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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Poverty, oppression, unjust wars, dog-eat-dog capitalism, wealthy politicians looting the treasury, looming climate catastrophe, unarmed black people being gunned down by cops: no one bats an eye.
Women won’t give you sex: pick up an AR-15 and start firing at the world.
America, in a nutshell.
New York Times had an article about this and related problems in America yesterday.
U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See The Threat of White Nationalism. Now They Don’t Know How To Stop It.
Great article with one gaping hole. They talk a lot about the racial violence of these men, but, surprise surprise, next to nothing about the misogyny. All the fascists who have a biography of sorts in the article have a history of violence against women, but it’s just tossed in as a point-of-interest instead of being, you know, fucking indicative.
Still worth reading. Describes police standing by and watching during alt-right violence, even helping out, treating them as victims, etc, and tries to explain it as bewilderment. Doesn’t mention that the fascists have spent the past decade or more infiltrating the police. It does do an okay job of talking about how the ahem current American government has dismantled all safeguards against domestic terrorism, though.
Offers another reason why even well-meaning police don’t pursue this stuff (beyond the Thin Blue Line of course). They have no mechanism to do it.
@ Scildfreja The cops (and our secret service) have been tasked with keeping tabs on the alt – Reich over here. Given their ineptitude at monitoring people who then went on to commit terrorist offences, and ham – fistedly keeping tabs on the other end of the political spectrum (undercover officers entering disastrous personal relationships with activists for example) I’m expecting the whole thing to blow up in their faces with a huge scandal sooner or later.
The CBC article last night was one of the ‘unknown motive’ headlines/titles. I had to roll my eyes, the motive was pretty bloody obvious to me.
Last night, I had a weird dream. Armageddon had struck, and the apocalypse, long longed-for by many of these MRA/Incel types was here.
Within one day, every single apple in America had disappeared. I guess that’s the first thing you eat in an apocalypse? However, we did have lots and lots and lots of Wonderbread (which I found strangely hilarious, and also made me totally not want to eat Wonderbread, because, what’s in that stuff?!).
Fishes were walking out of their aquariums and biting people. Any body of water had to have at least two gunships assigned to it.
My house was forcibly taken over by a cosmetology school. When I said, “Hey! This is MY home, and MY bed, and MY cupboard,” the person in charge agreed that I could keep MY bed and MY cupboard, but the rest of the house was theirs, assigned by the new government. Nobody knew who was actually in charge of the new government, but stuff was actually well-organized and getting done, so we didn’t question it too much. We were alive, the government was keeping the zombies at bay, and the Wonderbread was being equally apportioned in plenty among all the surviving humans.
When it became clear that I was not one for the new navy or for the cosmetology school, I was assigned to the breeding program. After all, with the majority of the human population wiped out, we needed to repopulate quickly, and women of breeding age were assigned (except, for some reason, the members of the new navy, and the cosmetology students?!) to the breeding program.
I was shown to my shelter, where I was assigned a bed along with five other women. Apparently, after having won my argument about keeping my own bed and my own cupboard, I decided to give it up, anyway, because the cosmetology students were way too loud and kept getting make-up all over my clean sheets, and so I was quite happy to have a twin-size bed in a small room with five other women (each with her own twin-size bed), because they were quiet and tidy. Aaaah. And unlike many of the survivors, I had a bed!
The rules were explained to me: Men would visit our compound during the day, one day a month, and we were supposed to “do our duty” with them, in order to propagate the species. Sounds very inefficient, to me, since they didn’t even examine us, to see if we were “ripe,” like they did in Handmaid’s Tale, but the Auntie just sort of indicated we should shut up and deal with it, and make human babies to fight off the next generation of zombies.
On my first day, I was approached by a good-looking man, who subsequently opened his mouth and let it be known that he was one of THOSE guys, all while immediately pawing and groping me. I noped right out. “Help, help, Auntie, please!”
Auntie assessed the situation quickly, smiled at me, and said, “No big deal. Just try other men until you find one who clicks with you. If you don’t find one today, try again next month.” I was grateful that I didn’t have to mate with Gropey McFoulMouth, but also afraid that one of the other women in the program would have to deal with him. I looked around, ready to yell out a warning to whoever he tried next, and noticed that Gropey McFoulMouth was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, he had been kicked out of the mating compound, deemed unfit to breed.
And that, dear readers, is my story of an apocalyptic utopia! I may have been forced out of my house, and forced into a breeding program, but I was actually allowed to choose my own partner, who “clicked,” and was NOT pressured to find someone NOW, just to get it done. My duty was to try to find a partner, but I was free to say “no,” and have that “no” respected. I was still in the program, but with the knowledge that I could simply “not click” one day a month, for as long as necessary. Or, I could click with a great guy and make as many babies as I wanted. Or, have a once-a-month, long-term and childless love affair. Or something. So, it was a really inefficient breeding program, but a low-pressure dating program, where our safety was assured, and our physical needs were met, despite the apocalypse. And nobody was forced to do more than just be there: in a clean and quiet, safe and well-stocked compound, free from zombies and jerk-wads.
And then, I woke up and read this.
Well the Incel and PUA sites are now just parroting Nazi rhetoric, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Nazi sites have adopted Incel philosophy. It’s just a Venn diagram that’s one big circle.
https://dailystormer.name/yoga-shooter-was-an-incel-revolutionary/
(I’m afraid I don’t know how to do those ‘do not link’ things; but maybe one of our more techno literate mammotheers could assist)
Thanks Nequam, I thought I was the only one who always thinks of this film clip when incel men kill women. The only thing that keeps me from despair is these forums of like minded people. I still hope we are a majority.
This shit happened a few blocks from my house; I went to the vigil at Lake Ella last night
I’m beyond done with these fuckers
@Penny – Ted Bundy was only charming to a point. After that point, he was a skeevy, creepy shitball obsessed with his ex-girlfriend and making every woman he ever met that looked like her suffer. That’s not a charmer. Also, he was a republican. Hmmmmmmm.
@Tosca — Interesting, but I don’t really agree and going into it would take a very long time why. I think the downturn in Serial Killings is actually a lot more simple and just has to do with two things: better technology and less fucking lead in the air. When they stopped leading the gasoline, violent crime rates in this country plummeted, meaning people who might have had the necessary damage to loosen up the violence circuits don’t anymore. Also, they can generally catch you by two or so now, so they don’t really get to build up a huge body count anymore without being really smart about their targets. Which, when they are good, are still street kids and working women. Funny how that works. :/
@Alan Robertshaw:
I’ve used this in the past: https://donotlink.it/
So: https://donotlink.it/vlj6
I hope this works!
Targeting a yoga studio, which is so heavily associated with women, makes his motives even clearer. Especially given how incels fixate on Beckys in yoga pants who should be shagging them but throw themselves at Chads, because something-something looksmatch entitlement women don’t deserve free will.
Am I the only one feeling completely overwhelmed with the raw hatred and violence? 7 synagogues had fires set to their exteriors in Brooklyn on Friday. The Jewish community is in mourning and afraid. Every trans person in my circle in the US is afraid. We’re being targeted, but we’re fighting with protests and ballots, not AR15s. Every time in the US has been frightening and difficult for anyone not a white cishet Christian man of means, but damn, it feels more intense now than it has in a while. I can’t tell anymore if it’s getting worse, or the rot in our society is just more publicised.
Re: incels as serial killers. As someone who has actually academically studied serial killers (I’m a Criminal Justice major and I took a class on them last semester), it’s incredibly disturbing how many of the classic traits of a serial killer are displayed by incels. I wouldn’t be surprised if a psych examination of a cross section of random incels turned up more than a few sociopaths. The narcissistic tendencies and absolute lack of empathy on display in their “community” are pretty much the hallmark traits of every serial killer from Bundy to Gary Ridgway.
Most incels seem to be what we call control killers. The violence is meant as a means to have absolute control over someone – both control over their very life, and the ability to physically control their deceased bodies. A lot of the most famous serial killers were control killers. Incels remind me of Edmund Kemper in particular. The same kind of nonspecific rage at women for real or perceived rejections was basically the entirety of Kemper’s profile. Most incels would probably also be referred to as killers without self-control. Some serial killers (like Bundy) were capable of controlling themselves to a degree and at least putting up a front of a normal life. Others, like Dahmer, were basically just gigantic messes both in their public and private lives. From what I’ve seen of most incels, they seem to be basically entirely incapable of getting their lives together beyond the bare minimum necessary for survival, if even that.
Of course, I’m sure none of this is news to any of the readers or commenters here. There’s not really much of a difference between serial and mass killers in terms of psyche and motivation, the only real difference is that serial killers seem to have some modicum of self-preservation, whereas mass killers usually aren’t afraid to die.
And I just realize I’ve put way too much effort into analyzing this like it was a class assignment…
@Talonknife
Well, I’d read your doctoral thesis on the subject.
Earlier today, the wonderful Chrisiousity asked Twitter followers to report someone going by the handle @basedincel. He’s been tweeting violent threats and shit like “Elliott was a warning. Minassian was a warning.”
Hopefully mass reporting may get him bumped off Twitter, but it’s not going to stop him in general.
These guys are emboldened, and we can’t afford to assume they’re just being shitlords.
@Mish
Looked yesterday and just looked again at him now – theres a few of his tweets gone missing.
Figure he deleted some of them.
@Shadowplay, yep, the tweet that Chrisi was highlighting got deleted very quickly, but she had a screenshot. He looks like a shitposter, overall, but it makes little difference in the current climate.
Sort of off-topic – but I met with a divorce lawyer recently and I talked about how my ex has become radicalised. Now, I don’t think he’s gonna go off and kill someone, but you never know. She looked at me like I was (comment policy word deleted) and said we wouldn’t get anywhere with that.
He’s gone from a bit right-of-centre to full on Cultural Marxist, William Lind, Jordan Peterson, woman hating, Jew hating, gay-hating, racist, Trump supporting conspiracy junkie. And he has my son a good portion of the week.
And just like any other online radicalisation – e.g. Islamic extremism – most people who get into it don’t do anything dreadful – but it’s still toxic. I do know that at some point the courts will get a hold of this, but it will be too late for me.
Oddly enough the fact that my ex won’t do any homework with my son seems to be a better leverage point. And I’m faced with the quandary of whether to phone my son on days when he’s with his dad to make sure the homework gets done or whether to just record what’s happened. It was my ex’s weekend this week and upon collecting my son on Sunday my partner and I did hours of homework with him that could have been done over the weekend.
@ Godzilla Roberts:
Also, while popular culture focuses on serial killers motivated by spite or thrill-seeking, looking over true-crime sites suggests that in the past, the majority had financial motives – they were robbers or con-artists who eventually decided to take the extra step and eliminate their victims so they couldn’t testify, or to collect their life insurance as well as their savings. Murders with an obvious benefit to the killer are probably much easier to solve nowadays– not just due to modern forensics, but because it’s a lot harder to move to the next town over and change your alias every time you want to repeat your crime, and if you can’t do that, someone’s bound to notice if your spouses/business partners keep dying right after naming you sole beneficiary.
This morning there was a big discussion on the Today programme of whether misogynistic hate crime is… er… actually a thing.
The context is that a couple of police chiefs (one very high profile) have said they cannot spend police time logging or investigating misogyny. The police force is 44,000 understaffed compared with 8 years ago.
But the 75-year old white male interviewer took it to an extreme when the interviewee pointed out that the murder of a black male with a racist motive is regarded as a racially aggravated murder.
He poo-pooed the whole thing and said “White man or black man, it’s still murder”.
So instead of looking at police force levels and the rise of misogynistic crime (still roughly 5 women murdered ever 14 days in this country), not only were they arguing against misogyny as a motive in crime (and you have to wonder where they have been lately), he also seemed to be claiming racism isn’t a motive either.
I think it’s worth highlighting the gun angle as well. While I cannot be certain about the perp’s former dating life, what’s always bothered me about the “good guy with a gun/bad guy with a gun” dichotomy is that it reduces gun usage to just what is done in that fraction of a second. I have no idea what that armed individual does with the gun in his own home. Is he intimidating an intimate partner with that firearm? Given the rampant misogyny in our society and with these men in particular, I’m willing to bet a lot of murderers began with threatening a woman with a firearm. It’s something that needs to be underscored more often in the public discourse.
Considering that violence against women is probably the biggest commonality between mass shooters, it’s neglecting public safety to dismiss it.
Meanwhile, an 11 year old shot his grandmother and himself after she tried to get him to clean his room
https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/11/05/us/arizona-boy-11-grandmother-shot/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F
I’ve got to wonder if there’s a connection to all the entitled misogyny boys are exposed to on YouTube early on and the normalization of extreme misogyny at the highest level of government during the Trump era. Of course, that’s just speculation at this point.
Katamount:
I understand that in this model, the problem isn’t that whenever anyone decides to commit a crime, they already own or can get a gun. The problem is that few (read: effectively zero) people are willing and able to take the civic responsibility of preparing to being an everyday gun hero.
A little OT something to get folks to possibly laugh and facepalm at the same time. James Cameron, or someone working with him, released the next four titles in his Avatar series.
https://www.themarysue.com/avatar-sequel-titles/
I’m hoping that the second title in this list is just a badly-worded reference to gardening instead of to certain ciswomen (or men?) abilities, because otherwise… >.<
(@Katamount:
)
@Lumipuna:
This haunting quote–which has obvious relevance to more than swords–from The Dreamthief’s Daughter by Michael Moorcock comes to mind:
The sword was not forged to decorate walls or be a lifted signal of victory and dominance, but to cut
flesh, bone and sinew, and kill. She is not an extension of your manhood, nor an expression of your selfhood. She is an instrument of death. At her best, she kills in justice. If this notion is objectionable to you, my son—and I do not suggest for an instant that you apply it, simply that you acknowledge its truth—then you should put away the sword forever. Fighting with swords is a refined art, but it is an art best enjoyed when also a matter of life and death.
@Rabid Rabbit
Well, thank you, but I should probably finish my Bach Degree first. XD