UPDATE 3: See the end of the post for updates.
By David Futrelle
The shooter who murdered two women and wounded five others at a Tallahassee, Florida yoga studio last night before killing himself was an angry misogynist who identified with Elliot Rodger and had a long history of ranting against women online.
According to Buzzfeed, 40-year-old Scott Beierle
was a far-right extremist and self-proclaimed misogynist who railed against women, black people, and immigrants in a series of online videos and songs. …
On a YouTube channel in 2014, Beierle filmed several videos of himself offering extremely racist and misogynistic opinions in which he called women “sluts” and “whores,” and lamented “the collective treachery” of girls he went to high school with.
“There are whores in — not only every city, not only every town, but every village,” he said, referring to women in interracial relationships, who he said had betrayed “their blood.”
In a song posted to Soundcloud before his shooting rampage, Buzzfeed notes, he declared
To hell with the boss that won’t get off my back
To hell with the girl I can’t get in the sack
To hell with the good times I can’t get back
To hell with my life I can’t get on track
His other songs, all posted recently, were even less charming. As Buzzfeed reports, one song
called “Nobody’s Type,” featured him lamenting that women didn’t find him attractive. “I’m no athletic shark. I’m not a physical specimen. …” he sang.
In “American Wigger,” he sang that he would “blow off” the head of a women he referred to using the c-word. The song “Locked in my Basement” featured an extremely disturbing tale of Beierle holding a woman prisoner in his basement using chains so he could rape her.
It’s not clear if he self-identified as an incel, but many of his complaints echo the central preoccupations of the incel movement, with which he was clearly familiar, and he was obviously fixated on “the girl[s] I can’t get in the sack.”
In one video he recorded in 2014, he spent ten minutes rehashing his limited and unsatisfying romantic and sexual history with women. He dedicated the video to
the adolescent males … that are in the position, the situation, the disposition of Elliot Rodger, of not getting any, no love, no nothing. … that was me … as an adolescent.
He certainly acted the part of the isolated incel. Reporting by the Tallahassee Democrat suggests that Beierle was a socially inept loner whose often inappropriate behavior disturbed those who knew him.
One of his former roommates told the paper that
Beierle was odd and obnoxious. He appeared friendless — no one ever came to visit him, Brown said. He sat around in the living room in his briefs drinking beer, refusing to put on pants even when friends of his roommates came over. …
“He was very weird and made everyone uncomfortable,” Brown said. “It worried me at the time. … But there wasn’t enough evidence, and I would have been wasting the police’s time if I had made any kind of report. I had nothing.”
Beierle made inappropriate comments when Brown or his other roommate had girlfriends over. It got to the point that Brown and his roommate wouldn’t leave any of their guests, male or female, alone with Beierle.
“We compared him to Ted Bundy back then,” Brown said. “It was the way he lurked and followed girls.”
He was also, the paper notes, arrested twice for grabbing women’s asses without their consent. Though in one case there appears to have been clear surveillance video proof of his assault, charges were dropped in both instances.
Just yesterday, I wrote about some of the disturbing sexual fixations of regular commenters on Incels.me — particularly their notion that any man who sleeps with a woman who isn’t a virgin is being “cucked” by her past sexual history. It’s yet another way that incels cast women as, to use the terminology Beierle used in one of his videos, “treacher[ous]” creatures who have sex with numerous men but won’t give incels the sex they supposedly deserve.
I warned, as I have been warning for some time, that “the ideas being spread every day on Incels.is” — and, I should add, wherever incels congregate online — “put all of us in danger.” After quoting one incel promising to murder his (hypothetical) future wife if she turned out not to be a virgin, I noted that “incels don’t just fantasize about violence and murder. Some of them have committed it.”
It appears another one has done just that.
UPDATE: Users in Reddit’s incel-monitoring subreddit Incel Tears have pointed out that a (now-banned) commenter on Truecels.org had been threatening he would be “Going ER on 11/2/2018 11:00 AM.” While the time is wrong — the shooting took place in early evening — the date is correct, and the commenter in question frequently posted murder fantasies and other violent content on the site. I have yet to see any direct links to the shooter, or to Florida, in his comments but will keep looking. Here’s his avatar:
UPDATE 2: It turns out I wrote about Towncel, who was also a prolific commenter at Incels.me — in two posts. In one, I quoted him as saying that
Going ER is very selfless and heroic … it’s the long awaited life fuel for many others who are isolated and shit on by society as well as an end to the reign of the chads and femoids that you have killed.
In the other, he reacted to the initial reports of the Parkland killing by saying he hoped that shooter Nikolas Cruz had “kill[ed] over 60 normies.”
He was banned at Incels.me, apparently many months ago.
Again, it’s not clear if this is Beierle, and the language he used on both sites is filled with incel jargon that doesn’t seem to have appeared in Beierle’s recent songs, so at this point I’m thinking it’s someone else.
But this guy should definitely be on someone’s watchlist.
UPDATE 3: Having listened to more of Beierle’s “music,” read his lyrics and other writings, I am pretty confident that he wasn’t Towncel.
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Men who believe that they are entitled to women’s bodies purely because they are men have been fed these beliefs their entire lives thanks to how society has raised them to be and when they are told otherwise they act out in violent and dangerous ways, as shown here. Women are at risk every day because men are taught that they are superior to women, at risk of sexual violence, harassment, even murder, simply for being a woman, how can this be a viable way for society to function? Half of the population is terrified of the other half and the dangers they pose to their lives!