This is my last post. After 29,000 posts and 5 years, including a 1-year term as moderator from 2022 to 2023, I have decided that it is time for me to move on. The vast majority of users who leave do not make farewell posts, but I have spent so much time here, I think I would not have closure without making one. So I want to briefly talk about why I joined the community, and why I have stayed until now despite this website’s notoriety.
To be honest, I don’t quite remember what compelled me to join this site in the first place. I’d rather not reveal my exact age for privacy reasons, so I’ll simply say that I was in my late teens or my very early 20s when I first joined. I do know that I was a brat who picked up an alcoholic streak from my boarding school, and despite my academic achievements, I was consistently angsty throughout my undergraduate years. After all, I was a low SMV male with a high sex drive—so it was very much like being a homeless person across the street from a glass-walled Michelin-starred establishment, watching as the moneyed patrons guzzle caviar and champagne whilst I starved in the freezing rain.
I did pay for sex occasionally, but even in those instances where the physical act of copulation was satisfying, the emotions were not. So the first two years of my online existence here was one of post-adolescent rage and despair. Eventually, the most intense of my emotions eventually died down somewhat—not because I took a Redditor’s advice and sat down with an obese therapist for lectures on critical feminist theory, but because I simply and naturally mellowed out as I progressed into my early- or mid-20s. I still have awful days from time to time, but I learned to grin and bear it, to stay productive and complete any assigned tasks in my academic or professional life.
As my rage died down somewhat, my involvement in the incel community took a more intellectual turn. For years now I’ve noticed a recurring discursive pattern within the incelosphere: Edgy .is posters and irascible Redditors engage in this game whereby the former achieves maximum shock effect with politically incorrect speech, and the latter quite predictably reacts with outrage, often with calls for censorship. The notion of censorship, of course, brings many more questions. As an example, why and how does the United States adopt such a radically different view of offensive speech than most Western European societies? The answer, of course, is far too complex to be explored in just one thread alone. But if you’re a normie wondering why this incel forum has survived deplatforming for almost seven years, that’s the question you should try to thoroughly answer—from both the normative and descriptive standpoints.
I further digress here, but during the course of my position as a moderator of this incel forum, I read
The Federalist Papers—which I realize sounds incredibly absurd, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Federalist No. 78 in particular addresses the scope and power of the federal judiciary; Hamilton’s view of the courts as a bulwark against crude majoritarianism was incredibly prescient in many areas of the law, but is particularly appurtenant as it relates to freedom of speech. After all, popular speech has no need for protection from the state. The type of speech that requires the protection of the law is often unpopular—uncouth, edgy, even loathsome—adjectives that often apply to incel speech. I considered it incredibly fascinating at the macro level: That such lofty, broad political concepts can be applied even to us, the proverbial basement-dwellers.
I didn’t sit around philosophizing the entire time, of course. I still get a good chuckle when I re-read some of the highlights of my time in the incel community. We
doxxed prominent r/IncelTear moderator and “artist” AdvocateDoogy, who later turned out to be
an autistic child groomer. We also covered
the saga of another prominent r/IncelTears user, Peter “DrPizza” Bright, who is now halfway through his 12-year federal sentence for, unsurprisingly,
child sex exploitation. We
celebrated some U.S. Supreme Court decisions that upheld the rule of law by adhering to a faithful and originalist interpretation of the text. And then there was the time
we asked a federal judge to unseal some documents regarding a former .is user who purportedly planned a mass shooting—and though we didn’t get a reply, those documents we asked were
available on the public docket shortly after. Last but not least, we recently
told the New Zealand Government to politely fuck off when they asked us to take down a video of the Buffalo mass shooting.
Anyhow, my explanation sounds abrupt and laconic, I know, but I have very recently decided that as much fun as I have had, I should focus on the other priorities within my life. Thus this concludes my time here. I have full faith and confidence in
@Master and Frail and the rest of the forum’s well-respected moderation team, in their ability to keep this community running and thriving. And I want to thank all the users who have entertained me and indulged my idiosyncratic polemics over the years—there are too many to count. I wish all of you the best.
Thank you all.