Amanda Montell
speaker
1,990 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Amanda Montell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.
Appearances
But in lieu of that kind of like tangible connective tissue, they have a lot of language and a lot of ritual.
And it is very easy to radicalize someone with all of that abstraction, you know, because that's all they have.
Like a cult IRL, I'm spitballing here.
But I have to think based on all that I've seen, there's a lot of distraction going on in good ways and bad ways.
It's like the radicalization might happen slower because people might be like busy over there at the crafts table or like busy organizing the food or whatever.
Commuting over other healthier things on the little side quests.
Exactly the side quests are distracting from what might ultimately be
Be a violent and fucked up main quest.
With incels, there's kind of only a main quest, which is violence against women.
an
Yes.
So speaking of abstraction and how language is really one of the main unifying pieces here, I kind of want to linger a little bit on the vocabulary of it all.
As those who've been listening to this podcast for a while may have heard me say before: no cult subculture would be complete without its own secret language.
The incel community lives for its little glossary.
Of twisted slang.
One of their core metaphors is the red pill versus blue pill, which was co-opted from The Matrix.
A blue pill person in incel culture is someone who's still asleep, blissfully unaware of the so-called truth about love and society, i.e., not buying into incel ideology.
Taking the red pill means you've been enlightened to the belief that.
Women and only women are in charge of sex and dating, and you're basically a victim of this cruel system.
And then there is the black pill, which is when you believe that everything is hopeless.
Showing 201–220 of 1,990 · page 11 of 100
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