The man suspected of murdering three Baton Rouge police officers in what’s being called an “ambush” shooting earlier today has been identified as a 29-year-old ex-Marine named Gavin Long.
On the internet, Long was better known as Cosmo Setepenra, a self-described “freedom strategist, mental game coach, nutritionist, author and spiritual advisor” who expressed his peculiar worldview at length in a number of YouTube videos, in blog posts and in several self-published books with titles like “The Cosmo Way: A W(H)olistic Guide for the Total Transformation of Melanated People Vol.2 The Ascension (Volume 2).”
“Cosmo,” who was killed by police in the shootout this morning, seems to have dabbled in an assortment of ideologies, many of them fringe. In a video posted earlier this month that looks in hindsight like an announcement of today’s shooting rampage, he declared himself both a former Christian and a former Nation of Islam member. Police say he carried a membership card for a black “sovereign citizen” organization. He was a regular poster on conspiracy websites and a member of a group that claimed to fight against the imaginary evil of “gangstalking,” as well as “Remote Brain experimentation, Remote Neural Monitoring of an entire Humans Body” and “Patented Voice-to-(Human)-Skull (the forceful 24/7 of projected noise to a citizen’s head).”
While it will take some time to untangle his paranoid, often delusional, worldview, a few things are pretty clear. He had a deep animus towards police, and was angered by recent police shootings of unarmed black men. In a Tweet, he hailed Dallas police shooter Micah Johnson as “one of us!” and declared that “my religion is justice.”
He was also a raging misogynist, a self-proclaimed “alpha male” and “alpha preneur” who believed that men need to keep women “in check.”
In a blog post/podcast in June, he declared:
The Man is the leader, he has to take responsibility for keeping his woman in check at all times. Dont get a woman if you cant keep her in check. …
Alpha Males Dont Leave A Bitch Un-Checked!
He then listed the names of a number of celebrity athletes who, in his mind, illustrated the dangers of allowing “bitches” to remain “un-checked.”
Ray Rice, Terrel Owens, Ben Rothlesburger, Ray McDonald, Lamar Odom, etc etc etc They let their woman get them into some shit and it cost them Millions. Well Its because they didnt have their woman in check.
Ray Rice, as you probably recall, was caught on a surveillance camera knocking out his fiancee with a blow to the head. Ben Rothlesburger has been accused more than once of sexual assault. Ray McDonald has been charged with “rape by intoxication … domestic violence, felony false imprisonment, child endangerment, and violating a court order.”
But in Cosmo’s mind, the real crime of these men was insufficient bitch-checking.
Yea Ray Rice woman swung on him first, but my thing is that…Do you think that’s the first time that she did that? Im sure she displayed signs of un-Checkability before. Because if a bitch is swinging on you, then you know she been out of line before. Violence against a Man is a clear sign that you simping. There is no worst violation than to be assaulted by your woman.
In another blog post, Cosmo urged men to “be territorial” with “their” women. “Sometimes you might need to invade her independence,” he explained.
Why bring any of this up? Gavin Long/Cosmo Setepenra didn’t target women; he targeted cops, and the three cops he shot dead were men, two white and one black.
I bring it up because there are deep links between traditional “macho” masculinity and violence. But it isn’t just the most macho men who turn to violence to “check their women” or assert their dominance over other men. Men who are anxious about their masculinity are also more likely to resort to violence. As Salem State University professor Felix Amato notes in a recent study, “men’s fear of femininity” can lead to an assortment of “maladaptive and restrictive behaviors” including violence.
The sort of hypermasculinity that “Cosmo” preached on his blog — in which even the brutal woman-abuser Ray Rice is deemed insufficiently macho — looks a lot like a fantasy dreamed up by someone deeply anxious about their own masculinity. That also seems to describe the hypermacho “Red Pill” lifestyle preached daily on the Red Pill subreddit and on sites like Roosh V’s Return of Kings.
In many cases, the victims of this anxious hypermasculinity are women and children. Indeed, murder-suicides — in which a man guns down his girlfriend or wife or ex-wife and sometimes her children before killing himself — are so common they rarely make it beyond the local news, though the body count from such crimes (to be crass about it) is far higher than the body count from domestic terrorism.
Several weeks ago, a Las Vegas man murdered his wife, chasing her down and shooting her in the parking lot of a Walgreens; he returned to their apartment, where he shot and killed their three children and then himself. None of the networks cut away from their programming to go live to the scene of the crime. Trump didn’t Tweet about it; Obama didn’t make a statement. Outside of a handful of stories (on Raw Story, the Inquisitr and the Daily Mail), the only coverage this horrendous crime got was in the Las Vegas media.
Terrorism makes the headlines. But domestic violence, much of it driven by macho entitlement and/or anxious masculinity, causes more deaths and more damage to our society. If we want to fight violence, we need to start talking about this.
Has there ever been a mass shooter that didn’t have manosphere type views? At this point, I’d be surprised if a mass murderer wasn’t a raging misogynist.
Fuck toxic masculinity. That is all.
(Or at least, all I have to say tonight. I am too tired to type.)
My younger son, who I could have sworn barely knew about everything going on, said, “I think this is the Summer of Impending Doom.”
He’s /eight/.
That’s depressingly appropriate.
The fact that raging hypermasculinity and misogyny related acts of violence is not put up to media or considered a major proprietor of violence in the US is a travesty.
And a major source of worry. Nobody wants to talk about the damn elephant in the room, but it’s there. And its turds are stinking up everything.
Oh look, a mass shooter who was a misogynist. Let’s add him to the list, which includes nearly all of the mass shooters.
I suppose that Ray Caruth would have met the ‘macho macho man’ standards of this asshole? Caruth is rotting in jail for scheming and arranging to have his pregnant girlfriend killed to avoid his responsibilities (instead of wearing a condom in the first place) and the son she gave birth to before she died was left profoundly disabled – personally I think he should be killed, brought back to life and then killed again as punishment, but I’m in a dark mood tonight. But at least he’s locked up and all that football money he had and didn’t want to share (he wasn’t doing right by his first baby either, and threatened subsequent women he dated and got pregnant so they would get an abortion…couldn’t wear a condom or have a vasectomy though…) is now paying for the care needed by his son for the rest of his life thanks to what happened.
Don’t get a woman if you can’t keep her in check? “Sometimes you might need to invade her independence”?? Dude, NO. No no nope nuh uh and NO. Any guy who feels a need to keep a woman ‘in check’ should definitely not be trying to date or seeking a relationship with a woman. I suggest going your own way if you have that desire, it’s going to be the best thing for everyone.
The worst part, well more worse, is the idea of keeping someone in check, like a pet or a steam boiler. It’s insinuating that they’re essentially property that you maintain for your image and wants.
@msexceptiontotherule
To any person who ends up saying that divorced women get too much cash from divorces can kiss my ass. Yeah, so much cash, apparently raising a child is so cheap. And if anyone is going to say abuse is cheap, then why the fuck didn’t YOU decide to keep the kid/leave him/her for adoption? I can’t really see your “morals being lost” in courts, when you have as much equal right to the kid. But I guess if you didn’t want to deal with it, maybe you should consider wearing a condom some time.
Those are some seriously fringe element belief systems. I’m black and I didn’t even know there were black people who believed any of the stuff this man espoused, although I’m well aware there’s a Reddit type element in the black community. (I had never heard of flat-earthers either. Didn’t know it was even still a thing.)
This is one of the dangers of having a wealth of information at ones fingertips via the Internet, but being completely incapable of discerning fact from drivel, and a distrust of of mainstream education. You end up with a perfect storm of self-educated, thoroughly ignorant, nincompoops. In his case, he couldn’t even decide what amount of drivel to settle on top of, and was just all over the place. I’m surprised he wasn’t also a Hotep.
Yeah, there is a good amount of misogyny in the black community but usually not very organized with meetings, logos, and sh%t. The most organized group of misogynists are Hoteps who try to disguise their vileness towards black women as trying to be helpful to women (which is what makes it so vile and insidious. Queen my a$$!)
This.
Also, I’m feeling tired, and that’s got nothing to do with my actual lack of sleep and hangover. This climate of violence has pretty much always been there, but with the last few days I’m starting to wonder if it’s ever gonna stop escalating.
@Her Grace Phryne
There’s a saying in French that goes, roughly translated, “truth comes from the mouths of children”.
Regarding Cosmo, from what can be read here it seems he was the one needing to be kept in check. Guy’s got the whole recipe : conspiracy theories, self-help books (bonus points for ridiculous titles featuring the words “the ascension”), sovereign citizen, aaaand of course the raging misogyny, because no such moron is complete without the raging misogyny.
But hey, on the bright side, I chuckled at “signs of un-checkability”. Small things…
It’s worth noting that Micah Johnson had his ‘issues’ with women, too. It’s also worth noting that his Wikipedia entry seems to downplay what he did, implying that the punishment was too heavy-handed and ‘shaming’ – maybe even ‘triggering’.
Why can’t we just believe the woman? She turned out to be right after all.
@Ikeke – ‘treat her like a Queen’ – when I was at university, the ‘promise keepers’ came to town and hired out the football stadium. I couldn’t quite understand why my colleagues were so upset about ‘treat her like a Queen’ (I was young and naive). They explained and I was like:
“Ooooh, see when they said queen, I was thinking Elizabeth I.”
@Ikeke: “Hoteps”? Do I even want to know?
Also, some brain bleach: a Bengal cat rescued from a unethical backyard breeder and her two adorable kittens.
@Nequam
Yeah, that is some much needed sweetness in this dumpster fire of a month.
Though me personally I couldn’t be happier. Just got my paycheck, and I’m on my second week of antidepressants. The best part of the meds so far, aside from feeling thirstier, which is no problem as I guzzle down water daily, it didn’t affect negatively my ability to work. In fact I’d say it helped me greatly with to counter my inability to remember things short term. Here’s to hoping it stays that way.
I even was able to talk to my sister about my condition, and she was kind of surprised that my parents would be accepting of my mental condition or even bother to address it. I pretty much thought it was just them being sick of me and my unmedicated, well, not so great quirks and personality. Apparently behind the scenes my parents often made light of mental disorders. To what extant I don’t know, and I don’t feel like I want to know. I’m just glad she respects my privacy enough to not pry into my affairs too much.
I cannot thank you all enough for being there when I really needed a sympathetic voice. Every day I actually feel happy, a feeling I often cherished since I couldn’t feel happy all that often, and those feelings of happiness go by way too quick. Now I can even keep at and do the things I wish to do. It’s just so gratifying, and damn it I shouldn’t be tearing up by mere typing. I just regret that it took this long to figure out what was wrong with me.
The runup to this event was long, and fuck everyone involved in it.
Fuck Long for thinking that he, barely a child, could be a gatekeeper and coach for others’ masculinity. Fuck him for buying into this bullshit.
Fuck every grown adult out there who thought that feeding this delusion was a good way to control Long and sell him things. Fuck them for looking at him and not seeing a human being, just a marketing demographic which responds well to this sort of bullshit. Fuck them for vying with one another to see who could do it the most successfully, regardless of how much this race flooded the world with hateful, hurtful, harmful messages about what masculinity is.
Fuck everyone who perpetuates the lie that masculinity is something that can be given, taken or gatekept. Fuck every organisation and every industry which benefits from this: sports, music, the military, video games and many more. Fuck every single person who works in any of those industries. Fuck everyone who makes a living from selling people a heroic power-fantasy narrative of their own lives.
Fuck everyone who’s ever suggested, by word or thought or deed, that the capacity to control other people is the mark of a man. Fuck everyone who believes, even if they haven’t dared verbalise it, that a lack of control of others means that one is also lacking in other traditionally masculine aspects of oneself.
Fuck everyone who perpetuates the hateful paradigm in which violence is the truest test of a man. Fuck everyone who’s ever believed in “sheepdogs”, who praises “heroes”, who worships “guardians.” Fuck everyone who’s ever dared assert that it is admirable to fight for the group into which one was born. Fuck everyone who uses the word “warrior” or “protector.”
* * *
Fuck the police.
Fuck every asshole who feels that they need to assert their own masculinity by joining the police, by carrying a gun and wearing a uniform and demanding obedience. Fuck everyone who puts on that uniform every day.
Fuck everyone who tells their sons that this is an admirable path in life. Fuck everyone who suggests that one should respect or admire the police more than they respect and admire any other human being who works in infrastructure. Fuck any person whose knee-jerk reaction is to support that badge, and fuck any person who enjoys that support and so seeks out the badge because of it.
Fuck the person who suggested to three young men that the best thing to do, in an America grappling to come to terms with the violence of uniformed white men against non-uniformed black men, is to put on a uniform and a gun and then parade oneself in front of black men as a act of provocation and dominance. Fuck the idiots who chose to obey this order, whether they had misgivings or not.
Fuck every policeman who looks at another human being and thinks of them only as a cardboard cutout that needs to be cowed and intimidated into obedience. Fuck every policeman who lies awake at night worrying what will happen if those people stop being cardboard cutouts and stop being intimidated into obedience.
Fuck everyone who benefits from the police forcing those people into obedience. Fuck every landlord, every investor, every shopkeeper who wants them to be obedient in their poverty. Fuck everyone who expects others to be quiet in circumstances where they themselves would not.
* * *
Fuck everyone involved in having four young men come together and kill one another. This didn’t happen by accident. You did this. Their blood is on your hands.
Fuck everyone who sees this and howls for vengeance on behalf of the police. Fuck everyone who sees this and howls for vengeance on Long’s behalf. The blood of the next bunch of young men who do this to one another is on your hands, regardless of which side you support, regardless of which side does the shooting next time.
Fuck everyone who thinks of this as the police having an image problem, or needing more PR, or needing better sensitivity training. Fuck everyone who looks at this and demands that the black community take better care of its young men. This is bigger than that. This is the end of a very long runup, in which those four young men were only enacting a script written for them by many thousands of pens over many centuries.
Fuck everyone who looks at this tragedy and admires Long, for any reason. Fuck anyone who calls him a martyr, or calls for his death to be avenged. Fuck everyone who sees him as a symbol rather than what he was: a scared child hiding behind the facade of a parody of masculinity. Fuck everyone who only saw and only responded to that facade, rather than to the person behind it.
Fuck everyone who thinks that the right thing to do was to send another group of police to kill Long. Fuck everyone who made him believe that death was a better and more heroic action than surrender. Fuck everyone who taught him, through movies and video games and other media, that it is better to die violently than to live in a cage. Fuck the legal system which imposed that dichotomy upon Long, rather than truly encouraging him to live a better and wiser life in future.
Fuck everyone who confused neglecting our sons with giving them freedom. Fuck everyone who confused being neglected with being able to do as they will. Fuck everyone who earns their daily bread via a system which perpetuates this.
The runup to this event was long, and if you took part in it, fuck you.
* * *
Fuck everyone who read this rant and admired me because I am forceful and dominant and swear a lot, and who wants to emulate me. You’re part of the problem. Fuck anyone who looks at me and thinks, “if only you were the gatekeeper of masculinity, EJ, the world would be better.” You are also part of the problem.
Fuck me for feeling, in my heart of hearts, that being such a gatekeeper would be pretty fuckin’ cool. I’m part of the problem too.
Fuck toxic masculinity.
@Her Grace Phyne
It really has been a horrific summer hasn’t it? I almost want the spend the rest of it permanently looking through my fingers for the next time something awful is going to pop up on the news. 2016 has been a year marked by death, for sure.
@lkeke35
I have a feeling he was a Hotep.
His Twitter bio notes: “▲☥Ethiopian Bloodline☥▲”
Also this post: https://twitter.com/ConvosWithCosmo/status/745243232599105537
(But I am white and could be misinterpreting.)
Some pretty good analysis in this point. After listening to some of his red pill podcast which you linked it seemed his “masculinity” was a shell for a certain sense of helplessness he felt. So the toxicity of such social postures seems to expand inward as well as outward.
@Ooglyboggles
That’s wonderful that you’re feeling happy now!
Your life has taken quite a turn for the better. 🙂
A domestic violence counselor once explained to me that batterers try to control others because they don’t know how to control themselves.
Gavin Long didn’t know how to control himself or his life.
So he decided to gain control over others and their lives by killing them.
This same DV counselor told me that the basic problem of all batterers is that they don’t know how to get along with people.
Makes sense, all of it.
There were a number of high profile domestic murders here in Australia last year. Fortunately our politicians decided to make anti-domestic violence a priority in response to that. Rather than ignore it.
I’m not sure what the impact of that was. Hopefully it’s improved things.
Nothing to add, vis a vis domestic violence. You got it, Dave
Re: 2016 malaise
2016 is not a bad year. It’s definitely not the worst year. Or maybe it is, I don’t know. Nobody does. We just decided it is, cos Bowie and Pulse. Nobody gave a shit when terrible things were happening literally everywhere else. Last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, since forever. Now it’s closer to home (Europeans, Americans, Canadians, us), we decide it matters. We pretend like we care about ISIS in Aleppo or Baghdad, but we really don’t until it’s Paris or Riverside. How many people didn’t care about police-community relations until cops started being the ones getting shot? I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore…
@EJ
Well, I’m safe then *heavy eyed, ‘whatever, man’ emoticon*
PS. ^Turns out I’m in a fuckin mood. I’m not deleting any of it tho^
@Oogly
Good news! Crying is good for you. Let’s you know you still can. Glad it’s looking up for you ?
2016 is turning out to be a truly, truly awful year. Every week – hell, every few days – there’s news of another shooting, another attack, another few dead people.
It FEELS like we’re headed for some kind of all-encompassing doom, like Trump is gonna be elected president and the moment he ascends that proverbial throne, the heavens will open up and a bolt of lightening will fry his totally-not-fake hair and all of humanity along with it.
Though Axecalibur is probably right – it seems that way because it’s happening closer to us now, maybe even to people we know. Horrific things happen every year, the news just don’t bother covering it when it doesn’t directly affect us.
*sigh* Regardless, what a shitty state of things.
I sometimes think finding out just what some people think of horrible events doesn’t help. I remember seeing a graph that showed how there was actually *more* terrorist casualties in the 1970s and ’80s, primarily in the UK– which led me to infer that it was due to The Troubles.
Now just imagine if we had social media when THAT was going down… or better yet, don’t.
@ nequam
The 70s/80s certainly felt more apocalyptic. Bombings were constant background noise; but they felt irrelevant compared to the fact that we all thought we’d be annihilated by nuclear holocaust within a year or so anyway. There are still horrible things going on in the world, as this thread demonstrates, but it’s not an existential threat anymore.
It’s weird to think that there was a total taboo on showing any depiction of nuclear war. You had to go to special screenings just to see “The War Game”. There was a book examining how a Third World War might come about and it was a major thing; now that’s the stuff of airport thrillers. It would be interesting to see now whether “The Day After” or “Threads” would have any impact on people in a post “Walking Dead” mediascape.