Portrait of a Killer: Elliot Rodger Claimed in Video to Be ‘Supreme Gentleman’

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Santa Barbara mass murderer Elliot Rodger.

Background information about the Santa Barbara shooter is beginning to emerge, tending to confirm what I said about Elliot Rodger when his YouTube rant was nearly all we knew about his motives:

This attitude is a typical “Nice Guy” rationalization by which losers project onto others the responsibility for their own failures, so that successful men are scapegoated as “obnoxious brutes” and women who reject the Nice Guy are condemned as “sluts.”
At the root of the “Nice Guy” rationalization is a narcissistic blindness to his own shortcomings and a sense of entitlement to female companionship. He cannot admit (especially to himself) that his own resentments are actually motivated by envy, nor that his rage against women is a type of “sour grapes” rationalization: Frustrated desire expressed as rejection of those who reject him.

Rodger was short, non-athletic and socially awkward, and this kind of “Nice Guy” rationalization is what goes on inside the minds of losers who can neither accept their limitations nor overcome them. The Los Angeles Times has the full transcript of his video rant:

“Hi, Elliot Rodger here. Well, this is my last video. It all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you.
“For the last eight years of my life, since I hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men, never to me.
“I’m 22 years old and still a virgin, never even kissed a girl. And through college, 2 1/2 years, more than that actually, I’m still a virgin. It has been very torturous.
“College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. In those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness, it’s not fair.
“You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime because I don’t know what you don’t see in me, I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman. I will punish all of you for it. [laughs]
“On the day of retribution, I am going to enter the hottest sorority house at UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut I see inside there. All those girls I’ve desired so much. They have all rejected me and looked down on me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance toward them, while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes.
“I take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you., You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male. [laughs] Yes, after I have annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I’ll take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there. All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure while I’ve had to rot in loneliness all these years. They all look down upon me every time I tried to join them, they’ve all treated me like a mouse.
“Well, now I will be a god compared to you, you will all be animals, you are animals and I will slaughter you like animals. I’ll be a god exacting my retribution on all those who deserve it and you do deserve it just for the crime of living a better life than me.
“The popular kids, you never accepted me and now you will all pay for it. Girls, all I ever wanted was to love you, be loved by you. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted sex, love, affection, adoration.
“You think I’m unworthy of you. That’s a crime I can never get over. If I can’t have you girls, I will destroy you. [laughs] You denied me a happy life and in turn I will deny all of you life, it’s only fair. I hate all of you.
“Humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species. If I had it in my power I would stop at nothing to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood and rightfully so. You deserve to be annihilated and I will give that to you. You never showed me any mercy so I will show you none. [laughs]
“You forced me to suffer all my life, now I will make you all suffer. I waited a long time for this. I’ll give you exactly what you deserve, all of you. All you girls who rejected me, looked down upon me, you know, treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men. And all of you men for living a better life than me, all of you sexually active men. I hate you. I hate all of you. I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve, annihilation.”

See? Dude had no game, but that can’t be his fault. No, it’s the girls he wanted — the blonde sluts who rejected him — who are to blame.

The Daily Mail has more background on the “gentleman” killer:

He was diagnosed at an earlier age with Asperger’s Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism meaning he had difficulties with social interaction.
Rodger was living with roommates at the Independent Living Institute in Santa Barbara, a facility that offers ‘living skills instruction to help adults with disabilities to live more independently in their communities,’ according to the website. . . .
A good-looking boy, it is impossible to say what caused Rodger’s problem with women, but apart from his parents’ divorce, there are no clues in his background as to the deeply troubled loner he would become.
He was born in August 1991 in Lambeth, South London, the scion of a family steeped in photography and the cinema.
His Malaysian-born mother Li Chin, now 53, and film director father Peter, 49, moved to America’s West Coast when Elliot was five and his younger sister Georgia only a baby. . . .
Speaking from her home in Kent, Elliot’s grandmother, 89, explained that he had suffered mental health issues for some time.
She said: ‘He was a very disturbed boy. He lived in California but of course I’d known him. This is just one of those very tragic things. I don’t want to talk about it any more. This is a rather difficult time.’ . . .
Yesterday, a family friend told The Mail on Sunday that Peter and Li Chin divorced soon after moving to the US and Peter later married Soumaya Akaaboune, a French actress of Moroccan-French descent who appeared in Hollywood blockbuster Green Zone. . . .
[Elliot] recalled in one Facebook posting ‘being the smallest kid in the class’ when he was photographed at Topanga Elementary School near his home, aged seven, in 1998.

Asperger’s Syndrome — thanks to science, we now have a diagnosis, so parents don’t blame themselves for their kid being a total dork. But this is small comfort when the creepy little weirdo kills six people:

A California gunman who went on a rampage near a Santa Barbara university stabbed three people to death at his apartment before shooting to death three more in a terrorizing crime spree through a neighborhood, sheriff’s officials said Saturday.
The three people in the apartment were among the six left dead Friday night during the shootings near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Elliot Rodger, 22, the suspected gunman, apparently killed himself, authorities said. . . .
Earlier Saturday, Alan Shifman — a lawyer who represents Peter Rodger, one of the assistant directors on “The Hunger Games” — issued a statement saying his client believes his son, Elliot Rodger, was the shooter. It was unclear how the son would have obtained a gun. The family is staunchly against guns, he added. . . .
Attorney Shifman said the Rodger family called police several weeks ago after being alarmed by YouTube videos “regarding suicide and the killing of people” that Elliot Rodger had been posting.
Police interviewed Elliot Rodger and found him to be a “perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human,” but noted that he had few friends and no girlfriend, he added.

So the family is “staunchly against guns,” and they called the police because they were worried about their creepy little weirdo son, but the police found the future mass murderer to be “perfectly polite” — the supreme gentleman, you might say.

Because no one can be blamed — not the parents, not the cops, and certainly not the shooter, who was a victim of Asperger’s Syndrome — some people go hunting for political scapegoats and (surprise) find what they’re looking for: Elliot Rodger was a racist because he wrote some stuff on an Internet forum complaining that he saw a black guy with four “hot white girls.” Never mind, of course, that Rodger was himself of mixed ancestry, and also never mind the real object of his murderous rage: “It’s been my life struggle to get a beautiful, white girl.” And, hey, let’s blame the NRA while we’re at it.

Meanwhile, we now have the Mass Murderer’s Manifesto — a 141-page autobiography — because what’s the point of being a mass murderer unless you’ve got a manifesto about how the innocent people you killed really deserved to die because of how unfair your life was?

UPDATE: Just spent about an hour of my life I’ll never get back reading the first 60 pages of the creepy little weirdo’s manifesto. He was very aware — in his conscious, rational mind — of his shortcomings, and understood that his resentments resulted from envy. But this rational awareness did not lead to any kind of effective coping strategy, nor did it quell the intensity of his emotions. He felt horribly humiliated by girls; his sense of being doomed to rejection made him fearful of social interaction with girls. Also, he was unusually obsessed with social status. When his father’s directing career took a downturn, his mother’s child-support was reduced, and she had to move into a less-affluent neighborhood. The boy was so embarrassed  by this that he stopped inviting friends to visit. Meanwhile, he disappeared into World of Warcraft — becoming that 21st-century cliché, the videogamer with zero social life.

UPDATE II: From Page 67 of the “Manifesto,” when the creepy little weirdo was 18 and had dropped out of college:

I continued searching for a job, but I still wasn’t able to find one. . . . The problem was that most of the jobs that were available to me at the time were jobs I considered to be beneath me. My mother wanted me to get a simple retail job, and the thought of myself doing that was mortifying. It would be completely against my character. I am an intellectual who is destined for greatness. I would never perform a low-class service job.

Oh, what a Special Snowflake — he was “destined for greatness”!

 

249 comments

  1. The answer is all on page 67:

    I continued searching for a job, but I still wasn’t able to find one. . . . The problem was that most of the jobs that were available to me at the time were jobs I considered to be beneath me. My mother wanted me to get a simple retail job, and the thought of myself doing that was mortifying. It would be completely against my character. I am an intellectual who is destined for greatness. I would never perform a low-class service job.

    I’d bet a case of Mountain Dew that the girls who might have been interested in him were also “beneath” him. He was short and not athletic, but his target girls — unfortunate pun realized while writing, but still sadly appropriate — were the “the hottest sorority house ” girls, the girls who were apparently way, way, way! out of his league. The short, not-so-hot girls, the nerd girls, the ones with whom he might have had a chance, if he had only tried, weren’t good enough for him.

    Ours is a society fixated on beauty, and every cultural message we receive is full of model-type women, and men, but the vast majority of us know in which league we can play. (Of course, I still think that I married up!)

    Unfortunately, Mr Rodger has set the pattern, and there are a lot more guys out there who aren’t all that different from him, and for those who are having suicidal thoughts along with similar feelings of rejection, the “trend” of the spectacular suicide is growing.

  2. concern00 wrote:

    The icing on the cake is that they are making sure there are also no coping skills to go along with that inevitable failure.

    And that is a huge problem: in an educational culture in which everybody is a winner just for playing, those who really aren’t winners in actual competition are left feeling cheated.

    And let’s be honest here: men compete for women, and women know it. Women compete for men, as well, though they do it differently, given the cultural norm that the man is supposed to ask out the woman.

    That cultural norm is the basis for a lot of frustration among the men who have a hard time getting up the nerve to ask a woman out. I have known a few of those types, men who are so afraid of being told, “No,” that they never even ask, thus foreclosing the possibility of a woman saying, “Yes.” Mr Rodger already admitted to that:

    They have all rejected me and looked down on me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance toward them, while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes.

    It’s not hard to see, in that, that he rarely, if ever, actually asked women out.

    I have heard a few guys really lament the cultural norm, thinking that women who might have some interest should be direct in their communication of it, ought to ask them out instead. The trouble is, when a man male lacks the confidence to ask women out, women recognize it, and rather than ‘helping’ him by making the first move, they figure that if he hasn’t the confidence to ask them out, he’s not worth going out with.

  3. Yeah, it kind of is difficult to be “constructive” about a person who went out and killed nine people because he knew that he was a loser.

  4. You have assumed that he “was abused and used by women who.constantly put him in the friend zone while always dangling the possibility of ‘more’.” That sounds to me to not have been the case, but that he was more probably ignored by them completely.

    However, think of what the “friend zone” is. The friend zone is the “you’re a nice guy, but I’m not interested in you that way” polite response, as opposed to the “get away from me, you loser” hard rejection. It can be argued that being polite simply drags things out, and the direct rejection is kinder in the end, but we don’t normally criticize people being courteous.

  5. While I philosophically support the idea that prostitution ought to be legal — I fail to see how it can be illegal to do something for cash that is perfectly legal if done for free — patronizing prostitutes would never have solved Mr Rodger’s problems. His complaint that the hot girls were never attracted to him would not have been ameliorated by finding women who were attracted only to his cash.

  7. I’d guess that even in a society where a lot of women will “give (away) a piece,” they usually don’t do so to men who don’t project an image of being able to make it a good ride. Mr Rodger, short, non-athletic and desperate — women can sense desperation — would not have been able to score even with the women who were profligate with their sexual favors, because he almost certainly didn’t look like he could take care of business.

  8. That the world is full of horrors was made full of horrors by people like Mr Rodger. There are a bunch of families feeling that horror, because he wanted to commit suicide spectacularly, to take a few people with him, to spread his own pain to others as he was dying.

    There are people who are born blind, or paraplegic, or with any of a number of problems, who do their best to make life not as much of a horror for themselves. They have my respect and admiration.

  9. I’m going to go out on a limb and say his Asperger’s Syndrome isn’t what caused him to do this. It was him being a self entitled douche bag. I’ve found that, while women do go for jerks, they generally avoid guys who are so stuck on themselves that they will be just an ornament. A prize. I have no sympathy for him. None. He wasn’t “A Nice Guy”. Women will still talk to nice guys even if they friend zone them. They wouldn’t talk to him because he wanted a worshiper not a girlfriend. This kid spent his whole life being given everything he asked for. When he decided to try to date girls the girls told him “No”. No one had ever done that to him before. No one was supposed to tell him no!?!? He was Elliot F!@#ing Rodgers! No one tells Elliot Rodgers no! They have to pay! So now we get this. Yeah, blame the NRA. Your kid wasn’t a member (probably because it wasn’t cool or beneath him or something). This kid’s self entitlement killed these people. The gun was just a tool to do it. /rant. (Sorry, I watched about a minute of his video manifesto and it pissed me off. What a douche.)

  10. “Kill a bunch of people and then myself.” Yeah, that’ll show ’em.

    Maybe he should’ve just tried coping; we’re all only in competition with ourselves in the end, anyway.

  12. I have a grandson with Asperger’s. The only person he’s talked of doing violence to is himself. Comparing notes with others who have a family member in the same straights I’ve found they have similar experiences.

  13. If we had a mental health system worthy of the name, he would have been taken off the streets. The Police should not have to be Shrinks.

  15. There are two ways of looking at the “friend zone.” One is from the view point of the PUA where you “ain’t getting’ nothin’. OTOH, the friend zone is where marriages begin. I personally never wanted a girl that put out for the world. I wanted a decent girl for a decent life. Marriage is a sexual relationship, but sex is not all marriage is about.

    You need to be a good friend with some one you marry. If not, then you don’t have anything to build a life long relationship on. I’m still in the friend zone 39 years later.

  16. I notice he didn’t blame knife and car manufacturers, when the guy stabbed three people to death and ran over a bunch of others with his car.

  18. You never have been to Utah or North Dakota, have you? And if you have, you didn’t learn the rules.

  20. Driving a BMW and attending the Hollywood premiere of The Hunger Games is “low social status?” I think not. His parents should have had him committed to a psychiatric facility while he was still a minor, where he could have received treatment and kept off the streets for as long as he posed a danger. His own grandmother stated that he’d had serious mental health issues throughout his life. His parents are wealthy. Why was he out and walking about?

  22. Perhaps more clarity is needed, or we need to know more about what the police knew, and when. But, if he was making videos about mass killings and such before, and the police did nothing, what does that say?

  23. Nailed it on the comparison to class warfare. And in most socialist “revolutions,” the mass killings are done, but are then legally sanctioned.

  24. Kirby, I generally agree with your comments, but this one sets my teeth on edge.

    His parents knew the kid had problems; that’s one reason why they called the police. What sort of training does one need when a person is posting videos talking about committing violent acts?

    Law enforcement, as a rule, has no legal means of deciding when someone is dangerous due to mental illness. For better or for worse, they lack the authority to intervene prior to someone committing a crime.

    This problem goes back to when people started getting kicked out of mental institutions if they weren’t a “threat to society”, and got worse when people stopped accepting personal responsibility.

    Training? Please. That might have helped. But this problem runs deeper than that.

  25. I have Asperger’s, and I’ve never had a premonition of violence my entire life. It simply doesn’t give rise to sociopathic tendencies, as it did with this twerp.

    Really, we’ll have to look elsewhere.

  26. All the arguments aside, and as a practical matter; if he was socially inept as is suggested, he didn’t get close enough to be in the friend zone. I’m betting he spent a great deal of time in isolation, and came up with his victim narrative to explain away his frustrations. It’s always easier to blame something external, than look inside and realize that one needs to change. He ended up believing his own narrative, He drank his own Kool-Aid, so to speak.

  28. What, and have the stigma of a son in the nut house? That wouldn’t do at all for one of the Hollywood elite. Image, y’know!

  30. You need to be a good friend with some one you marry. If not, then you don’t have anything to build a life long relationship on. I’m still in the friend zone 39 years later.

    Bingo. Just celebrated 26 years of marriage to a woman who was my friend long before we were romantically involved. One day, we just woke up and realized that “friendship” was the foundation of a truly lasting relationship.

  31. Not much to add, but I note the Media’s prurient interest in these stories, providing the perpetrator with the 21st Century version of Valhalla is a contributing factor in these sorts of crimes. People whose minds are so warped want the “blaze of glory.” These people have always existed but never had the incentive of knowing that their horrific behavior could get them world wide attention in a matter of seconds.

  32. Despair and short time preferences work together with this too. Feeling as if nothing is ever going to change (despair) and not being willing to undergo the Bataan Death March of Patience (short time preferences) because the pain is Right Now make things harder.

    I’ve heard it argued that pain multiplies. You don’t add douchness, and rejection, and all the rest….you multiply them. If you’re thinking ‘oh my stars, that’s a level of pain that I wonder he kept breathing from the agony’ then you got the idea.

    Good news is, I think, that pain also divides. So if you’re walking thru hell, each area of pain reduced can reduce the overall level a LOT. I think. Learning to be content, or being driven to improve oneself seem to be the major paths of improving the situation from mind crushing horror to something approaching normality.

  34. Life and the people around you make of them.
    Suck it up, look to yourself and what you can do to make a difference and move on from whatever hasn’t been working for you.
    Those who think “All women are this..” or “All men are that…” just need to change themselves and those they interact with and be patient.
    Life is good!

  36. Thats why you send him to a posh nut house on the East Coast up under the pretense of eating him treated for alcoholism. Geez, don’t Californians know how to snob their way through a crisis?

  37. $30 ?
    I remember when that would’ve covered a whole week and a couple of “shows” in TJ.

    Inflation… meh.

  43. I’m pretty socially inept. Always have been. The difference is that I never used that as an excuse to hate the people around me. And in a way, it gave me an ability to completely ignore the normal teenage desire to fit in with people who took joy in tormenting me. That in turn resulted in them eventually abandoning me as a target because they got no response.

    Do I have Asperger’s on some level? Possibly. I’ve never been tested and don’t see the point of being diagnosed now. I do know my parents contemplated skipping me a grade and didn’t because they were worried that, as socially inept and withdrawn as I was around kids of my own age, it would have been worse if they had moved me up. I don’t think so, but it hardly matters now.

    Whatever issues this kid had, the Asperger’s didn’t make them any easier to deal with. Though that certainly doesn’t excuse what he did.

  44. No other way to terrorize the populace into obedience, or to get rid of any potential resistance.

  45. helps me out Matt. I hate people empathizing with amoral psychopaths at the expense of the victim. I vote he’s a worthless piece of murdering feces

  46. creep=desperate; lack of confidence. Which reveals the shallowness of women.

    And remember ‘misssssogynistic’ is spelled with Five S’s.

  48. “Straits” but I get your point.

    I have two autistic nephews. One is now in college, the other will never be anything but a sweet kid.

    The shrinks recently pulled the term “Asperger’s” from the lexicon, literally because of Sheldon on “big Bang Theory”. Once they called him Asperger’s on-air the shrinks were flooded with parents wanting their kid diagnosed.

    Now it’s “autistic spectrum disorder,” which covers so broad a range of disorders as to be clinically useless, I would think, lumping functional folks in with dysfunctional.

    I guess those of us who once might have been considered Asperger’s will just have to go back to being plain old assholes.

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