Heritage Foundation Says FBI Associates Slang With Extremism

(RightWing.org) – When one puts an opinion, gripe, or even thought out on one of their social media platforms, they should do so with the understanding that their words are open for anyone to read and examine. Documents that the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show how the government “equates protected online speech to violence” through a newly unveiled list of words and/or phrases.

Using terms like “looksmaxxing”, “Chad”, and “Stacy” will get you on an @FBI list for "Involuntary Celibate Violent Extremism." pic.twitter.com/VoIegyoUby

— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) April 3, 2023

Everyday Phrases or Warning Signs?

One document received by the Oversight Project and published is an FBI “Domestic Terrorism Reference Guide [on] Involuntary Celibate Violent Extremism [Extremists] (IVEs).” Involuntary celibate people (or incels) are an online community whose members are defined in the bulletin as heterosexual men who feel society, and women on the whole, are conspiring to deny them the romantic/sexual relationships to which they are entitled.

Some of the terms the FBI has flagged include:

Chad: an idealized version of the men who compete with the incels for intimate relations with a woman and typically wins the perceived competition.
Stacy: an idealized version of the women who regularly choose the Chads of the world over them.
Femoid: a term meant to portray women as robots instead of humans.

This is not the first government report to identify the incels as a possible threat, the October 2022 “Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism” discussed the group as well. This report said IVEs “pose a persistent threat of violence against women, heterosexual couples, and others perceived” to have achieved the relationships they desired.

The Oversight Project’s document release also referenced a list of terms the government claims could indicate a person has been indoctrinated into “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism (REMVE).” Some of the words and phrases on the list include:

RaHoWa: the idea that Whites should instigate “a race war against Jews and non-whites [sic].”
Great Replacement: is the belief in a conspiracy meant to push the White race and Western culture aside.
((( ))), a.k.a. echoes: when placed around a person or institution’s name, indicates they are Jewish.

The FBI includes a list of books (both fiction and non-) from which some of these phrases come, including so-called manifestoes left by a previous “influential attacker.” A February 2023 peer-reviewed article in “Current Psychology” gives at least some insight into the psychological makeup of incels who have turned violent.

When one thinks of incels, an image portrayed in many popular television shows and movies of a guy wearing glasses, who lives in his parent’s basement and plays video games all day as his only connection to the outside world, they may not be too far off the mark. The paper reported that in a 2018 nonscientific website poll of ~300 self-described incels, only one-third of them said they had any friends.

The report also indicates incels can have a poor self-image that can include the idea they are simply too unappealing to attract the opposite sex and often have “experienced suicidal thoughts and question whether they would be missed if they acted on them.” It goes on to say the media representation of incels being rejected only on the sexuality front is misplaced since “sexual rejection is just one of many forms of social exclusion they experience.”