By David Futrelle
Last Friday, a man walked up to a mother and her five-year-old boy who were standing outside the Rain Forest Cafe on the third floor of Minnesota’s Mall of America. Without saying a word, he grabbed the boy and threw him over the balcony.
Luckily, the boy survived the fall, and is being treated for multiple severe injuries at a local hospital. His assailant, a 24-year-old man named Emmanuel Deshawn Aranda, was captured as he tried to flee the mall, and has confessed to the crime, according to police. He’s been charged with attempted murder.
As unsettling as all this is, what makes it even more unsettling is the apparent motive for the attack. According to the Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, Aranda was driven by rage over being rejected by women.
A statement put out by the Attorney’s office says that
Aranda told police he had come to the mall on Thursday intending to kill an adult, but that it did not “work out,” according to the complaint. He returned Friday and chose the boy instead. He told police he knew what he was planning to do was wrong. Aranda said he had been coming to the mall for years, tried to speak to women there and they rejected him. That made him lash out and act aggressively.
According to the complaint itself, Aranda had been previously banned from the mall “for throwing water in a woman’s face and destroying property. He has a warrant for his arrest from Illinois for assault. …”
It’s not clear if Aranda had any connection to the incel “movement,” such as it is, or if he was inspired by previous incel acts of violence like Elliot Rodger’s 2014 killing spree or the van attack in Toronto a year ago. But he was clearly motivated by the “aggrieved entitlement” that is rampant among men in America and throughout the world today.
On the Braincels subreddit, the site’s main forum for incels, the regulars seem most concerned that they will get “slammed” for the brutal attempted murder. While no one in the desultory discussion of the case there is glorifying Aranda the way that incels have glorified Elliot Rodger, one commenter is offering him a certain degree of sympathy.
“I think not getting pussy does something to the brain,” writes BBCislaw, “it’s a legitimate issue that will be ignored in favor of mocking the afflicted.”
On Incels.co, the largest incel forum off of Reddit, they don’t seem to have discovered the story yet, though the regulars are currently celebrating the pain suffered by a 22-year-old “Stacey” who apparently fell from a clock tower while attempting to take a selfie, and voting in a poll on what they see as the proper punishment for couples who kiss in public. (At the moment, “torture/death by soldering iron” is in the lead.)
The incel ideology is pure poison.
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Maybe not an incel as in not on the hatesites, but apparently living out the fantasies many of them express.
Absolutely terrible, it just shows how easy it is to destroy life if you really don’t care.
This should be provided as evidence that catcalling is about dominance, not sex or sexual frustration. He targeted a five year old boy because he was small enough to be an easy target. He couldn’t manage for whatever reason to get an adult women, so he went for a child instead.
Because he’s black. They would if he were white and had caused lasting distress to the femoid mother of the boy, and even moreso had the child been a girl. But he looks too close to a “Tyrone” to be a hero for incels.
“Aranda said he had been coming to the mall for years, tried to speak to women there and they rejected him. That made him lash out and act aggressively.”
Uuuuuugh no, being rejected didn’t “make” you do anything. You did that thing. You made you do that. Holy shit.
No, it didn’t “make” him. Nothing made him throw a child off of a balcony. He chose to do that.
I have the distinct sentiment the incels and incel adjacents are getting worse and worse.
Angry at women, so you try to kill a child.
(long angry screed contemplated but not typed due to respect for comments policy and the rule of law)
From Pharyngula, part of a comment by commenter cartomancer, whom I often find insightful:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/04/16/i-wonder-where-he-got-those-of-ideas-of-masculine-entitlement/
Every incel needs to crawl into a hole and stay there.
I’m gonna go angrily read my chapter for archaeology before I say something that goes against the comment policy here.
These people really are abberrant, like whatever malicious entity inhabits them could set off cats like in vampire folklore
@Lumipuna, regarding the comment you quoted – is that really distinct from entitlement though?
A very public act of violence seems like an extreme way of saying “NOW YOU CAN’T IGNORE ME!” even if the behavior is irrational and the reaction is inevitably overwhelmingly negative. Not to mention that this man, like so many killers or would-be killers before him, felt entitled to (try to) end another human being’s life because he didn’t want to address his own frustration in a reasonable way.
I’m curious as to whether cartomancer has elaborated on their comment? Cases like this look like almost *nothing but* entitlement to me.
@Genjones – I often wish I could believe that, but men who think and behave like this are everywhere. It’s just that many of them reserve their violence for their families, behind closed doors.
I do not usually rejoice in prisoner-on-prisoner violence, but in this case I at least take solace in the fact that:
A) this piece of shit is likely to be denied bail; and
B) prisoners generally take a very dim view of men who harm children.
best of luck in lockup fella
edited re typo
Mels,
To some extent, yes, in the thread I linked. It makes sense to me, though I’m not an expert in armchair sociology.
Sorry, didn’t realize I had left virtually the same comment as Vince. Agreed, Vince.
I think cartomancer is onto something. I’ve been thinking and talking and writing about the American culture of rage, and how it ties into violence and depression. It’s akin to male entitlement – fueled by it, certainly – but it’s older, and I believe deeper.
It’s what I think of as the cowboy ideal, or the Rambo fantasy: one man, all alone, filled with a need for vengeance setting out to Right the Wrong. Softer people try to stop him, but he won’t be stopped. “Cowards” try to reason with him, but they fail because he is the Man, the Violent One who is going to Right the Wrong.
You’ll see something similar in other cultures, including European culture, but not to the same extent. Here in the States it seems like it’s pretty central, a major theme in many books and movies and video games and TV shows.
OT: The latest episode of the “I Don’t Speak German” podcast is up. This week’s subject: the thoroughly odious Stefan Molyneux. While maybe not as despicable as some of the alt-right personalities (sic) they’ve covered to date, Molyneux’s role in the “alt-right pipeline”, converting people in the manosphere/ right-libertarian worlds to outright fascism, cannot be understated.
Oh my gods, this is monstrous. I hope the poor kid recovers okay.
@Iseult
I definitely think you’re on to something, in part from conversations with Canadian friends who got a lot less of that growing up. In our case it’s something to do with Manifest Destiny and our history in European colonialism, I think. Something something cowboy mythology, give or take a century of self-righteous male superheroes.
@Cyborgette that, and also…. maybe there’s a genetic component? The people who came here from Europe were, for the most part, the ones who couldn’t get along there. I mean, that’s a vast generalization, and I’m thinking mainly about the earliest sets, but I do wonder whether there’s a temperament trait that came over with them and has hung around.
I mean, some of our most enduring “heroes” are essentially sociopaths (and I say this as a lay person completely unqualified to diagnose, but you get the gist. Not kindly disposed people, a bit ruthless, not given to introspection or apology).
This hit a bit uncomfortably close to home for me. Why? Well, I suffer from violent impulses, always have. As a little kid, I used to bite people on the playground and all that. Luckily, I am very well aware that these impulses are not appropriate for human interaction and I simply deal with them healthily.
And it’s not because “not getting pussy does something to the brain”, since even when I was having a very happy relationship, I was fighting my daily fight.
And before anyone thinks I’m excusing or empathizing with that guy: NO! We all have our issues and we also have the moral responsibility to deal with them in a way that doesn’t harm our fellow creatures (animals and certain plants included).
@Iseult The Idle
I do think there is a cultural component to it too, because public killings as a way to gain attention is by far less common in Sweden than in USA, and I think it’s in part thanks to the glorification of violence in America, but also the combination of a strong push for individualism paired with how the media reports those crimes. In Sweden, it takes time before names and faces of perpetrators are released to the press and the news tend to be less “dramatic” for a lack of a better word.
But I also think it’s the American mentality of not trusting the government and that “real men” should solve their problems by themselves (and mainly, their fists) that rears it’s ugly head. Sweden used to be that way too, but you know, the viking age has ended, and even the vikings knew to settle their conflicts in court. If people applaud someone for punching someone that angered them, even if the person being punched is an harassing jerk, it’s not that strange if someone were to extend that logic to feel justified in harming anyone representing a group that angers them, and it’s extra volatile when paired with entitlement.
As a mom of two small children who is unsettled by those malls with all the high open space anyway, this is a story I could have just as easily done without.
I honestly don’t know if this is relevant to violence in American society, but before Australia, Britain viewed the American colonies as a place to transport criminals.
I think the only reason incels haven’t gone straight to maximum awful is that the victim was a boy. You know if the kid was a girl they’d be all, “Hope she dies so there’s one less future Stacy.”
*barf*