The trouble with designating ‘incels’ a terror threat

The Texas Department of Public Safety has designated incels, or ‘involuntary celibates’, as an ‘emerging domestic terror threat’. What began online with what the Department’s report calls a ‘a personal grievance due to perceived rejection by women’ may already, the report claims, have morphed into ‘allegiance to, and attempts to further, an Incel Rebellion’.Incels have quickly become one of the few groups whose mockery and derision is deemed universally acceptable. The term has become a go-to insult for men who are merely undesirable or unpopular. The idea that some men are misogynists, embittered because they can’t get…