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.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
“Where were they radicalized?”
My question would bump hard against the comments policy.
The “another excuse to hate us!” pity-party is probably already in full swing too…
These online gathering places for young men aren’t support groups, they’re radicalization centers for domestic terrorism.
Every fucking time there’s a mass shooting incident, there’s a history of misogyny. Every time. Police and prosecutors need to take sex crimes and partner violence seriously. Maybe then these guys wouldn’t escalate to this.
And big shock that he was a Nazi.
White women who vote Republican? Wake up. You aren’t going to get racism without misogyny. There can be no white ethnostate that isn’t also extremely patriarchal. You’re signing your own rights and your own lives away when you provide cover for racist sexist white men.
Not that any Republican women are likely to read this, but I just had to say it.
OT, with my apologies, but with so much bad news … I just had to pass on this bit of good news.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/03/liverpool-runs-far-right-marchers-out-of-town
Ugh, I bet he loves Griffith unironically…
Hey guys, I’m still alive. Just been lurking for a while
‘To hell’ with all of these douchebros. I’m so done with this bullshit.
Also, eff that guy for using Griffith as an avatar – I mean the man’s literally an evil demon but he’s an interesting character. Guys who call themselves incels have as much depth as a coat of paint.
As Barloq and Sniper Kitty mentioned, his avatar pic is of Griffith, a character from the anime/manga series Berserk.
CONTENT NOTE: discussion of graphic depiction of rape and extreme violence, as well as MAJOR SPOILERS
Somewhat like a cult leader, Griffith has dozens of people who are deeply devoted to him, but is not similarly devoted to them. He sacrifices them all–allowing them to be ripped apart and devoured by demons–so he can become a demi-god. He then rapes Casca, his 2nd-in-command who used to love him, in front of the man she now loves.
He’s…a really evil character.
What will it take for people to take this more seriously?
I know that’s kind of a naive question, but this type of atrocity is happening more and more frequently, and the causes are so obvious that it’s insulting to ignore them. I keep thinking, “eventually, people will have to do or say something about this,” but it never happens. We just shrug, or worse, blame it on the victims.
I’m not sure what the endgame is here. Is it going to take an actual “omega uprising” to get people to admit there’s a problem? Or is it just going to continue this way until we run out of women to kill?
It will be taken seriously the second that a possible “acceptable” thing to blame can be identified. Not things that are considered normal, these being: whiteness, christian-ness, misogyny, etc.
The acceptable things to blame are things that are already being marginalized (and therefore pose no threat to the people in power). So: mental illness, non-whiteness, Islam, etc.
I honestly believe that the system as it is now will never consider misogyny to be a legitimate threat to be treated as such. I wish I could believe otherwise, but I can’t.
My first thought when I heard about the shooting was, “This was another George Sodini, wasn’t it?”
[quote]“We compared him to Ted Bundy back then,” Brown said. “It was the way he lurked and followed girls.”[/quote]
I’ve been saying it the whole time.
The whollllle time. Still waiting for one of them to be a legit, god honest serial killer. I’m sure one is, just I mean caught. Because ewwwww.
What have I been saying this entire time? The. Entire. Time.
I’m sure there’s a legit serial killer or two in that community as well.
Everyone should have to sign a release form upon reaching the age of majority that says “I fully understand that bosses tell you what to do because it’s literally their job, that not everyone wants to sleep with me, that time moves forward only (at least in this universe), and that as a general rule, life is hard and it’s no one else’s job to manage it for me.”
Edit: I think we should start a new tradition based on “purity balls,” but instead of young women it would be all genders, and instead of pledging purity it would be pledging to take responsibility for your own shit and not kill people.
@Kate:
Mine too. Probably because both of these ghastly shitfuckers picked a place where women go to improve themselves physically, and that just touched a raw nerve in them somehow. Funny how it’s always the ones who make basic personal hygiene and the simplest social norms out to be huge impositions, and blow them up into oppression of the “superior” white cishet males…and yet, simultaneously, expect all the young hotties to just flop at their feet like docked fish, gasping “Take me, my liege!”
Perspective: If they had it, they wouldn’t be incels, right-wing freak-scenes, or mass shooters.
I recently read an article with the hypothesis that people who would have been serial killers a few decades ago, have switched to committing mass shootings instead.
The site’s fact-checking is not always all that, but it’s an interesting idea and links to stats etc. are provided.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-weird-serial-killer-trends-that-say-lot-about-society/
Give it a week, some frothing-at-the-mouth misogynist will blame this mass murder on women being allowed to have free will.
While I get the point with the serial killer comparison, Ted Bundy is an odd choice, since one of the best known facts about him was that he was charming. He put people at ease (that’s how he got so many to come in his car, after all). He was the kind of guy that knows just how to manipulate others, the kind where after all his crimes were known people who knew him went “what, him, really?”.
This Beierle guy doesn’t sound anything like that. Just like an entitled angry asshole.
@Bina
Paging Mr Valizadeh…
There’s a lot of #notallmrassholes going on in twitter land, but they know as well as we do that this sort of thing is fucking endemic in the manosphere, and whilst they will probably continue getting away with it under the current government this state of affairs is unlikely to last forever.
As you can see from my screen name, I am not American but I have been visiting this site for some time. More often since the Trump election. I think it is very topical to the current cultural and political climate and covers areas that mainstream media wasn’t aware of until recently.
It is obvious that a lot of the events discussed here are US-focused and I assume most commentators are from the US. I have a question regarding the whole incel phenomenon and it turning violent recently that someone here might be able to answer.
The existence of men, usually young, who are awkward and find difficulty in forming relationships with women, even being celibate for long amount of time, is a universal and they exist in all cultures and countries. There are cultures around the world that are far more repressive to interactions between men and women and put all kinds of behavior codes on them. So, why are these violent incidents seem to happen so frequently in the US, which is also the main source of most of the incel related material? Maybe someone here who has lived for some time outside the US and has experience of a different culture is able to provide some insight.
Is it a cultural thing? Is it the way American men are raised, how they are socialised at school? I have never been to the US so my main ideas of life there come from movies and TV, which I am sure are far from what every day life is for the average young person in the country.
However, I do come from a Mediterannean culture that is known to be more macho and men here tend to be very forward when it comes to their interactions with women. There’s a lot of flirting and some distateful cat calling, but no one is getting angry if they get a rejection, it is considered part of the process and you are expecting to fail 80% of the time. You just laugh it out with your mates and go for a beer. Also women here are very bad-ass, if you cross the line you’ll know immediately and might even be physically hurt. Like ‘kick in the balls’ kind of hurt. Plus we don’t have any guns around, they are almost banned outside police, army and people who hunt.
Happy to get people’s views and apologies for the long message. Please keep up the good work.
A week? I’d be totally unsurprised to find some of them already doing it.
@opposablethumbs
Ninja’d! So happy that the hometown of the Beatles (I loved them when I was nine and I still do, even though, yeah, they’re problematic) stood up to the fascists!
Mammotheers, there’s a (brief) video!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/03/liverpool-runs-far-right-marchers-out-of-town
The bottom line is that if they’ve posted something philosophically in sync with the “manifestos” of those who actually “go full ER” (ugh), they absolutely are part of the problem. Yes, they may never act out their fantasies themselves, but the fact that they’ve chosen not to keep them to themselves and share them with God knows who means that they’re contributors and possibly even facilitators. Whether they like it or not.
As has been posted here time and time again, it’s perfectly possible to stand up for legitimate concerns about important issues like male victims of domestic abuse and disproportionate male suicide rates without rage-dumping on women in the process. I know men who are technically MGTOW in terms of their actions – namely, consciously cutting women out of their lives for whatever reason – who’d be horrified at the kind of stuff that’s been spewed on their behalf, because they actually went their own way: they didn’t hang around on the margins ranting and raving about what evil bitches women are.
And indeed vice versa: one of my wife’s closest friends is a woman who after her second painful marriage break-up (the culmination of a long string of wildly unsuitable partners) entirely consciously decided to cut men out of her life to the extent that I’m most likely the only one she has regular conversations with outside work or retail situations (she has no close male relatives) – but there’s never the tiniest hint of tension between us or any suggestion that she secretly thinks that I’m scum, and I’d be pretty astonished if she thought that privately. Because most people are perfectly capable of separating their feelings about individuals with what they feel about the wider community.