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.
Remember when that Neo-Nazi shot up that Sikh temple a few years ago and how everyone immediately saw that it was because of his ideology?
Yeah, we totally don’t need feminism.
I’ve read a lot about mass killers and the shithole in that video sounds like a typical example of one. They aren’t deranged, the mass killer is most defined by their pathological malignant narcissism, total lack of empathy and tendency to leave long self-serving notes, or in this case a video, explaining all the reasons why their victims deserve to be killed by them. The fact that petty resentment and a wounded ego can lead to human slaughter is endlessly infuriating and crushingly sad.
I’m joining the chorus of nopes when it comes to reading the jackasses on reddit opine on this human tragedy. Everyone who fucking mentions Aspergers in relation to these killings needs to realize that’s wrong and/or punch themselves in the face. JFC.
:::sigh::: Nobody seems willing to talk about it as it really is. My family? Knowing I grew up at constant risk of being shot by a father who had long promised to take his family with him when he decided to go? They go out less and less. We don’t go to national parks in the popular season, we don’t go to malls, we don’t go to movies.
Maybe the saddest bit will be that the gun lobbies won’t get shut down till enough business bottom lines are affected.
Horribly, there has been a shooting in Jewish museum in Belgium, today, with 3 killed. As is only right, this has led to discussions of the increase of anti-semitism in Europe in recent years.
What makes me spit feathers is the people over on Roosh’s forum spouting ‘if only he had gotten laid’ schtick. What utter rubbish. This was a very dangerous young man, lack of sex, or anything else he felt entitled to and wasn’t getting, did not ‘drive’ him to go out and murder people. He killed people because there was something lacking in him that meant that he could.
(By the way I’m not suggesting for a nanosecond that his actions can be chalked up to mental illness, I do know that the overwhelming majority of people with mental health issues will never harm another person. I certainly don’t think this guy suffered from autism as is being suggested on YouTube.)
No, the MRM won’t learn from this. People somewhat skeptical of it and people on the fence might though. The people who aren’t in the thick of it still have a chance.
I’m going to have a cry. Hope that’s OK.
Here’s another quote he posted:
“Women have control over which men sex and which men don’t, thus having control over which men breed and which men don’t. Feminism gave women power over the future of the human species. Feminism is evil.”
Sounds like pretty much every MRA I’ve seen… And apparently, feminism is a hate movement in the guys’ eyes.
You SAY that. But after the Kansas City shooting, people were (still are) questioning whether it was a “hate crime”. So, uhm. Can we not use that as an example, please?
@michelle
I can’t work up anger right now eitehr.
But sometimes hwen really bad things like this happen.
Its like my brain just shuts that part down. Idk why.
And I just feel really mellow and kind of sad. Even though I shoulld be horrified.
@kathleen
They will
They always ignore the actual reason (misogyny, male entitlement) blame mentally ill people, or in this case, autistic* people, and continue the cycle. The US sucks.
*Idk how many autistic people ID as mentally ill, so I put it as either/ or
@weirdwoodtreehugger
FUck. IDk. what country is that? IS it US again?
I hate people who act like this is just because of mental illness. It usually makes me mad, but today I can’t even get up the emotional energy to be mad. They don’t actually help stop shootings. THey just hide the real reason (male entitlement) and keep making mental illness more and more stigmized.
@leftwingfox
You’re very wrong there. I wish I remember the article. Someone did shoot up a jewish center, and there were people acting like it didn’t have anything to do with antiseministm.
I don’t know how much of mainstream media said, so maybe less people ignore the reason, but I know for sure people were trying to act like it wasn’t a anti semitism thing.
I just…idk.
@linds
So that was the shooting I was thinking of.
Yeah. We shouldn’t be doing that. Because the ‘if it happened to X they would acknowledge the hate’ is usually not true.
Sorry my tone is off today. I can’t get anything working right now. I just feel empty.
Part of me just cannot understand how this KEEPs happening.
hellkell – can I join you and LBT on that? I want some ice cream.
I’m beginning to take seriously the proposition that the MRA and PUA hardliners have blood on their hands, at least by proxy. A few years ago I used to shrug and laugh at this stuff. It seemed laughable as well as mockable. Why not laugh at it? This kid’s tirade might almost been funny if it hadn’t been backed up by action. If he’d texted it in long blocks to some girl who had given him the brush-off, slowly enough that he had time to decompress (while giving the girl time to alert her roommates or maybe her dorm counselor, who in turn might have had time to alert his dorm counselor, etc.) — if the thing had been handled just right it would almost have amounted to an edgy sitcom plot. (The last scene would have featured Our Hero’s introduction to the Randroid Clique on his floor. See, the Randroids understand how he feels, but they think his passion is misplaced. In that scene I have in my head the Randroid Leader would advise him that he’s been making waaaaaaaayy too much fuss about women and that he ought to learn to care about money instead. “That is the wave of the future,my friend,” says the Randroid Leader, as the scene fades out.)
If young men were taught as a matter of course that their personal problems were their
personal business and nobody else’s, as they used to be*, this kid’s resentment might not have assumed such stupendous proportions in his own mind. But he wasn’t taught that; he was taught, on the contrary, that his problems were the result of a conspiracy to turn him into a eunuch, a conspiracy all the pretty girls around him were in on (“sluts — tease men”) and which all the nonpretty girls around him were in on (“dogs — hate men”) and which all the young men capable of nonsexual gallantry toward women were in on (“white knights”) and which all the women capable of nonsexual politeness toward men also were in on (“they just don’t wanna recognize I’m a guy“) and which those of his fellow-misogynists who were more successful with girls than he was (“obnoxious bastards”) either were in on or were taking advantage of.
And I’m almost half-a-tick with him on the last point. I’ve called him a misogynist, and I’m not using that as a swear word. He enunciates a theory clearly and he’s fairly detailed and consistent about his exposition of it. He seems to be well up on a style of rhetoric which he wasn’t born knowing how to employ. Somebody taught that style of rhetoric to him. Somebody assured him, over and over again, that a suitably offended man can act as an understudy to God. It doesn’t matter to what extent the people who taught this to him were earnest about their own claims, or to what extent they may have been goofing off for a lark, or to what extent they may have regarded themselves as performance artists, or to what extent they were playing him for a sucker. Whatever the truth of all those things may have been, they still did it, they still stuffed him full of their flatulent phrases and then stuck a firecracker in between his teeth and nagged him into lighting the fuse. The responsibility for his own deeds lies with him, of course, but events like this one don’t happen in a vacuum. They don’t happen in a vacuum because they can’t; it’s a physical impossibility. Consider this young man’s immolation in itself, apart from the other murders. In another world he would’ve just drunk-dialed some girl who’d caught his eye but whom he knew didn’t want to hear from him and would have given her enough of an earful that she would have gone running for the bathtub and would have stayed there for an hour. And that’s bad enough, but that would have been all, that would have been it; there would have been no other shoe to drop. So, what got him to turn what should have been farce into tragedy? What got him to ready the stake for himself and collect and pile up the kindling and ladle out the lighter fluid and light the match? Was it that girls wear their skirts too short? Was it that he hadn’t gotten laid yet at the ripe age of twenty-two? Honestly? But he was hassled, he was right about that. He was egged on. Who did the egging?
*(Not that I want to go back to everything about those days, at all. But there were things about them which were not completely bad.)
i’m not reading/watching the main post; i don’t have enough mental energy to deal with it. Maybe later. atm i’m just reading comments.
sometimes i get really scared. idk why. it seems like lots of these things happen in colleges (i’m in college). aaaggg…
@rowanmcintyre
mmhmm people will do anything to excuse male violence against women and act like there’s not systems backing it up.
@shaenon
ugh i’ve already seen too many people react to this with “not all men” or shit like that. they care that their feelings are getting hurt (aka misandry) but not that actual people died. it’s sick.
cloudiah
Extra important here b/c people are already leaping to blame mental illness (not on this site thank god, but i’ve seen it happen in the other internet places i frequent.)
Linds
yh i always hate the “people would treat this bigotry worse” like it’s a contest, or like to say that one marginalized group has it worse than another. :// it’s like, kind of disrespectful to people from the one you’re using just as a comparison.
Have you seen they’ve allegedly removed 3 more bodies from the gunman’s apartment building?
http://www.keyt.com/news/alleged-gunmans-apartment-now-a-crime-scene/26157468
And the article references his “100 page manifesto”.
I don’t have the words for how grievous this all is.
Oh no. It looks like there might be 3 more victims found in his apartment.
http://gawker.com/this-afternoon-at-least-one-body-was-removed-from-the-1581174371/all
Reblogged this on The Monster's Ink and commented:
This post includes the full transcript of Rodger’s last video.
Ninja’d
The killer has more videos up. They all say roughly the same thing – “I have looks, I have money, I have a BMW, why don’t I have a girlfriend. It’s not fair.”
In other words – “All this stuff was handed to me, why can’t I have the one thing that takes actual effort on my part? It’s not fair.”
He is also obsessed with long blond hair, a sort of status symbol to go with his beamer. In his own words he wants to be “loved and adored.” He never mentions any other attribute in a woman besides her looks and availability for sex. Unless he is seething that she is with someone else.
it’s creepy as fuck. Mostly because I’ve met supremely entitled people before. Some of them grow out of it but most of them are angry or baffled by the idea that there are some situations they will need to work out on their own. Some of these are peripherally in my life. The idea that I know people who would empathize with the killer and be unable to humanize the victims just freaks me out.
Alice Sanguinaria: Come on over. I just got some of that Ben & Jerry’s Core ice cream, salted caramel flavor. You could probably get me to eat the most disgusting stuff in the world if you put some salted caramel on it.
3 corpses found in his apartment and a 100 page manifesto. I’m ging to read a book and try to sleep now. It’s bothering me. It’s just so sick.
Jesus fucking christ, sounds like he took out three more people. Going to cry.
Apparentlly not content with being a supremely entitled, egocentrist, misogynist prick, the guy apparently also was a raging racist:
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2014/05/24/elliot-rodger-isla-vista-shooting-suspect-posted-racist-messages-on-misogynistic-website/
Also this lovely post of his from PUAhate:
http://i.imgur.com/b5LyX2I.jpg
And a large (most likely rambling) manifesto? I feel very uncomfortably reminded of Breivik…
hellkell – Yay. :3 Ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s is so good.
Ugh, this is just awful. Here, have some brain bleach:
http://www.pleated-jeans.com/2014/05/23/22-animals-that-really-need-a-hug-right-now/