This Is What ‘Revolutionary Terror’ Looks Like

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

 

Two people are dead, including one police officer, after a gunman opened fire in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood. According to legacy media accounts of the attack, the shooter was inspired to murder by his proximity to the sexless and misogynistic “incel” movement.

 

But the killer’s targets and his stated intentions tell a grimmer tale.

 

Côte-des-Neiges is described in the Canadian press as a “multicultural neighborhood” and in the Jerusalem Post as a “heavily Jewish area of Montreal,” with many kosher markets and restaurants. According to Chabad.org, “At this time, reports indicate the shooter’s target was the police, not the Jewish community.” The attacker did kill one officer and seriously wound another. The lone civilian killed amid the attack has been identified as Michael Moshe Mizrahi, a “Jewish local and member of the local Chabad center,” said the Jerusalem Post, which noted that some “20-30 shots were reported to have been fired next to the Hilton Hotel.”

 

Setting out to murder police is less a calling card associated with “incels” and more typically a feature of political violence. While Montreal police have declined to establish a motive, the killer’s manifesto elucidates his objective: “The essential political conditions of a society in which capitalism/liberalism, and thereby, hypergamy itself, are not part of the established order of things, have mostly already been laid out by Marx, Engels, and others in works such as The Communist Manifesto.”

 

The missive, in which its author sees totalitarian socialism’s sexual conventions as a remedy for his celibacy, is replete with criticisms of the capitalist enterprise as well as calls for the abolition of private property and the state ownership of industry. It expounds on the most effectively propagandistic ways to murder elites, whom he describes as “the more virulent and filthy facets of the capitalist economy.” And it defends the moral and ethical nature of “revolutionary terror.”

 

The attacker seems to have been consumed with resentment toward women. But it was the revolutionary Marxist ethic and the vestigial Soviet-style attacks on the perfidy of the Zionist enterprise that provided this killer with a psychological permission structure for murderous violence. He also seems to have assumed that there was an audience for this sort of thing. And, given the recent outbreak of left-wing political violence (which I chronicle in my latest book), apparently there is.

 

Montreal police have warned that the attack could inspire copycats. But if police are on the lookout for killers inspired by “incel ideology,” and not radical Marxist revolutionary dogma, they will only contribute to what is clearly emerging as a threat to domestic security throughout the West.