White nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes leaned on his homophobia as an excuse for why the young man is apparently having difficulty attracting women.
Fuentes complained about "people calling me gay because I've never had a girlfriend."
"I think if anything — if anything — it makes me less gay. If anything, it makes me not gay — as opposed to less gay, not that there's any gay, but it makes me not gay," he argued.
Fuentes went on to describe how he has never been in a romantic relationship or had sex with a woman, but is "more heterosexual than anybody."
“If we're really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman, really makes you more heterosexual, because honestly, dating women is gay," he claimed. "And if you want to know the truth, the only really straight, heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel.”
The incel movement came to prominence in 2014 when Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured fourteen others in a rampage in Isla Vista, California before committing suicide.
In 2018, Alek Minassian praised Rodger before allegedly murdering ten people in Toronto.
"The Incel Rebellion has already begun!" Minassian posted to Facebook. "All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!"
The movement was described by The New York Times in 2018 as "an online community of men who lament being 'involuntarily celibate' and dream of a social order granting them access to the women of their choice."
“Although attacks like the one in Toronto that killed 10 people are rare, the hate being spread online is leading increasingly to threats and calls for violence. More often than not, the threats target women," the newspaper explained. "The incel movement tells its adherents that society’s rules are engineered to unfairly deprive them of sex. That worldview lets them see themselves as both victims, made lonely by a vast conspiracy, and as superior, for their unique understanding of the truth.”
There are political ramifications of the incel movement beyond violence.
“The alt-right, right-wing populism, men’s rights groups and a renewed white supremacist movement have capitalized on many white men’s feeling of loss in recent years. The groups vary in how they diagnose society’s ills and whom they blame, but they provide a sense of meaning and place for their followers," The Times explained. "And as different extremist groups connect online, they draw on one another’s membership bases, tactics and worldviews, allowing membership in one group to become a gateway to other extremist ideologies as well.”
