On Monday, FBI documents exposed to the public revealed that the investigative agency has deliberately misrepresented the meaning of numerous popular Internet slang terms, and has used this misinterpretation to label them as signs of “violent extremism.”
As reported by Fox News, the documents were made public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. The documents show that numerous popular phrases and terms have been flagged as indicators of “Involuntary Celibate Violent Extremism” or “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.”
The documents focus particularly on young men who are known as “incels,” short for “involuntarily celibate,” which is incorrectly written as “involuntary celibate” by the FBI. The term encompasses many young men, particularly in the Millennial and Generation Z age ranges, who are incapable of finding romance due to an increasingly disproportionate and difficult dating scene due to the rise of social media. The FBI’s “threat overview” describes such men as planning to “commit violence in support of their beliefs that society unjustly denies them sexual or romantic attention, to which they believe they are entitled.”
One of the most popular phrases on the internet is “red pill,” a reference to the 1999 film “The Matrix,” and meant to represent someone’s awakening to previously hidden lies and finally seeing the harsh reality of the world, especially with regards to politics. The FBI claims that the phrase represents “a belief shared by many online communities that society is corrupt, and that the believer is a victim of this corruption.”
Many other terms are subsequently flagged by the FBI, despite being harmless and often used in comedic situations more than anything else. Another term the FBI notes is “Chad,” which has since come to be synonymous with the ideal alpha male, idolized by men and women alike. The FBI incorrectly identifies “Chad” as a “Race-specific term,” and claims that “incels unsuccessfully compete against Chads for attention.
Another term of mockery and jest that is labeled by the FBI as “extremist” is the phrase “It’s over,” which is often meant to convey the hopelessness of the current situation of the world, either by politics, culture, or some other broader means of societal decline. A nihilistic worldview that is also associated with the phrase “black-pilled,” the FBI falsely connects this phrase exclusively to incels, claiming that it represents “the hopelessness of being an incel.”
A commonly-used word on the internet is “based,” which essentially means “agreeable” or “cool” from a right-wing perspective, suggesting that the more right-wing someone is on certain issues, the more “based” they are. The FBI incorrectly describes “based” as “someone who has been converted to racist ideology.”
The full list by the FBI is described by the agency as terms representative of “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism” (RMVE), despite the fact that virtually none of the terms actually have anything to do with race.