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Might is Right: Inside the Gilroy shooter’s borrowed manifesto

By David Futrelle

Like the Christchurch shooter, like Elliot Rodger, like countless other mass killers, the shooter who took three young lives at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California yesterday seems to have left behind a manifesto.

But it’s not his manifesto; it’s borrowed from a pseudonymous 19th century paean to “survival of the fittest.” Before launching his assault at the food festival, alleged shooter Santino William Legan posted a message on his Instagram account urging everyone to “Read ‘Might Is Right’ by Ragnar Redbeard.”

The book in question, first published in 1890, is an over-the-top, sometimes comically so, explication of the simple, and simplistic, idea encapsulated in its title; it’s been in and out of print for more than a century and is now readily available on the internet for free. The prose is ponderous and purple — “Redbeard” specializes in the sort of bombastic rhetoric that has an irresistible allure for many on the far right — but the ideas are easy enough to understand. It’s basically Nietzsche for Dummies.

The victor gets the gold and the land every time. He, also, gets the fairest maidens, the glory tributes. And — why should it be otherwise? Why should the delights of life go to failures and cowards? Why should the spoils of battle belong to the unwarlike?That would be insanity, utterly unnatural and immoral.

Imagine that stretched out over, say, 180 pages, with heaping helpings of racism and antisemitism on the side, and you’ve got Might is Right. Alongside its glorification of the powerful, the book is filled with snide asides about the “simian disposition” of “the Negro” and regular rants about the “usurious Jew.” (Redbeard is also pretty virulently anti-Christian, but mainly because Jesus was a Jew who liked to talk about the meek inheriting the earth.)

Naturally, the book has become a favorite of many in the manosphere and (of course) on the alt-right. It’s gotten shoutouts everywhere from the MGTOW subreddit (where one commenter hailed it as “the most important book out there”) to Incels.co (where it was described as “the most blackpilled and inflamatory book ever”); you can find it being recommended both by the old-school racists of the Vanguard News Network and by the relatively newfangled reactionaries of the Red Pill and DarkEnlightenment subreddits, not to mention 4chan’s /pol/. Before his recent (alleged) conversion to Orthodox Christianity, our old friend fiend Roosh V wrote a largely appreciative “review” of it.

It’s not clear where Legan ran across the book; it could have been almost anywhere. A better question might be: what exactly is it about this 129-year-old book that would appeal to a 19-year-old like Legan? And the answer to that, I think, is relatively straightforward: if you strip away the purple prose and the sometimes archaic references, what Redbeard preaches isn’t that terribly different from the contemporary ideologies of the manosphere and the alt-right.

Nowhere is that clearer — to me at least — than in the final chapter, in which Redbeard takes on the so-called “woman question” and delivers answers that would not seem out of place in Reddit’s the Red Pill.

As he sees it, women are naturally attracted to the most macho of men, those who can both take and deliver a punch, quite literally, as

fighting is the method whereby the most fitted to propagate conclusively prove the fact. …

Women instinctively admire soldiers, athletes, kings, nobles, and fighting-men generally, above all other kinds of suitors — and rightly so.

Nothing so lowers a lover in a virile maiden’s estimation, than for him to be ‘whipped’ in a personal encounter with a rival. …

Young women have an instinctive detestation for the ‘good young man that died’ kind of adorer, and they positively abhor the pale coward … Strength, energy-of-character, ferocity, and courage, she admires in her possible husband, above all other qualities combined. Even to be carried-off by force, is not repugnant to her feelings, if the ‘bold bad man’ is in other respects acceptable.

She pines to be ‘wooed and won,’ … she likes to feel that she has been mastered, conquered, taken possession of—that the man who has stormed her heart is in all respects, a man among men.

Nature, in other words, is an unending battle of Alpha Chads vs obsequious Beta soyboys — and Chad always wins, even if (perhaps especially if) he skips past romance and resorts to brute force to win his fair lady.

Change a few words in Redbeard’s text and you basically have a post on the Red Pill subreddit. Everything new in Red Pill ideology is actually quite old. Indeed, Redbeard even refers to sexual “market value,” an idea that many modern pickup artists think they came up with.

It’s impossible to know — at least given the scant information we now have — what in particular about Rebeard’s book most appealed to Legan, or how exactly the book may have played a role in inspiring his killings.

If he was trying to become the Redbeardian “man among men” that women instinctively hunger for (allegedly), I’m not sure than gunning down a six-year-old is going to earn him the posthumous adoration he may have wanted. It seems more likely he was hoping to garner the admiration of incels and others who are impressed by mass murderers. He may have been less interested in Redbeard’s specific ideas than in the amoral almost-nihilism that permeates the book.

We don’t know. We may never know. An alienated young man read read a really shitty book he (almost certainly) found on the internet and liked it so much he decided to make it the “message” behind his mass shooting. Now three innocents are dead, and so is the shooter himself, gunned down by police shortly after starting his rampage, and the biggest clue we have right now as to his motives is a terrible book from more than a century ago. Ideas have consequences; very bad ideas have very bad consequences.

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Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
5 years ago

This is what you get when narcissism becomes currency.

Hunter
Hunter
5 years ago

It being so over-the-top is why there’s an argument about whether the work was satire. It was also one of the major components of LaVeyan Satanism, which is just Ayn Rand for people that understand Nietzsche even less than Ayn Rand did.

Mabret (née Laugher at Bigots)
Mabret (née Laugher at Bigots)
5 years ago

Did Ragnar not know that “virile” means “manly”, or did the word mean something very different in his day?

I am, regrettably, a “virile maiden”, (that is, I unfortunately have manly features,) and I don’t desire men of any description.

ETA: I might add “virile maiden” to my screen name.

Moggie
Moggie
5 years ago

The end of the Daily Beast article:

Adams, for his part, responded defiantly to his critics.

“I do plan to do the same thing again in the future,” he said on his Periscope livestream, “Now if it’s a mass shooting, I might think twice.”

And then he laughed.

Just vile.

There was also a quote from a journalism professor, which included the words: And I used to like that cartoon. I hear that a lot. Many people used to like Dilbert.

Cyborgette
Cyborgette
5 years ago

You know, for the life of me I don’t think I’ll ever understand how (most) men can look at how much much stronger they can be, and how easily, and think: “This is good and just and fair.” I just can’t understand how.

Even when you consider how much Hollywood mythologizes and exaggerates male strength, and how most of us are trained to underestimate our own, the difference is there and it is horrifying. The injustice just seems so obvious. How can someone accept that unfairness as right, even if it benefits them personally? I just can’t wrap my mind around it.

@Moggie

The really terrible thing to me is, it’s not like Adams didn’t telegraph what sort of person he was already, and very openly. The elitism, the obsessive ableism, the jokes about social Darwinism, the barely veiled misogyny and racism. Every time I recall laughing at Dilbert, I find myself thinking again, I should have known what this was. I should have seen his fascism coming from miles away.

Naglfar
Naglfar
5 years ago

@Cyborgette
The real irony is that most of the folks favoring the “Might is Right” narrative (Nazis, libertarians, satanists, other assorted far right types) are usually not the ones who would survive in such a system. They seem to vastly overestimate their own strength.
I feel the same way about Dilbert. The more I look back at what I used to find funny, the more I see how awful it was and feel kind of guilty for laughing. Or old books I used to read then realize were awful.
When I was in 7th grade, I read the first 9 Xanth books by Piers Anthony and at the time enjoyed them. It was a few years later, with more knowledge, that I realized just how horribly misogynistic the entire series was (and that Piers Anthony is an awful person) and I still worry about how I might have internalized stuff from those books without meaning to.

TheKND
TheKND
5 years ago

Ragnar Redbeard would have been a really good LARP name…

Crip Dyke
5 years ago

@The KND:

Related (though admittedly not directly relevant to) your observation, I read a little of the thing, and I was actually wondering if it was someone who tried to create an American Modest Proposal and racist, classist, sexist jackwads didn’t get the joke.

Jesalin: Clit-o-centric Lesbian Goddess
Jesalin: Clit-o-centric Lesbian Goddess
5 years ago

@Nalfgar

I loved the Xanth books when I was younger, I only found out within the last couple of years that Piers Anthony was a misogynistic jackass.
(Kid me wasn’t so great at seeing deeper issues)

@TheKND

Ragnar ‘Rok’ Redbeard, that would make a great character name.

Pyxxxie
Pyxxxie
5 years ago

Why are stories like this about mass shootings FrontPage news? Or even national / international news for that matter? Most gun crimes are only reported on local news outlets. By giving people like this the media spotlight, you are rewarding bad behavior.

Mass shootings are becoming commonplace as desperate losers are looking for a way to get attention. They shoot up public place, quote some edgey manifesto, and get their 15 minutes of fame.

No more notoriety for these simpletons. And that means no more national news coverage for these acts. Enough is enough.

Moon Custafer
Moon Custafer
5 years ago

@Mabret:

Could Ragnar (or his typesetter) have confused the words “virile” and “virginal?”

Mabret (née Laugher at Bigots)
Mabret (née Laugher at Bigots)
5 years ago

It’s conceivable that the typesetter might have confused them, but they look quite different in handwriting. “Maiden” would have connoted “virginal” back then. I think Ragnar was just an idiot. Fascists and their prototypes are not known for their outstanding intelligence.

Moon Custafer
Moon Custafer
5 years ago

The weird thing is that I once saw a seemingly insightful Dilbert cartoon in which a management colleague advises Alice that she needs to socialize and network like her male coworkers, and she decides to try this immediately by suggesting they continue the conversation in a bar, whereupon he takes it as a sexual come-on. I don’t know whether this was a case of “he came so close to getting it,” or whether someone else had recaptioned one of Adams’ strips.

Pyxxxie
Pyxxxie
5 years ago

It’s also conceivable that this manifesto titled “Might makes right” is a hoax. Or as another said it’s a satire created in the last 30 year’s ripping off Nitzschean nonsense.

Patricia Kayden
Patricia Kayden
5 years ago

@Pyxxxie,

I really can’t tell if you’re trying to be funny or not. Not covering shootings doesn’t magically make them disappear. Report them and push towards ending such tragedies. Sensible gun reforms for a start.

Crip Dyke
5 years ago

Could Ragnar (or his typesetter) have confused the words “virile” and “virginal?”

It’s conceivable that the typesetter might have confused them, but they look quite different in handwriting. “Maiden” would have connoted “virginal” back then. I think Ragnar was just an idiot.

Isn’t it possible that the meaning of “virile” has simply changed over time, from someone generally filled with sexual potency to someone filled with specifically male sexual potency?



Hmmm. Just looked up the etymology and seemingly not. I had been unaware that the root was specifically masculine in the original latin, thus I was too quick to assume that this was a temporal/cultural oddity rather than simply a failure of the writer.

TIL

Nequam
Nequam
5 years ago

Regarding Anton LaVey: before he founded his church he was a carny. Specifically, a “talker” (barker), the guy whose job it is to shill for the various acts and get the rubes to come in.

This, I find, explains much.

Nequam
Nequam
5 years ago

Pyxxie: Ivan Stang mentions the manifesto in his book High Weirdness by Mail, which was published in 1988. He describes it as a reprint from Loompanics Press, so it could still be satire, but it’s probably been around rather longer than 30 years.

Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Buttercup Q. Skullpants
5 years ago

The victor gets the gold and the land every time.

Except when he’s Jewish, and then having money and success is a nefarious global conspiracy.

He, also, gets the fairest maidens

Except when he’s one of the brown immigrants swarming into the country to steal all the white wimmenz, and then it’s unfairrrrrrrrrrr and unnatural.

fighting is the method whereby the most fitted to propagate conclusively prove the fact.

Except when you’re a teenage coward who murders innocents and gets shot by the police. I don’t see a whole lot of propagating in his future.

Why should the delights of life go to failures and cowards? Why should the spoils of battle belong to the unwarlike?That would be insanity, utterly unnatural and immoral.

So, anyone could kidnap Ragnar Redbeard and steal his house and money and worldly goods. And he would have to meekly accept it, because losing his freedom and possessions proves he’s inferior and unfit. Why have any laws at all, then?

People who think “might is right” is a great idea forget that there’s always a more bloodthirsty asshole, a more powerful gun, a bigger army. There’s no logical stopping point to the violence.

Dalillama
Dalillama
5 years ago

@Jesalin

I loved the Xanth books when I was younger, I only found out within the last couple of years that Piers Anthony was a misogynistic jackass.
(Kid me wasn’t so great at seeing deeper issues)

Mysogyny is the least if it.

@Nequam
Hey, someone else still has a copy of that! Loompanics was a weird imprint, but they were right-libertarian leaning with all that implies. I’m not at all surprised they reprinted it, though I don’t recall seeing it in any of the catalogues we had around the house.

Naglfar
Naglfar
5 years ago

@Jesalin and Dalillama
Xanth isn’t even the most misogynistic and awful thing Anthony wrote. That award goes to the items noted in this blog post or this. The amount of pedophile apologia in Anthony’s work makes me think he is probably a pedophile himself. That would explain why there is so much eroticism of prepubescent girls.

Cyborgette
Cyborgette
5 years ago

@Jesalin, @Naglfar, @Dalillama: FWIW I’ve encountered at least one person who was sexually harassed by Piers Anthony as a minor. The man is scum.

Dalillama
Dalillama
5 years ago

@Cyborgette
I’m utterly unsurprised. Or rather, I’m surprised it’s been this long before I had confirmation…

Naglfar
Naglfar
5 years ago

@Dalillama
There’s also this unsettling Twitter thread of people whom he wrote creepy letters to. He’s a pedophile dirtbag, case closed.

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