Robert

That's...

you know, it's the kind of thing that would be more worthy of mocking if he hadn't killed 10 people, but he did, you know, like it's this, this, this fucking thing with the internet, where's this mix of, well, that's just absurd.

And also so many people are fucking dead and have their lives forever changed because of this fucking asshole.

Um,

So these are the only three attacks that we're discussing in these episodes, but they're not the only incel-related killings.

But it is important that the massive media response to specifically Roger and Manassian spree killings cemented the public image of an incel and ironically guaranteed the incels a shocking degree of cultural influence from then on.

especially because Roger does this while posting a manifesto, it gets in Seldom's foot in the door culturally in a very weird way.

And part of what's happening is people are horrified by these attacks, but they're also reading shit like what Alec Manassian posted.

And they're like, well, that's just...

ridiculous on some level.

The way these people talk is like very silly, as scary as it is.

And for whatever reason, that kind of makes people adopt, I think initially ironically, but a lot of people start adopting the elaborate terms that incels are using.

And it starts filtering out even chunks of the internet that have nothing to do with incels.

One of my sources for these episodes is the 2025 book AlgoSpeak by linguist Adam Oleksik.

His book is broadly about internet slang and particularly how algorithmic censorship on social media has altered online speech patterns and how that has changed the way that people talk in the real world.

He spends a lot of time, though, in his book talking about incels because, it turns out, they hit way above their weight class when it comes to linguistic influence.

In forums like PUA Hate and specific sections of 4chan, which also becomes a major incel hub, it's later than like those first couple of big like web forums, but it's also like larger in a lot of ways, they start cooking up new terms.

This is where we get words like mogging, which simply means to best or to outclass someone in a visible way.

Merriam-Webster notes, it was originally used to praise one man as being taller, more muscular, or more stereotypically handsome in direct comparison to another man.

this is really a result of the deep insecurity at the core of a lot of these guys.