Monday’s horrific shooting in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood left innocent people dead. An Israeli man and a local police officer lost their lives. Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as 25-year-old Seth Hatfield.
Initial press coverage focused extensively on the fact that Hatfield identified as an “incel,” effectively blinding the public to the perpetrator’s deeper motivations. The label minimizes the killer as a solitary, pathetic misfit. It frames his violence as the exclusive by-product of private sexual frustration and the dark corners of the internet.
The suspect’s actual manifesto adds several missing layers to that simple narrative. Although the text discusses “loneliness, isolation, and social degradation,” they aren’t the main focus of his complaint. Rather, they serve as the baseline for a warped worldview that directly echoes the anti-Western dogmas embedded within our mainstream institutions.
Hatfield uses the precise dialect of far-left radicalism to justify his actions. He launches a sweeping ideological assault on the economic foundations of liberal democracy, denouncing capitalism as a system engineered not to benefit the common working-class male, but one “designed by the bourgeois class towards their own benefit.” He goes further, demanding that readers reject “residual notions of Western advancement or ‘superiority,’ ” while openly praising communist alternatives and requesting that his tract be translated into Arabic, Farsi, and Mandarin, where he believed his ideas would be better received. Most disturbingly, his bitter resentment of modern society and economic power ultimately takes a familiar, sinister turn into pure antisemitism. “The influence of Zionist Jews upon the Western bourgeoisie is in fact so strong,” he writes, “that in my other works I sometimes refer to the Western ruling class itself as the Judaeo-bourgeois class.”
