Do you ever find internet slang creeping into your IRL life? Declaring your grandma “based” for her anti-authoritarian outbursts every time a Tory pops up on the telly? Calling the postman a Chad for wearing those cute little shorts, even in the depths of winter? Embracing #corecore, becoming pill-pilled? If so, we’re afraid to tell you that you might be an incel extremist, at least according to the FBI.

In documents brought to light on Monday (April 10) via a Freedom of Information Act request from the Heritage Foundation (which is, it should be noted, a prominent conservative think tank), the Federal Bureau of Investigation is shown to classify widely-used internet slang as an indicator for “violent extremism” linked to the incel movement and racially-motivated hate crimes. 

The documents list language such as “red pill” and “black pill” – alongside incel-adjacent terms such as “Chad” and “looksmaxxing” – as linked to “involuntary celibate violent extremism”. These appear alongside more harmful and hopeless phrases that are pretty much exclusive to the incel movement, such as “it’s over” or “just be first”. However, the document also includes very general figures of speech, like the suffix “-cel”, which can be applied to pretty much anything.

“Red pill” also features on a list of words linked to “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism” (RMVE). “In the context of RMVE ideology, taking the red pill or becoming ‘redpilled’ indicates the adoption of racist, anti-Semitic, or fascist beliefs,” the list reads. Elsewhere, it includes “LARPing” (aka “live-action role playing”), “((()))” (or “echoes”, used to signal anti-Semitic conspiracy theories), and “/pol/”, in reference to “‘politically incorrect’ discussion boards on 4chan and 8chan”.

Could using internet slang really land you on an FBI watchlist, though? Well, by the bureau’s own admission, the key terms “may constitute a basis for reporting or law enforcement action” when combined with certain behavioural patterns. And yes, if a teenage boy is reading Mein Kampf, binge watching fancams of famed incels, and posting about “blood and soil”, it probably is time for an authority figure to step in and have a word.

For the Extremely Online, though, it might be surprising to hear that sharing a Virgin vs Chad meme, or uttering a phrase that pales in comparison to what your favourite podcaster is saying, could cause the FBI to treat you with suspicion. It certainly seems like an overreach to brand words like “based” (a complimentary term supposedly coined by Lil B) and “red pill” (a word from The Matrix, of all places) as symptoms of violent extremism, especially in an online landscape steeped in irony and political satire.

Who knows? Maybe, in a world where everyone’s forgotten how to take a joke, language does hold some dark, revolutionary power that needs to be reigned in by multibillion-dollar intelligence agencies, lest it falls into the wrong hands. But while the FBI are LARPing 1984, the wordcels are out here typing the instructions for the end of the world into ChatGPT, so there’s a good chance none of it will matter soon anyway.