A mass shooting in Santa Barbara last night left seven dead, including the man suspected of being the killer. Local authorities say that this chilling video, titled Elliot Rodger’s retribution, “appears to be connected” to the shootings. It is a supremely disturbing real-life villain’s monologue in which a young man, evidently the killer, explains on the day before the massacre why he intends to kill: because women have rejected him.
As the person who sent this video to me this morning noted, it sounds almost like a parody of the misogynistic beliefs and rhetoric that I write about on this blog. His language and his melodramatic tone both echo the writings of many of those young men who consider themselves “incels.” His anger is the same anger we see from the rejected men who lash out with insults and threats on OkCupid when their often crude advances are turned down. He reminds me of every so-called “nice guy” who is inwardly seething with resentment born of sexual entitlement denied. He even, at one point, calls himself a “gentleman.” He also calls himself an “alpha.”
It is clear that his resentment at women was stoked by what I call the “new misogyny” and by steeping himself in at least one online community that reaffirmed his exaggerated, unwarranted sense of victimhood. So far we have evidence that he was a commenter at PUAhate, a site ostensibly designed to critique PUAs but which has degenerated into a haven for misogynistic “incels” and angry trolls. I suspect we will find that he was also a reader of, or a commenter at, some of the other sites I critique on this blog.
For those of you who cannot make it through the video — I found it very hard to watch — here is a transcript of what he said.
Hi, Elliot Rodger here.
Well… this is my last video. It all has to come to this.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day in which I will have my revenge against humanity. Against all of you.
For the last 8 years of my life, ever since I’ve hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires. All because girls have never been attracted to me.
Girls gave their affection, and sex, and love, to other men but never to me.
I’m 22 years old and I’m still a virgin. I’ve never even kissed a girl.
I’ve been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I’m still a virgin.
It has been very torturous.
College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex, and fun, and pleasure. But in those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness.
It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me.
I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.
It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentlemen.
I will punish all of you for it. (laughs)
On the day of retribution I am going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB… and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see inside there.
All those girls that I’ve desired so much, they would’ve all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes.
I will take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.
You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true alpha male. (laughs)
Yes, after I’ve annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I’ll take to the streets of Isla Vista, and slay every single person I see there.
All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure while I’ve had to rot in loneliness for all these years, they’ve all looked down upon me every time I try to go out and join them. They’ve all treated me like a mouse.
Well now, I will be a God compared to you. You will all be animals. You are animals, and I will slaughter you like animals. I will be a God, exacting my retribution, on all those who deserve it.
And you do deserve it, just for the crime of living a better life than me.
All you popular kids. You’ve never accepted me, and now you’ll all pay for it.
And girls, all I’ve ever wanted was to love you, and to be loved by you. I’ve wanted a girlfriend, I’ve wanted sex, I’ve wanted love, affection, adoration, but you think I’m unworthy of it.
That’s a crime that can never be forgiven.
If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you. (laughs)
You denied me a happy life, and in turn, I will deny all of you life. (laughs) It’s only fair.
I hate all of you, humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species. If I had it in my power, I would stop at nothing, to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood, and rightfully so.
You deserve to be annihilated. And I’ll give that to you.
You never showed me any mercy, and so I will show you none. (laughs)
You force me to suffer all my life, and now I’ll make you all suffer.
I’ve waited a long time for this.
I’ll give you exactly what you deserve.
I will have more on this as the story develops. My heart goes out to the loved ones of all the victims.
Misogyny kills.
EDITED TO ADD: Elliot Rodger seems to have been a commenter on PUAhate, the anti-PUA message board that is as misogynistic and generally awful as the PUAs it critiques. PUAhate has taken itself offline, so all evidence of this may end up scrubbed. I added a paragraph about this.
I will keep updating as I track down more information on this story. Please post anything you find in the comments as well.
EDIT 2: This will be a NO TROLLS thread. Anything gratuitously argumentative or less than respectful of the victims will be removed.
Thank you for providing a transcript. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to make it through the video and all of the articles that I saw about it gave several word excerpts at most. (The exceprts were of MRA code-word and dog-whistle use but didn’t mention that.) Most of the media is now trying to blame mental illness (by which they mean Asperger’s, which doesn’t cause people to kill) so that they can treat this as an isolated incident that isn’t a hate crime. It’s crucial that we return the focus to the actual problems here: extreme male entitlement and misogyny. This is a hate crime and we need to talk about the things that cause crimes like this to happen, which isn’t rejection, but an echo-chamber of hateful men who recruit men who feel rejected.
marinerachel:
As Louis points out, Pharyngula, and PZ, have a poor track record of casually equating bad with mad (he loves to describe fundamentalists as crazy, insane, etc). Louis’ other point, that this isn’t “lone madman with gun” but “standard operational misogyny” is the really important one. Like he says – two women murdered by their partners every week in the UK. (It’s one a week here in Oz, which is even more grotesque given our tiny population.) Women not believed when they go to the police about violence. Police ignoring all the warnings about Rodgers, in particular, that came from his family. Equating it in any way with mental illness is bullshit; it’s toxic masculinity, reinforced, encouraged, by MRA and PUA groups, who should seriously be outed as hate groups.
Zolnier:
Damn true.
I know that brain bleach is kinda impossible in this case, but anyone needing a break, I offer a cute little animation about possessed shoes and a dancing ghost:
When I first read this, I thought you meant your Louis…
a comment on an article about it on LAtimes
When you were a young man you felt entitled to women’s bodies and hated the fact that they could choose who they had sex with? you think you’re special because you wrote instead of killed? (I shudder to think about what)
Revolting.
Wow. I’m browsing through that manifesto and… the whole thing is just the dictionary definition of entitlement. It’d be almost funny if he hadn’t gone out and actually murdered people.
He bought a lot of lottery tickets (believing that being a multi-millionaire was the only way a beta like him would get women, which is upsettingly familiar logic), didn’t win the Mega Millions, and his reaction every time was exaggerated fury. “The winner was some guy from Riverside. He took MY money. What a waste. What an injustice.”
I’m skimming because it’s like 140 pages and I don’t really want to read the whole thing, but it seems like a big long narrative of him sabotaging his own life or having ordinary normal setbacks and decrying it all as terrible injustice. He broke his leg trying to push people off a ledge and called it an “injustice.” And of course, over and over he sat around silently seething at women and they failed to recognize this as gentlemanly courtship and reward it with instant sex, and to him that was the greatest injustice of all.
It’s really distressing because this is stuff we laugh at so much. It’s so absurd and over-dramatic that you can almost forget how threatening it really is.
Oh, I don’t disagree that it’s unhelpful and shouldn’t happen and a lot of people will understand “insane” and “crazy” and “disturbed” literally. Not cool. I know PZ well enough though not to believe he thinks this guy’s mentally ill. Obvs, he still shouldn’t perpetuate this sort of language knowing the damage it does.
so much for not reading comments…urg.
brain bleach:
:: waves at Cliff :: 😀
I am…. in love with that frog.
Hi Cliff!
also hi everyone else, sorry for the drive-by commenting…I hope you’re all doing well! 🙂
I just sat here and spent my evening reading a bunch of the guy’s manifesto. A few things stood out to me, He is SO fixated on a narrow band of exceptionally conventionally pretty women (young, tall, tan, blonde, thin, long hair, unblemished skin– “California Girl” types) that he seems to completely fail to notice other types of women even exist, aside from his close female relatives. (Meantime, he obviously totally excoriates them for not noticing HIM.) He’s breathtakingly racist– while he hates seeing white guys hanging out with the blonde girls he’s fixated on, it REALLY burns him up when he sees or hears about someone he considers racially inferior to himself getting any attention from anyone who meets his very narrow definition of the word “girl.”
At one point he blows up when he sees an Asian guy talking to a white girl at a party, because for whatever reason he has decided being “Eurasian” puts him higher on the racial hierarchy so the women should want him instead.
He is so unbelievably delusionally entitled that when he plays the lottery in a bid to get rich quick, he actually hates the lotto winners for taking “his” money away. He even resents his mom for not marrying a rich man and considers her preference for staying single “very selfish” not because he actually wants for anything material, just because if he were part of a wealthy family he thinks that would improve his social standing and help him get one of the girls he’s fixated on. In his mind even his mom is basically conspiring against him.
To me it sounds like one part overly-comfortable, entitled upbringing, one part ongoing mental health issues, one part wildly unrealistic expectations about sex/love fueled by media consumption, and three parts rampant unchecked misogyny.
Conclusion:
Rot in hell, little shit!
My sympathy to the victim’s families, and to his family, who sound to me like did what they could for him.
::waves at AllyS::
It’s sort of sad, I saw the news and knew it was going to be on WHTM. I’m not sure how old this pattern of “man decides his misery is caused by All Women Everywhere and goes on a killing spree” is, but it seems like it’s happening more frequently lately, and it’s terrifying. Maybe we’re just more aware of it now, I don’t know.
@marinerachel
I like how relaxed and poised the frog is, without a care in the world. Lucky frog lol
I watched the dancing ghost twice. I kind of needed that.
(sarcasm)
Oh but of coooouuuurse he was “mentally disturbed,” or had Aspergers, or was autistic, or was schizophrenic, or something! I mean, he was clearly psychologically deranged in some manner!
Because he was a white college boy, and not a man of color, so we can’t call it the terrorism that it clearly wasn’t and couldn’t be, because he was a white college boy!
(/steaming pile of sarcasm and jaded despondancy)
-hugs all around, where wanted-
My Thoughts and Prays to all the victims and their loved ones,
I happened to turn on the radio earlier today and heard this had happened, and all I really picked up on was, for some reason, the fact the sheriff (?) referred to him as “deeply disturbed” and a family member (?) referred to him as “having Aspergers”.
So my first thought– no my second thought, my first though was FUCK YOU– was Oh, well, this guy is totally white. And he totally was. Because folks who legit might be suffering from, I don’t know, PTSD from living in the middle of Chigaco’s gangland/police violence never ever get a mention about how “so and so was clearly disturbed, and recently a counsellor described him as having PTSD”. (I choose PTSD as an example, and in many cases it is linked to an increased risk of violence, unlike Aspergers.)
But the weirdest thing was listening to this reporter, who kept really emphatically referring to “people” being gunned down, and there was something about the way he was saying it. I don’t know how to describe it, it was repeated far more frequently than necessary, and for some reason the gender-neutralness of “people” was being undercut by his tone, and I thought, oh HELL no, not some woman-hating murdering son of a bitch getting let off the hook already because of being “disturbed”.
And sure enough. There it was. On the evening news, with a rant right out of the Manosphere. The reason I even pay attention to these scumbags in the first place. Damn it.
I love Isla Vista and Santa Barbara, I spent a lot of time there about twenty years ago. Wonderful place and a great bunch of schools up there. No place is perfect– it was also where I first encountered a friend coming back from a party at a frat house where she’d been roofied and didn’t remember anything, and I had to take her to the hospital, and yeah. But besides that horrifying incident, my memories of there have been good. I just feel so rotten for the families of these people who died, and I’m pissed that the family of this murdering asshole went to the cops and told them something was wrong, and nothing could be done. Just such a Nice Guy.
Such a Nice Guy.
I compiled all the comments he made on the BodyBuilding.com forum as well. They’re now deleted so I made copies that Google cache won’t remove https://storify.com/NewSecular/elliot-rodger-bodybuilding-com-forum
moldybrehd,
Yeah, it felt weird writing that! 🙂
Well I thinks it very clear that misogyny played a large role in this crime, I wonder what can first the misogyny or the MRA sites? His manifesto or whatever smacks of all the usually MRA talking points but at the same time, if you look at other domestic terrorist there is a pattern, that they have always held their view but needed that final push from liked minded others.
@Cliff Pervocracy
yeah, it is distressing. But I find the general poking trolls so much better than having to carefully debate them. Everytime I talk to my dad or stepmom about misogyny I get shut down for even being emotional about it. I need somewhere I can just mock it.
If that makes sense.
And now the honeybadgers are claiming that SLPC is either a hate group/funded by hate groups. How even.
http://f2.thejournal.ie/media/2014/05/emrknjp.gif
Anyone looking for the right words to talk about this should have a look at Miri’s post. Delineates all the issues and the ways to talk about them really clearly.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/brutereason/2014/05/24/masculinity-violence-and-bandaid-solutions/
This bit struck home with me.
Love the dancing ghost and sitting frog clips – thank you, LBT and Quackers!
::waves::
Hi, Cliff!