By David Futrelle
On Wednesday night, a gunman opened fire on patrons at two separate hookah bars in Hanau, Germany, killing nine; he and his elderly mother were later found dead in his apartment.
Like many mass shooters today, he left behind a manifesto (link available on request), one that revealed him to be a genocidal racist and eugenicist who wanted the people in a wide swath of countries — from North Africa all the way to the Philippines — to be wiped off the face of the earth. His massacre — which seems to have been directed at Turkish immigrants, the main patrons of the bars he chose to target — was his way of getting attention to his genocidal ideas.
He also wove a strange and paranoid tale about his own life, claiming that he had been monitored since birth by a shadowy agency eager to hear and capitalize on his thoughts. He claims, among other things, that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were his idea, that Donald Trump stole his slogan “America First,” and that he came up with the basic premises of a number of Hollywood movies and TV shows, from “Look Who’s Talking,” “The Cell,” and “Prison Break.” He also believes that the “invisible people” monitoring him can read (and control) minds. This portion of his manifesto reads less like a political declaration than the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic.
The 43-year-old shooter also made a few remarks, almost in passing, suggesting that he had never had a girlfriend, and some have taken this to mean that he was an “incel” This non-factual “fact” has made it into several news stories so far, and even onto Wikipedia,with The Sun describing him in a headline as an “‘Incel’ terrorist” and offering up a potted history of the incel movement to explain his rage. Meanwhile, The Independent (which should know better) made the contradictory claim that he
identified as an “incel”, and wrote that he had not been in a relationship with a woman, out of choice, for the past 18 years.
You can see the problem immediately; this is a claim that rebuts itself. “Incel” stands for “involuntary celibate”; anyone who claims to be celibate by choice is by definition not an incel. The shooter claims that in his younger years, from his mid-teens through his early twenties, he simply could not find a girlfriend who lived up to his exacting standards. “[T]o take a less good looking woman,” he wrote, “was out of the question – I wanted the best or nothing.”
In the years since then, he claimed that he remained single because “I know that I’m being monitored.”
There is no trace of the incel ideology anywhere in the shooter’s manifesto — no incel lingo, no rants against too-picky “femoids”or too-handsome Chads, no disquisitions on some lost golden age when every good man was able to date and ultimately marry his “looksmatch.” Unlike incels, the shooter did not blame women for rejecting him, nor (as far as we can tell from the manifesto) did he blame society for encouraging these women to “ride the cock carousel” with everyone but him.
Incel ideology is all about cultivating a deep sense of grievance toward women and feminism; the shooter’s grievances were directed at immigrants and Muslims and people of color generally — mostly North Africans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians — and at the people he imagined were monitoring him. If the shooter was even aware of the incel movement, there’s no evidence of it in the manifesto itself.
Indeed, though one imagines the shooter was radicalized at least in part online, as every right-wing extremist seems to be these days, there’s little in his manifesto suggesting just where, online or off, he got any of his ideas. There are no references to other mass shooters, no mention of the “great replacement” theory or the alt-right vision of “white genocide”, no sly allusions to 4chan memes. And while he lists Israel as one of the countries whose people deserve to die en masse, his conspiracy theories make no mention of Jews at all. A brief video he made aimed at Americans referred to an underground network of satanic baby-abusers, but made no reference to Pizzagate or QAnon.
In short, he’s given those us trying to make sense of his motivations plenty to work with. But, while his genocidal racism is certainly clear and obvious, he remains in many ways a mystery — and will remain so unless and until we find more evidence of his beliefs.
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Gee, I wonder why anyone could possibly think that someone who considers masturbation to be at the same trauma level as rape and claims that all PIV sex is inherently violent might possibly have some troubling views and potential actions with regard to sexual consent. I wonder…
@semen
You voilated my clear no. You might as well have sent a dick pic. Your wrong and you know it. Your a dishonest disgusting person who is so full of himself you can think past stuff that sprays out of your penis. Having had a lot of tjat both up my vagina and swallowed I can tell you it’s not special. Ever guys is the same. You came here. Started talking about rape, started talking about your penis, started to make comments about my marriage, started to call the sex i have eith my husband as violent and equated the most traumatic and damaging thing in my life to touching yourself of your own free will. Did your hand bite out a chunk of flash from yohr leg and leave you perminately scared? Because that’s what my rape did to me. And I am tired of explaining to you assholes how to respect a no. To respect my trauma and not equate it to divorce, paying money, losing a job, rejection, and now i have to with masturbating. I hope one day you can realize what you are and what you’ve done and then live with yourself you absolute peice of garage. But you and your kind are just all the same. Can’t take no and have no idea what real pain and trauma are
@SRLO
“Your own perspective” is valid as exactly that: Your own perspective. And now I want you to think a little with your amazingly enlightened brain and maybe admit that bad experiences could have skewered that perspective a whole lot and that it takes more than that one, skewered perspective to make broad, sweeping statements about a topic as big and complex as sex.
Though, none of your bad expieriences or the list of sexual atrocities that you like to pull out to apparently justify your skewered perspective, make your arguments any less unsettling, misogynistic or plain weird (seriously, the pee pee is a sacred mountain? What is my belly button then? And are my organs mineral veins? I have to know!).
And I’m on my phone again so there are spelling mistakes but basically I refuse to let you treat me like this just because you think your some kind of God because you have semen. Well guess what buddy. I can grow an entire person from my body. It’s not special it’s biology.
@Lainy
why did the regular commenters here make unsubstantiated rape accusations against a person whom they donot know wehther he is a man or female to male transgender or a hermaphrodite or an asexual or a homosexual or a bisexual and nothing of his sexual history?
@Semen
why did you tell me your incredibly gross sexual story when I told FOUR times I didn’t want to hear it. I asked you to answer my counter claim to your statement, not to cum on the back of my jeans like some jerk off on the bus. But apparently its just way to hard for you not to talk about your godly penis.
@Lainy
You started the trend of sharing sexual story a few pages back when you were insistent on having my opinion…It was unsolicited and I didnot want to hear it and yes it was gross …extremely gross
@TheKND
And what are the eyes? I’ve been told I have nice eyes. Or what of the appendix? The inferior vena cava? There are hundreds of structures in the body, what is each one? You have piqued my curiosity.
@SRLO
Again, no one made any rape accusations against you. Find me a quote where someone says that.
I’m not sure how any of that would be relevant to this discussion. Might I remind you, this was originally a discussion of a terrorist attack that had nothing to do with you or your semen or your divine mountain penis. Also, “hermaphrodite” is a slur, the correct term is intersex (note: I am not intersex, so if there is a better term please correct me). And now we do know more than we ever wanted to know about your sexual history.
@SRSLY?!
Are you meaning to imply that some of those are incapable of being rapists? (Or that “people who are female to male transgender” and “a man” are disjoint sets, for that matter?)
As for why anyone might think you might possibly be a rapist, well, let’s see, you’ve shown a propensity to violate boundaries, you’ve shown confusion on issues of consent, and you claimed you had an anecdote from your own past that would substantiate a claim that all sex was violent, while presenting as masculine, the gender much more likely to be the perpetrator than the victim in instances of sexual violence.
Nobody claimed you definitely were one, only that the circumstantial evidence reached the bar for worrying that you might be.
And if you don’t like that and feel it was unfair to suggest even that you might be … then how do you think Lainy felt when you implied the sex she’s described having with her husband was violent, when it plainly was not?
Shoe’s on the other foot now.
@SRLO
Quote anyone who accused you of being a rapist.
Surplus speculated that you might be one, but that’s not the same thing as an accusation.
And even if you were accused of that, responding with “I’m totally not a rapist! To prove it, let me provide an unsolicited and explicit account of one of my sexual experiences where I didn’t rape anyone!” isn’t exactly the exculpatory evidence you seem to think it is.
First thing, trans men are men.
Second thing, none of those traits would mean that you are incapable of rape. All kinds of people are capable of rape, and rapists don’t need to be sexually attracted to their victims in order to commit rape.
The commentariat is speculating on the problematic behavior you have exhibited in this thread, not based on your identity (which we know little of, as you said).
@Semen
Because you decided all sex was violent so I proved you wrong!
You know what, I’m done opening up my trauma to you since you have no empathy, go try and get emotional labor from another rape victim because you won’t get it from me. and since its so painful for you, I hope you get massive painful stiffy tonight that won’t go away and then you’ll have to masturbate.
fuck you
You decided to come in and cum on and mass shooting thread. and then you decide to start being gross to a 21 year old rape survivor, you’ve shown us who you are and I’m done trying to be some sort of voice of reason for you because really I have had my trauma been open up enough by entitled asshole men like you for the past three days and I’m about ready to become violent about it. Find someone else trauma to cum on because I’m done giving you mine.
@Surplus
Thank you, Sometimes you annoy me but you’re a good guy and I’m glad your in the community. One of these days I’m gonna meet up with you somewhere and bake you some brownies and just relax because I really appreciate it for being a decent stranger man to me. I really needed that.
@Naglfar
Dworkin’s version made a lot more sense, as it was related to the fact that consent is only meaningful if you have the option of saying “no”.
Andrea Dworkin:
Source
I’m hardly an expert on Dworkin, but this one comes up a lot, and so far I haven’t heard anyone dispute it. It sounds quite reasonable to me.
Semen_Retention_Liaison_Officer:
Bullshit. You wanted to tell the story.
You were all: “I could tell you this story. Do you want to hear the story? I could totally tell you this story. It’s a really great story. Are you sure you don’t want to hear the story? I’m sure you’ll love the story. I’m going to tell you the story.”
You’re not fooling anyone. Decent people can disagree, but decent people also listen when other people say “no”. That’s actually quite essential.
Wow, I’m sure glad that SRLO has chosen this thread about the murder of nine people in an act of racist terrorism as a place to drone on and on about what he does and doesn’t do with his body and what other people should or shouldn’t do with their bodies.
I’m so glad nine people could die so you could feel like you won the argument that no one was having except for you the other day. That’s just fantastic for you.
You should feel deeply ashamed.
@Naglfar
esteemed commenter Surplus Requirement at the top pf this page
made callous rapist accusation against me…I have the right to verbally defende myself after such ludicrous accusations
hermaphrodite is a biological English term in my country, but I believe you and will use intersex from now on..thanks for educating me
@Naglfar
The trend of establishing sacred body geography starts in Brihardaranyaka Upanishad (ca. 800 BC) where various parts are connected wth various primordial spiritual energies …you might love to read up on that…making sacred body geography is not the sole preserve of SRs
I am not the only one responsible if the thread has veered away from its original brief…but then that tends to be the general pattern of threads
Surplus said ‘maybe a rapist’. That’s not an accusation, it was speculation based on the horrible things you’ve said.
Also, no one else has made anything close to a rape accusation, and holding Lainy (or any of us for that matter) accountable for what other people said is crap.
I bet my sexual story just got his dick hard so now he has to wank on everything
@Semen_Retention_Liaison_Officer
Incidentally, when you made a claim about all sex, you also necessarily made a claim about the sex of married couples. So, you can’t really use that excuse.
You made a claim. You received a challenge to that claim. You responded with a self-defeating excuse and followed it up with a personal account that you had specifically been asked not to give.
Don’t you think it’s a good time to take a break and think things over?
It’s a common theme for me the last couple of days. Men seem to have to hold me accountable for all the horrible things they do and what others do.
And apparently I screwed up the link. The “Source” was supposed to point at this: https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2018/02/25/three-feminist-myths/
@Lukas Xavier
A very good idea for Mr. SRLO.
@Lainy
I’m sorry to hear that. Know that it’s projection and that it’s not your fault.
@Lainy
Nope if you have buddhist training you donot get sexually hard anymore by reading about sexual encounters…same for chance encounter of provocative pictures….full on pornographic movies may be different though , but I am autistic and run away from them anyways as they are too much sensory overload
If you remain happy with your sexual encounter, the Universe remains happy with your sexual encounter…you only need to remember that
The thought of wanking is terrifying,unnerving, world shattering, Universe ending for me
I am not going to engage in that..
@Yutolia
I also think he’s calling me about because I called out his very clear violation of my boundary and he doesn’t like that I’m holding him accountable for a bad thing he did. guys like him never do. They want to be treated gentle when they do bad things and have the person they did the bad thing to say sorry.
@Lainy: I totally agree with you. I’ve been in the same position and it sucks.
I’m trying to remind myself that but it’s hard. I’ve started taking my anxiety medication again because I’ve had more panic attacks in the last three days then I’ve had in the last 6 months. I can’t even drink the bottle of wine I bought because I can’t mix the two.
Someone else needs to make a comment about how Semen here is protesting that remark about his dick getting hard a little to much because I can’t start drinking at 2 in the afternoon.