Shooting the Pornhub CEO

Seth Hatfield's manifesto reveals a deeply confused man who remixed communist theory with far-right rhetoric to create an ideological dog's breakfast

This week, Albertan Seth Hatfield drove across Canada with the intention of murdering the CEO of Pornhub. This is, so far, what is thought to be known about this week’s active shooter situation in Montreal which ended up with three people dead: a bystander, a Montreal cop and Hatfield himself.

It took nearly no time for the far right to try and paint Hatfield as a communist/far-left ideologue. Far-right propagandists Rebel News claimed this in a headline: “Manifest Reveals Alleged Montreal Gunman’s Antisemitic, Far-Left and ‘Incel’ Ideology.” Disgraced podcaster Jesse Brown claimed that Hatfield was an antizionist activist. Neither mention what the French media picked up on from the start: this incel was driven by a crusade against elite CEOs, hated pornography and rented a hotel room near Pornhub’s parent company in Montreal, where he apparently tried to shoot people from his room across into the adjacent office.

This point is taking up such little space in English Canadian media right now that when I search news for Pornhub, the only news I get is about age verification in the UK.

Photos from Quebecor show the office building’s windows smashed from the shots. Montreal police said that employees hid under their desks for more than an hour.

What kind of socialism is this?

I’ve been a socialist for my entire adult life and I don’t recognize this apparent socialism as described by the Rebel News. That’s probably because the outlet understands that their anti-social, bigoted, fascist-adjacent propaganda rag is far closer to Hatfield’s ideology than I am. In reading his manifesto, a portrait of Hatfield emerges of someone who fashioned himself as an intellectual, though was confused as hell and in tremendous need of intellectual and theoretical guidance. He was sure that the key to his personal suffering was the women who were not in his life: a woman with whom he can marry and have children.

The first ten pages of Hatfield’s manifesto focus on human biology — the fixed realities of women who cannot have infinite children, and men who can. This builds to his argument, that the rise in something he calls hypergamy. He defines it like this: “a phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically and culturally just to one male.” He blames this on the rise of capitalism, as the elites have become degenerate swingers and have tried to fashion society into their image.

Under capitalism, he argues, there are favoured males (tall, handsome, Caucasian) who get all the women. Women, naturally, only want to mate with the favoured males. His manifesto is Incel Logic 101, complete with footnotes and APA style (which is enough to confuse some people into thinking that it’s smart — it is the opposite of smart).

By Page 30, Hatfield finally gets to the point — or perhaps, finally gets to himself — the bottom rung of society, the common male: “With that, we at last come to the icy lowermost sphere of the hypergamous inferno, that which holds the least fortunate of the three main sociobiological classes of the hypergamy state, the common males, who we will occasionally refer to simply as ‘the dispossessed’. Their lonely realm is one of gruelling deprivation, and ever surging woe.” He calls watching other guys find girlfriends, “traumatic” and that common men have two paths: either they develop mental illness and attempt suicide, or they rush towards self-improvement in an effort to lift them out of being common. Both are futile, and the only hope is through revolutionary violence.

To back up his point, Hatfield cites several pages worth of Reddit comments. He describes all the people who try to make money off of lonely men, promising that if they just do this or change that, they will transcend their commonness. This, he identifies, as being a series of swindles. While he doesn’t name anyone, it’s easy to hear him yelling at the Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons of the world. He is also angry at Conservative voices who have had a hand in creating what he calls the hypergamy state, but then pretend to offer young men the solution to fix it.

At this point, we are at Page 72 of his manifesto, the point where he starts to talk about solutions. Despite having railed against capitalism, it’s here where he finally talks about “leftists” — “The leftists partially or entirely reject the validity of bourgeois economics, i.e. capitalism, but they love the degeneracy that capitalism produces, i.e. obscene levels of mass immigration, rampant hypergamy, the encouragement and promotion of hedonistic bodily mutilation, et cetera.”

His solutions include abstaining from poisonous substances (booze, drugs, pop), trying to ween off video games, stop following sports and stop watching porn. He also goes on a racist rant against rap music.

By Page 82, he argues that the people should rise up against CEOs. He suggests a variety of weapons that one could use against them. He argues that one should not target random CEOs, or small-town business people like real estate agents, even though they participate in market speculation. Nor, he says, should you take random violence out against women. He lists possible targets, including the headquarters of companies that participate in degenerative pursuits, and suggests targeting their conferences and conventions, headquarters, and so on.

Ultimately, he says, you should expect to die for this cause. Do not kill a police officer but do provoke a police officer to kill you, he suggests. Incidentally, it isn’t clear that Hatfield killed anyone — “dozens” of shots were heard, SPVM officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane was killed, as was bystander Michel Mizrahi. Someone else was severely injured.

Hatfield concludes by appealing to pieces of the Communist Manifesto as a solution to male suffering — abolish private property, nationalize telecommunications and transportation and impose a planned economy. This, he thinks, will massively improve the lives of young men. Then, he argues that women should not be allowed to work.

This manifesto is not a left wing document. It’s a reactionary document that correctly identifies some of society’s problems, completely misdiagnoses other problems and then leaps right past social movement organizing and into violent revolutionary tactics to try and LARP a solution. Anyone who has red Marx and Engles knows that neither man advocated for the subjugation of women and forcing them into private, unpaid home work. In fact, the family unit that Hatfield pines for is the most potent node of support for the maintenance of capitalism. Marginalizing women into unpaid work is a crucial element of capitalism and without it, the system would fall apart.

Understanding 2026 incelism

Hatfield represents the maturing of incel ideology as it’s been remixed over a decade of declining social conditions. At 25 years old, the Albertan came to age in an era where incel violence had already murdered dozens of people, and where the male self-help world had evolved into open fascism. Still, young men were not getting the relief that the famous men of the manosphere promised. Social conditions declined, punctuated by a pandemic that halted the normal social development for many teenagers (COVID would have hit when Hatfield was 18-19 years old).

The promises of manosphere gurus have always been bullshit. Feminists have consistently called out their snake oil for years, seeing clearly the harm that it causes to women and men alike. But we don’t have the same platforms that the misogynists have, and political parties are far happier playing into the rhetoric than promising to actually do anything to fix social conditions. And so, the rhetoric gets more and more extreme while social conditions continue to deteriorate — it’s a deadly combination.

In 2018, I wrote about the same stuff that Hatfield writes about in his manifesto, but in relation to what was known at the time a about Alek Minassian. I quoted Arshy Mann on incels at the time:

Arshy Mann has been watching this movement for long enough to connect the dots: “They’re finding each other on online communities and they’re radicalizing each other,” he said on The Current. But, these “involuntary celibates,” men who blame women for a lifetime of being rejected by them (lifetime, of course, is misleading, as many of these men are very young) are part of a broader swamp of anti-feminist online activists, including so-called Pick Up Artists, Men’s Rights Associations and others. These groups are “more and more anti-feminist and more and more extreme,” Mann said.

In that same article, I wrote,

Less stability, fewer opportunities to meet people and more anxiety create the conditions where someone might turn to online subcultures for community and validation. Certainly, online communities help everyone expand their friend network, and this is borne out by other Statistics Canada research. When the community that someone finds is toxic or violent, it can serve to radicalize them.

Life in Canada has never been so unaffordable and profits have never been so large. This creates brutal conditions that impact all Canadians. In the eight years since I wrote these paragraphs, two generations of young men have come to age, realizing that capitalism might actually be the problem. Luckily, the vast majority of them have not decided to try to do revolution on their own.

But what this situation reminds us is this: current social conditions are untenable. They force people to their breaking point. Some people reach to easy scapegoats to explain the decay. Others, especially the ones who benefit from these conditions, peddle alternative arguments. For example, Ben Mulroney, whose personal fortune and career have only been made possible thanks to his father’s name (who incidentally imposed these social conditions on Canada four decades ago), and who hosts Global News’ flagship political show, was quick to try and make this attack adjacent to Israel — anything to distract from the fact that the economy as it is currently organized does generate violence.

And so, there will be a campaign intended to obfuscate reality. We’ll be forced to hear how Hatfield was a communist (code for crazy), or a an antizionist or whatever other distraction people might conjure to have us avoid arriving at the truth — that capitalism is destroying generations of people of all ages. And unless we force our government to stop this insane profits bonanza, there will be others like Hatfield whose incorrect diagnosis convinces them to take extreme acts of violence. In their wake, there will be innocent bystanders who are unfortunate casualties in the war on the working class.