Michael James Holt: The face of an incel?
By David Futrelle
Australians learned a bit more today about the motivations of Michael James Holt, a wannabe mass killer who appeared in a New South Wales court for a sentencing hearing after pleading guilty to an assortment of weapons charges. Holt, a Hitler-loving white supremacist obsessed with guns, admitted to planning a mass shooting at an Australian mall.
One of the sources of Holt’s murderous rage? According to a text message from Holt that was read aloud in court today, he was angry that he couldn’t get a date.
“Gonna have to just start killing people if I don’t get laid soon,” Holt wrote. And he apparently meant that quite literally. In another message, he declared that “my hate increases every day, my anger exponentially so.”
It would be nice if we could dismiss Holt as little more than a weird aberration — an neo-Nazified Australian wannabe version of Elliot Rodger, the self-pitying misogynist who murdered six people in Isla Vista California in 2014 as an act of symbolic “retribution” against the women of the world for not spontaneously offering him sex.
But unfortunately, as long-time readers of this blog know well, there’s an entire movement of men out there who think like Holt and Rodger — men who lash out at the world because they feel that women are unfairly denying them sex. In online forums like the Incels subreddit, these self-professed “involuntary celibates” nurture their resentment against women and stoke one another’s rage.
More than a few incels have embraced “Saint” Elliot Rodger as an incel martyr — thought some don’t think he killed enough people to be a true hero — and it’s probably only a matter of time until they embrace Holt as one of them as well. Indeed, a handful of Reddit incels already have.
For more on Incels, check out my numerous posts on the subject in the We Hunted the Mammoth archives. I’ve also written more than a few posts on Elliot Rodger and incels’ posthumous embrace of “Saint Elliot.”
H/T — Raw Story