By David Futrelle
On Wednesday evening, a 20-year old construction worker drove to the Westgate Entertainment Center, near Phoenix Arizona, a popular spot for shoppers and diners that had only just been reopened to the public after the state’s quarantine restrictions were lifted. He was armed with an AR-15 rifle.
In a live Snapchat video he told the world that “I’m going to be the shooter of Westgate 2020. This is to get back to mean society, so let’s get this done.”
Then he marched into the mall, AR-15 in one hand, cell phone in the other, ultimately gunning down three victims — none of whom, thankfully, have died — before his rifle jammed. He streamed at least some of his rampage on Snapchat, excerpts of which are going around online (I’m not going to link to them.) Police arrived quickly and arrested him, they said, without incident.
Yesterday, at the shooter’s first court apperance, Maricopa County prosecutor Edward Leiter filled us in on what he said were the shooter’s motives. The shooter, he said, had told investigators that he identified as an incel, and that his shooting rampage was an attempt to
tak[e] out his expressed anger at society, the feeling that he has been bullied, the feeling that women didn’t want him.
The shooter, he continued, “specifically said that he was targeting couples,” and indeed two of the victims were reportedly a couple.
Do we need to know any more about this creep? We don’t need to know any more. This is all textbook incel shooter shit. And it’s the second time this week I’ve had to write about a would-be mass murderer motivated by incel ideology. The first was a Toronto teenager charged with terrorism after he attacked sex workers with a machete at a massage parlor; one of his victims died.
As I do every time an incel murderer (or, in this case, would-be murderer) appears in the news, I made a depressing trek over to the Incels.co forums to see what the regulars there were saying about this wannabe Elliot Rodger.
And it was mostly predicable stuff. Depressing, but predictable.
“All hail St. Hernandez,” wrote someone calling himself universallyabhorred, “though his count was low, his heart was in the right place.”
“AnothER saint,” agreed FinnCell, capitalizing the initials of incel mass killer Elliot Rodger, almost universally beloved by the incel crowd.
Others mocked the shooter for not killing anyone in his rampage.
“[H]is count was ZERO,” complained IncelKing.
The dude was such a failure that he even failed at going ER. Now he’s gonna rot for the next 25+ years in prison because he didnt even kill himself after the attack, ovER for him.
Nystagmuscel added:
He is a retard who couldn’t even kill anyone at close range. Fuck him
The Incels.co regulars seem most bothered by the fact that the shooter didn’t finish off one woman who was caught on his video pleading for her life. (At this point in his rampage his gun may have already been jammed.)
“This is why when you go ER you must be 100% commited,” wrote werty1457. “He’s gonna get life and he didn’t even kill anyone, sad shit.”
But both the cheering squad and the complainers were overshadowed somewhat by those claiming that the gun rampage was somehow a false-flag setup designed to make incels look bad — and make it easier to round them up and put them in camps. One commenter wondered aloud if the shooting was “another crisis actors pys-ops.” Another declared that it “[c]ertainly looks like a hoax … .”
“It’s obviously fake,” wrote someone called Arthas93.
((they)) are not even putting effort in it anymore. Can almost see the ketchup packs.
Low effort, bad direction. It’s like a bollywood movie. This psyops got a C- for lack of effort.
Meanwhile, someone called chudur-budur suggested that Hernandez had been “framed,” as part of a nefarious plot to target “ugly men.”
“Now every crime is somehow related to ‘I.N.C.E.L,'” he wrote.
[G]et ready to be sent to gulag buddy boyos (assuming you are genuinely ugly virgin and not a larper).
We used to make jokes about this, but looks like it’s getting real.
“For real,” replied based_meme.
We were really joking about this shit for a couple of years. Now it’s likely to become a reality that we might get arrested for just being ugly misogynists.
In a followup comment, chudur-budur added:
They were trying to frame ugly men for a long long time, through title 9, consent circus and shit. But it was not effective or quick enough to lock us up. Now they are coming up with these incel “””attacks””” to legalize any ugly men to be detained.
While some blamed the alleged plot against incels on the Jews (see above), others suggested, as one commenter put it, that incels themselves were “being persecuted like the jews in germany.”
So on one side we’ve got incels lionizing this creep as a “saint” On the other we’ve got incels angry at him for not being more bloodthirsty. And then smack dab in the middle we have the “false flaggers,” pretending that this shooting is some sort of elaborately staged psyop aimed at them.
No one needs to stage anything. These murders and attempted murders are the inevitable result of the poisonous incel ideology, which encourages young men to stoke their already extreme anger and bitterness that they can’t have the adoration of the very particular subset of women they desire — and then tells them there’s nothing to do about their predicament but to kill themselves, preferably after killing a lot of “normies” first.
The incels lusting for more blood aren’t really much different from those crying “hoax.” Indeed, one of those talking “false flag” is using a picture of the Aurora theater shooter as his avatar. These are aspiring villains who see themselves — and want others to see them — as victims.
I feel sympathy for lonely, depressed men; I’ve been one. I feel sympathy for bullied boys; I’ve been one of them too. But I can’t feel sympathy for incels any more than I can feel sympathy for Nazis. Incel ideology takes normal loneliness — the kind that almost all of us have felt at some time — and turns it into hate, directed inward and outward at once. It’s toxic to anyone who is touched by it, whether incels themselves or the people they victimize.
I can only hope I don’t have to write another one of these posts any time soon. But tomorrow is the 6th anniversary of Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in Isla Vista, California — the incels are already celebrating — and I’m not hopeful.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
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!
@Dalillama
If he’s so ugly how did he get into so many movies? What is it that makes directors want him as opposed to thousands of better-looking men? Surely there’s no shortage of men who would like to be porn stars.
Also IIRC Ron Jeremy sexually assaulted some women, so he doesn’t seem like a very good guy.
@Naglfar
His dick is huge. And his moral qualities aside there’s no question that he’s had consensual sex with a very large number of people.
@Dalillama
And there’s no good looking men with big dicks?
The reason that mainstream porn has such a smaller number of male than female performers is basically that it is much harder for male talent to break into the industry, due to the demands of the market and the economics of filming.
With male talent, the most desirable trait has long been reliability – specifically, the ability to achieve and maintain an erection. If a male talent can’t do this, it can hold up the entire shoot, which can get expensive. For livestreaming shows it can wreck the entire show. So producers and directors want to go with proven male talent.
Furthermore, because mainstream porn is primarily driven by interest in the female performers, there just isn’t the demand for “fresh” male talent that there is for female talent. As far as the audience is concerned, the male talent is “a headless thrusting torso” (as Lee Stone described his job), so producers don’t really have any incentive to cast an unproven 19-year-old guy over the veteran who has reliably shot 100 scenes for them – even if the newbie turns out fine, there’s no major benefit to outweigh the risks.
This is one reason why a lot of male talent gets into the industry by pairing with a new female performer who will only shoot Boy/Girl scenes with him – if the producers want the hot new female talent (and the demand for new female talent is enormous), they need to use him, so the risk becomes acceptable. Then, after they’ve done enough scenes together that the male talent has a good reputation, he may start getting other work. (And she, of course, can hopefully get a good payday if she branches out to working with talent other than him. “Star performs X for the first time” is a big seller.)
ED drugs have affected this, but not as much as you would think.
@Allandrel
I was just about to ask about that. One would think that with Viagra any of them can have an erection on cue (though there are side effects that might be undesirable).
Thanks for the explanation.
Good looking is essential but some care waaaaay more about tongue and what he *does* with it than anything about dick anyway 🙂
(Talking more about personal preference than porn. I personally tend to dislike the porn most cishet guys like. The whole mindset of it almost always misses completely what I’m after. Just my thing though and definitely not judging others)
@Stacey
I agree. I don’t really watch porn so I’m a bit unfamiliar with the industry and its protocols, hence not knowing about RJ and his stuff. The mainstream hetero porn has too much emphasis on humiliation of women by men, which I’m not that into, and a lot of stuff that looks rather unpleasant (or at least that I wouldn’t enjoy, not shaming anyone who’s into that).
As a literal 40-year-old virgin (white and cishet and bothered by his lack of female companionship too, yet not an incel strangely enough /s), I’ve seen my fair share of live-action porn*, most of it mainstream I believe, and I completely understand how other people would dislike what I like. I tend to like a lot of things other people would dislike for reasons I consider completely understandable and non-threatening to my self-esteem (metal music, horror, offal e.g. organ meat…).
Fortunately, I take it all (the porn, I mean) with a grain of salt the size of a very large boulder, and my overly cartesian nature tends to analyse things too much for me to think those things are in any way relevant to most real-life sexual relations; to my mind it’s merely wish-fulfillment power fantasies. If anything I would likely be super cautious and worried about pleasing any erstwhile partner to even try acting macho and dominant at first, and would only attempt it with her explicit consent (probably get a safeword and everything – I’m not too big on full-on BDSM personally, but I think Safe, Sane and Consensual is a great idea that should be applied to pretty much all sexual endeavors).
*For those fearing what this implies, let me confirm your worst fears: yes, I do also enjoy hentai. What can I say, I’m a perv. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@Paireon
Since I’m a vegetarian I don’t eat organ meats, but I do enjoy metal music. For me, I naturally maintain a mental separation between the ideas expressed in songs and what I do in real life (I’m very non-confrontational and generally polite IRL, which makes people rather surprised when they learn about my music preferences). I often use music to relieve negative feelings and anger, and I can see how other media could function this way as well even if it’s media that I don’t personally use.
As a non-USAian, this is the bit that leaves me entirely unsurprised, that as soon as something reopened there would be a shooting.
I’m actually curious now if there’s been a pandemic-related decrease in mass shootings, to counterbalance the rise in domestic violence.
@Rabid Rabbit
I don’t have the full data, but anecdotally I can say that I had gone at least a couple months without hearing about any, and I do know that this March was the first March since 2002 with no school shootings.
@Naglfar: I use music for the same thing among others, so I guess great/strange minds do think alike. And I’m usually non-confrontational too, although I sometimes have this irresistible urge to call assholes out on their assholery – case in point, a jerk on a bike today who sure as hell gave no fucks about the 2 meters rule (he was even biking on the sidewalk when there’s a perfectly serviceable bike path right next to it on that boulevard); of course he was quick to resort to threats of violence, to which I simply retorted the fact that the local police station was just a bit further down the road so if I called 911 they’d be there pretty fast.
…I’m not even American and yet I can’t help but find this depressing… Seriously!? 17-18 years in a row that there was at least one school shooting per year in March!?
Re: porn
Because of how my life has worked out with moving to performance art (or at least moving in that direction before the pandemic and still headed there) I like to think more of a category of cultural expression that includes consensual sexual expression and pornography and also erotic dramatic performances and combinations of all of those. I am a sex positive feminist but I still struggle with knowing that my work in the beauty industry meant that I was kind of supporting a whole set of ideas that discouraged body positivity for women and had mixed feelings about working in a hair salon and so also I kind of have mixed feelings about commercial porn if it results in any exploitation but if everyone is fully free to consent and does then if they enjoy it they should do it. But like I said I don’t like the porn that most cishet men do. My guys all look traditionally masculine and I know some are cishet although the kinds of relationships I expect means a guy has to be a little (or a lot) more unconventional and open minded than most cishet men. So of the ones who meet my physical standards not all of them meet my other standards as they have to feel a certain way in their hearts and souls (which is what that troll in the other thread didn’t get). And the regular porn thing is too much about intercourse and doesn’t do much for women who like what I like. So much more do I care about other things besides a guy’s dick that with some of my guys I’ve never seen their dicks (I make them wear a dance belt underneath something tight so I can enjoy seeing that nice bulge). That’s hotter to me than porn…that and knowing he’s at my bidding and devoted to me because he wants to be, showing by using his tounge and not being selfish. I think that kind of togetherness is beautiful intimate art when we do it and enjoy it we’re subverting patriarchal norms. By choosing my partner and being as open as I am I’m defying those who would deny me my life. Gross creepy incels.
@ stacey
Don’t know if this is of any interest to you.
Reliability in male pornstars: Not just about getting a stiffy as required. Read an interview somewhere, can’t remember where, dammit, that indicated the ability to provide a ‘money shot’ on cue was vital.
@Paireon : I think it’s actually the first month without mass shooting since 2002. Which is worse.
It say something that there’s so few pushback against the second amendment. I mean, there’s a lot of brave people protesting that sad state of affair, but how come there isn’t riots ?
@Rabid Rabbit
I may be wrong, but I suspect that, sadly, if there is, it may simply be because lockdowns mean fewer targets, and, in the US, shootings of 1 or 2 people in a shop simply isn’t news any more.
@Paireon
Yup. And of course now that things are reopening one of the first things to return has been mass shootings.
@Ohlmann
I think it’s about money and who’s in power. Pro-2nd amendment groups have large amounts of both, while very few if any politicians are actually serious about getting rid of it. Any anti-2nd individuals are instantly branded as anti-American and smeared by right wing media so few are very open about it. If there were riots, they would almost certainly be met with deadly force from police, counterprotestors, or both, seeing as both institutional power and traditionally dominant groups have a vested interest in keeping their guns. Plus, even on the left a lot of progressives and leftists own guns, so there would likely be some opposition on the left as well.
No need to go in porn to find successful persons with appearance that some might find repulsive. Michael Berryman may be one of the most famous among them. Yet, he is married, and i have never read something saying he was – outside of his roles – an asshole (now, i do not read often cinema reviews). On the contrary, many people say he is an embodiment of the gentle giant trope in real life.
As for the fear that “being ugly” may lead you to be jailed or worse… In a first world where POC are still discriminated, often bullied, and sometimes still shot on sight, this assertion sounds just so wrong.Nah, they do not know what real fear is, damn them (i do not consider the “fear” of not being able to put d in v as a “real fear”. If this is offensive, please tell me, i will apologize and make corrections).
@StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved: I doubt I fulfill either the physical or mental criteria you’re looking for LOL, but frankly, more power to you. My personal philosophy boils down to something like “to what you will, but do no harm” (sounds neopagan/Wiccan, I know, but as a knowledgeable skeptic I’m quite aware that these things got traction first during the 19th century romanticism period, long after any actual original pagan cults had disappeared from Western, Central and Northern Europe except in the form of a few folk traditions and superstitions, despite any claims to the contrary by the entertaining if quite debunked Ms. Margaret Murray). Never had much use for patriarchal norms anyway since those led me to be bullied for most of my late childhood/adolescence.
@Ohlmann, Naglfar: Ugh, even worse then. Glad I live in slightly-more-reasonable Canada, where there was just recently a ban on 1500 different types of assault weapons. It was one of the Liberals’ electoral promises, but was likely pushed to the forefront of the agenda by the worst mass/spree shooting in Canada, ever in April ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nova_Scotia_attacks ). Yup, lockdown didn’t stop this dude. Of course there was much Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth and “Muh Freedumbs” by the gun rights crowd and the conservatives but since Trudeau had the backing of the NDP and Bloc (a great majority of Francophone Quebecers are pro-gun control) the motion passed easily. And anyways, as was somehow NOT pointed out (godfuckingdamnit journos and political chroniclers, DO YOUR FREAKING JOBS!!!) the only use for assault weapons is KILLING AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. They’re no use for hunting, there’s no competitive shooting scene like there is for handguns, NOTHING besides the unhealthy feeling of power creepy assholes get from possessing a weapon meant solely for mass slaughter of their fellow human beings.
Oh, and anyone making the argument “But… but then they’s also would ban functional swords too!” is a fucking moron with very little understanding of the difference in the lethality of those things, or is being willfully hypocritical. Yes, I’ve heard that line of thought, or heard it being implied.
@occasional reader: From what I’ve heard Michael Berryman really is a very nice person IRL (I’m a horror buff, and he plays a lot in horror movies). And as someone who’s apprehensive about probably dying a virgin myself, I assure you I find your position in no way offensive. Yes, the likeliness of never engaging in intercourse has given me existential pangs of worry several times in my life, but the way incels push it so outrageously far outside the bounds of human decency means I’m fully with you on this. Fuck’em, and not in the way they want.
@ paireon
I must confess to a wry smile of irony when people say of Wicca “It’s not a real religion; it’s just what someone made up in a book.”
Test (I appear to be in moderation)
@Paireon
To me, the main difference between guns and swords is range. If someone has a sword, running away and/or making sure there’s a shield between you and them, even a thin one, will save you. Range is limited to what they can swing at, and being skilled with a sword takes a lot more training and physical ability than a gun. Consequently, we see very few mass killings with swords.
My advice on this is to find meaning in your life in other ways. Sex isn’t the be-all, end-all of human experience. It can be fun for some, yes, but so can many other things. It is totally possible to live a full life without having sex, and there are many other things you can see and do that are satisfying. If you want to have sex, that’s a fine goal, but don’t lose sight of the rest of the world and the other past times.
@Nafalgar @Rabid Rabbit
I don’t know about in the USA, but here in Canada we just had our worst mass shooting ever back in April. (Near where I live. We’re still shaken.)
And, surprise surprise, there are links to misogyny and domestic violence.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/04/23/the-nova-scotia-shootings-began-with-an-act-of-domestic-abuse-and-there-were-red-flags-that-came-before.html
@Ohlmann
A few too many whiffs of grapeshot. The people who’d be inclined to riot haven’t forgotten the National Guard machineguns, or the tanks driving into the Bonus Army.