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

  2. Looking at that picture, I think women would have got the “avoid him” buzz loud and clear.

  3. I’m getting the feeling moody wimps are more of a threat than the bellowing jocks or braying party animals, who are at least engaged with the people around them.

    Maybe Belushi was right to smash that folk singer’s guitar.

  4. They could have just said “rehab” and everything would have been cool, socially.

    You have no idea how toxic for young people that environment is for raising kids. I watched some of the biggest names try to save their kids from going down this and other destructive paths and fail.

    When you have to make a phone call that runs “Send an armed man to my house my child is coming home!” something about your life doesn’t work…just saying.

  6. Sorry for your lonely, painful life but I don’t buy your diagnosis of the shooter at all. Reading his demented diatribe, I don’t see a wounded, scared little boy, but rather a nihilistic narcissist with a sense of entitlement. The girls owe him sexual favors …well just because he’s so absolutely special.
    In reality he’s a sociopathic, self absorbed monster without a soul. He has daddy’s money and a black heart . Bad combo.

  8. It’s a bit much for a mass murderer to complain about other men who are “douchebags.” No matter how lousy those men are, if they haven’t killed anyone recently, they are doing much better than this freak.

  9. See, this is what I call “constructive.” If someone had been around to explain that to Elliot Rodger, there might be several young women alive today.

  10. Bingo!
    I’ve not heard it put that way before but that simplicity covers most of life’s “problems”.

  11. Well number 1.. social status is not a function of wealth. Plenty of rich, lonely losers out there, like this kid. I’m not saying he didn’t have psychological problems, but I just think there is more to this than just some lonely psycho kid. Someone or something set him off.. also the fact that he was wealthy may have made it worse. He may have been exposed to gold diggers were repulsed by him, but dangled a future in front of his psychotic face in order to gain favors and money from him. He probably felt damn used.

  13. He’s dead, so it hardly matters in his case.
    But right this moment, there are other messed-up young men out there thinking about the same thing.

    So go ahead, withhold your empathy. When the body count comes back, you can pat yourself on the back for being so righteous.

    As I said before, you better hope you don’t know any of the victims.

  16. I have noticed that men will occasionally say they would love it if a woman would take the initiative and go after them. In practice, I’ve never seen this work. Not to say it never has, but on the whole I have been assured by a few men that they didn’t particularly like being pursued because it wasn’t fun for them. Part of being a man is the “thrill of the hunt”, or so I’ve been told. So if there is a perfectly good woman that would do anything for a certain guy, he’ll more likely than not ignore her because in his mind she’ll always be there (this is not my opinion, this is stuff I’ve had men tell me). I realize that isn’t true across the board, but my (limited) experience has certainly not disproven it.

  17. “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.”

    Yes — he saw girls as status-objects, and needed a “hot” girl to validate his sense of self. He could not content himself with “10 the hard way,” i.e., dating a 6 and a 4, and so ultimately his score was zero. Aesop could have made a fable of this pathetic kid’s life.

  18. Adam Lanza was also diagnosed with Asperger’s. Your point, that there are many, many people with this affliction who never harm anyone is well taken. But, I wouldn’t quite minimize it as “few if any”, which suggests the number approaches zero.

  25. the supreme gentleman

    Gentleman. Gentle man. It’s a supreme pity he didn’t understand the word he tagged himself with.

  27. He was 22, had Asperger’s and was a virgin?

    Big deal, I was a virgin until I was 22, and if Asperger’s was a diagnosis that was around back then, I doubtless would have been diagnosed with it. I found a girl that was as geeky as I was and solved that problem, and married her eventually.

    The Internet was built by 20-somethings with Asperger’s and most of them didn’t get laid that much. Very few of them ever killed anyone.

  31. If you want to blame someone or something besides the perp himself you could easily pick on our oversexualized culture where free premarital sex is considered an entitlement. But even that’s a stretch. Blaming this act on anything but Rodger’s extremely disturbed mind is like blaming the Manson family killings on “Helter Skelter”.

  32. Oh, the poor baby. Here, I was under the impression that he was trying to use women for sex and gratification of his ego. I had no idea that this mass murderer was the victim of nasty, vicious, self-absorbed women.

  33. Didn’t he watch a premier of The Hunger Games?

    Was it that hard for him to ask why Katniss was attracted to Gale (who taught her to hunt) and Peeta (who saved her life in Book 1 and volunteered to go into the arena to be with her in Book 2)? Why they were attracted to poor Katniss, on the brink of starvation, of a lower social caste than Peeta?

  34. I corrected the mistake. One of those things like “your” and “you’re” that simply comes out automatically and you don’t catch it.

    I agree with you on ASD. The shrinks have done little more than foul things up. Homosexuality was removed for political reasons back int eh early 70s, without any rhyme or reason other than politics. ASD is simple minded foolishness that doesn’t allow anyone to really deal with the problem. Additionally, why would a sane parent want their kid diagnosed with Asperger’s? It’s a problem to be dealt with, that my wife, mainly, and I dealt with in our son. By the time we resuced my grandson from Georgia’s state supported kidnapping operation, it was too late for our grandson.

  35. Bluntly, there are few people that say that to anyone. I doubt his parents realized it, or cared enough to explain it.

  36. We really need to come up with a notion other than “to blame” or “not to blame” – pick one and one only. Life isn’t that simple. The psyche isn’t that simple.

    Putting children in a soup of normalized sex mania, culturally-bolstered narcissism, violent entertainment, and personality-altering drugs is GOING to have consequences.

    Otherwise, why do we argue over the culture?

  37. Aren’t too many therapists left who DON’T peddle drugs.

    My teenage nephew went into therapy and got a bottle of drugs on day one – completely unbeknownst to his parents.

  38. We have no bases in the PI any more. There are several men I know that had been stationed there that married a Filipina, and they do make nice wives because of the way they are raised.

    You don’t have to be in service to chase skirts in the PI either. Here’s one place you could start,

    http://www.loveme.com/

  39. We have no bases in the PI any more. There are several men I know that had been stationed there that married a Filipina, and they do make nice wives because of the way they are raised.

    You don’t have to be in service to chase skirts in the PI either. Here’s one place you could start,

    http://www.loveme.com/

  40. I think Stacy puts a little too much emphasis on the fact this guy was not quite the alpha male. Most beta males don’t go on mass killing sprees. Or Asperger’s (which is highly overdiagnosed IMHO).

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