Within hours of Monday’s deadly shooting in Montreal, much of the Canadian media had already settled on a preferred explanation for the attacker’s ideology. The suspect, a man from Alberta named Seth Hatfield, was described as an ‘incel’—an involuntary celibate motivated by rejection from women—and the case was quickly linked to online right-wing extremist radicalization.
Yet a review of the 104-page manifesto left behind by the gunman suggests that this portrayal captured only a narrow portion of a much broader and more radical worldview, which, at its core, appears closer to radical Marxist ideology than anything else. Reading through the document, it is perhaps unsurprising why mainstream media outlets carefully selected certain excerpts rather than publishing the manifesto in full.
The shooting unfolded on 22 June in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges district after police responded to reports of an armed man near the Westbury complex. A gun battle followed, leaving Montreal police officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane dead, another officer seriously wounded, and the suspect killed by responding officers. A civilian victim, identified as Michael Mizrahi, a member of Montreal’s Jewish community, also lost his life during the incident, reportedly due to police gunfire during the chaotic shootout. Authorities have not yet announced a motive or formally classified the attack as terrorism.
Hours after the incident, media reports began highlighting excerpts from the perpetrator’s manifesto that focused on male loneliness, resentment towards women, and theories associated with the online ‘incel’ subculture. None of the outlets published the full document at the time, which was eventually released by Rebel News, a Canadian independent online news and commentary outlet.
The outlet’s founder, Ezra Levant, wrote in a post on X on Tuesday, 23 June, that while the manifesto did contain extreme views about women, this represented only ‘a small part of’ the murderer’s worldview. ‘In most of the rest of his rambling remarks, he was indistinguishable from left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders, Avi Lewis, or half the Liberal cabinet,’ he wrote.
A closer examination of the document suggests that its dominant themes are anti-capitalism, class struggle, revolutionary social theory, and antisemitic conspiracy narratives, all saturated with Marxist language and concepts—not characteristics typically associated with conventional right-wing manifestos.
Hatfield repeatedly attacks ‘bourgeois’ institutions, condemns capitalism as the source of social decay, and presents society through the lens of material and economic conflict. References to the ‘bourgeoisie’, class domination, and economic exploitation appear throughout the text, while immigration, race, and nationalism receive comparatively little attention.
‘In reality however, it is not communism, but capitalism which directly causes what they are witnessing, hence why the various communist nations of the world have always been comparatively devoid of the degeneracy that plagues western capitalist countries.’ (p. 19)
The manifesto’s most widely discussed sections focus on ‘male loneliness’, dating, and female ‘hypergamy’. The suspect describes a crisis of ‘terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation’ affecting Western men and argues that modern society has created a system in which women pursue only a small group of highly desirable men, leaving many ordinary men isolated. He calls this the ‘contradiction of the imperatives’, claiming that ‘the biological imperatives of the two sexes are contradictory’ because men and women seek different outcomes in mate selection.
These passages help explain why many media outlets characterized the document primarily as an ‘incel manifesto’. However, they form only one element of a broader ideological framework. Elsewhere, the author attacks the ‘bourgeois’ order, condemns liberal institutions, and interprets social problems through class power and economic exploitation. In one passage, he dismisses Western academics as belonging to the ‘liberal or bourgeois persuasion’, while repeatedly portraying modern society as being controlled by powerful elites acting against the interests of ordinary people.
‘Remember, capitalism was never designed towards the benefit of the common male of the working class, or of the whole of society at all; but rather, it was designed by the bourgeois class towards their own benefit.’ (p. 20)
The document is also filled with antisemitic conspiracy theories. The suspect refers to a ‘Judaeo-bourgeois class’ and claims that the influence of ‘Zionist Jews upon the western bourgeoisie is in fact so strong’ that it has shaped modern Western society itself. He further alleges that Jewish interests dominate finance, media, and politics.
Significantly, these antisemitic claims are framed through a class-based and anti-capitalist lens. Rather than focusing on nationalism, immigration, or ethnic replacement—common themes in contemporary far-right manifestos—the author portrays Jews as part of an allegedly exploitative capitalist elite that dominates Western institutions.
‘It is the case that there was amongst the western bourgeois class many Jews, who in their newly acquired power immediately set about creating the state of Israel, which became essentially a kind of base from which they were to assist in the expansion of capitalist hegemony in conjunction with American and British corporations. The influence of Zionist Jews upon the western bourgeoisie is in fact so strong that in my other works I sometimes refer to the western ruling class itself as the Judaeo-bourgeois class…’ (p. 20)
That distinction matters because the manifesto bears little resemblance to documents produced by recent right-wing extremist attackers such as the Christchurch shooter or the Buffalo gunman, whose writings centred on immigration, race, and demographic replacement. Instead, Hatfield’s text is overwhelmingly preoccupied with capitalism, class conflict, economic power, and what he views as the social consequences of modern liberal society.
The misogyny and male grievance politics that dominated early reporting are therefore presented not as a standalone ideology, but as one component of a wider anti-capitalist and revolutionary worldview.
By focusing overwhelmingly on the document’s most obviously ‘incel’ passages, much of the reporting encouraged readers to interpret the attack primarily through the familiar framework of online right-wing radicalization. However, a reading of the manifesto as a whole suggests that it bears little resemblance to conventional right-wing extremism and appears considerably closer to a radical Marxist worldview.
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