Robert

In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.

Her husband Mike was on his laptop.

What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.

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So the first key moment, if you're kind of like doing the big bullet points of incel history, the first key moment would probably be the 2009 founding of puahate.com.

The second and most defining probably moment for the subculture was the 2014 mass killing by Elliot Rodger.

However, kind of just jumping between those two points does leave out something very important.

It's just, I mean, it's an act of violence that just isn't as famous as what Elliot Rodger did.

But in 2009, the same year that PUA Hate was founded, George Sardini, a financial employee at a law firm, opened fire on a woman's fitness class at a gym.

And I think this was in New York City.

He killed three women and he injured nine other people and then shot himself.

At the time, The Guardian wrote that Sardini, quote, kept a web page in which he wrote about years of rejection by women and left behind notes describing his inability to get a girlfriend.

So, Sedini wasn't in the strictest sense an incel, right?

As far as we know, he wasn't a member of any of the incel online communities.

That was barely a term, right?

This was still, at the start of 2009, mostly people who had like, kind of were descendants from Alana's original incel forum, right?

This had not, POA hate had not even really turned into a fully incel thing quite yet.

But this is also very clearly still an incel killing spree.

You know, it's the same set of motivations.

He's blaming what he's shooting anonymous women he doesn't know because he's blaming women as a whole for the fact that he hasn't found anyone and isn't happy.