRNA vaccine skeptics and opponents were being monitored by the Army's 77th Brigade and the intelligence services.
Now with the new CONTEST 2023 Home Office strategy (PDF) that was announced yesterday, single men, under the umbrella term of involuntary celibates, are being monitored by the Government as potential threats to UK security. If you're someone who's on Tinder and getting dates every few minutes, you're probably not in the sights of the Government. But if you're not succeeding on dating apps, claim the single occupancy discount (on Council Tax for lone residents), view content from the likes of Andrew Tate, Pearl Davis, the manosphere including MGTOW, you are now being monitored as part of this new strategy on the grounds of security. The other obvious groups such as Islamic terrorism and the far-right are also being monitored in more limited numbers.
Listening to the debate on TalkTV last night, the host and panellists (one of which was Jess Phillips MP, who you may remember from Carl Benjamin's tweet to her) are very adamant on pushing this narrative.
And with the recent debanking that's happening in the UK, we know that anyone with a heightened risk to their name is going to have their account closed and refused service from everyone else. We know that having favourable views on Brexit, Russia, Novak Djokovic (on his anti-mRNA vaccine stance), women's and men's rights and the right wing plus being perceived as a racist puts you at risk, now your martial status and being perceived as sexist can potentially be added to that list.
When doing nothing gains you terrorist status, even the quality of terrorist is going down these days.
On a more serious note, the incel community is one of the community I expected to see the least amount of terrorism out of, there is not enough cohesion nor motivation for a more organized response out of that group.
Virtually all the violence committed by lonely men is against themselves. But that doesn't make a scary mainstream media narrative to create a us vs them dynamic to break apart society. They are desperate to water down the definition of incel to just single men (that creates potentially a few million threats as opposed to a few thousand in closed forums), paint them all as a threat to women and national security as a group and declare Andrew Tate as the leader (which he will denounce as he opposes them) which allows the generation of a moral panic and the Government to take action.
And yet even in their own reports the islamic is the major threat (although they brush the left under the rug as always) which means they already got too much power to use as wedge issue.
I read the strategy. It covers Islamic terrorism quite significantly and only gives one mention of incels - but a critical one for this topic. Guess which group the mainstream media dedicated their coverage to?
That is until the suicide is counted as gun violence.
And probably counted as an "violent incel incident" now.