The Montreal Shooter and His Twisted Ideology | Blendr Report EP168
A gunman opened fire on Pornhub's headquarters and left a 104-page manifesto stitched from incel theory and Marxism. We read all of it.
On the morning of June 22nd, a man in military camouflage set a rifle on a tripod in a room at the Hilton Garden Inn and aimed it across the street at the sixth floor — the headquarters of the company that owns Pornhub. By the time the shelter-in-place order lifted, three people were dead: a civilian, the shooter, and a Montreal police officer, the first killed in the line of duty in over twenty years. The gunman left behind 104 pages explaining himself.
The press did what the press does. Left-leaning outlets fixed on the incel language and the biological determinism. Right-leaning ones pointed at the Marxism. Pro-Israel outlets seized on the anti-Zionism. Each one found the piece that served its movement and held it up to the camera. The strange part is that all of them were right. This man checked every box. He tried on incel theory, Marxist class analysis, and the rest, and he decided that all of it fit.
That is the thing the coverage keeps missing. Ideology is rarely the cause but the justification. Nietzsche had a word for what came first: ressentiment. Once a person accepts that he is powerless, that he is a permanent victim with no hand in his own life, that spirit of helplessness goes looking for a philosophy to justify itself. Corrupted people seek out ideas that excuse the emotion they already carry. The violence is the end, while the ideology is only the means. So you don’t beat this by arguing one creed. You’re up against the spirit that spawns them all.
Carl Jung believed that even in good times only about forty percent of people are genuinely well-integrated and sound. For every visibly unstable person on the street, he figured, ten more carry a latent version, wearing every appearance of normality until one bad day tips them. We’ve spent a decade moving the line for what counts as normal — first refusing to name unstable behaviour as a problem, then insisting we celebrate it. So we lost the instrument that used to flag the warning.
So what do you actually do? Not much at the level of policy, at least not fast. The economy, the loneliness, the purpose crisis, the universities nursing victimhood instead of curing it — none of that turns on a dime, and the people most hurt by the fixes are the first to fight them. The honest answer points downward and backward, to how we raise children. Stop shielding them from every hardship. Stop repressing a boy’s aggression instead of teaching him to carry it. Adversity is what builds a person, and we keep trying to engineer it out. You don’t repair this in HR but in kindergarten, at the source, and then you wait the twenty or thirty years it takes to undo twenty or thirty years of damage. The saying, often attributed to Mother Teresa rings true: if you want to change the world, go home and love your family.
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