Creepy Little Weirdo’s Murder Rant Becomes Cultural ‘Rashomon’

Isla Vista mass murderer Elliot Rodger’s 7-minute video and 141-page manifesto have become a Rashomon — a story whose meaning is different to everyone. The Washington Post has Style section writer Ann Hornaday telling us how Rodger’s video rant reflects “misogynist” themes promoted by Hollywood.

Meanwhile, the shooter’s mention of Monette Moio — she shows up on Page 41 of Rodger’s manifesto as “a pretty blonde girl” he said teased him when he was in 8th grade and she was in 7th grade — drew an angry reaction from the girl’s father:

The woman’s father said it was Saturday morning when his 20-year-old daughter realized Rodger had made her part of his sick story.
“She’s devastated by this,” the dad said in a phone interview. “She doesn’t even remember this guy. . . . She’s always been the most delicate kid you’d ever want to meet. For him to call her a bully, this kid was really disillusioned.
“She was 10 years old,” the dad added. “He was two years older than her. He was in my son’s class. She was in the seventh grade and he was in eighth grade. . . . Can you imagine a 10-year-old kid bullying a 12-year-old? This little, petite girl bullying him?”
In his screed, Rodger called his crush an “evil bitch” who “teased and ridiculed” him and “wounded me deeply.”

The reality — this was just a girl he had a crush on in 8th grade, a girl who never even noticed him — became something completely different inside the twisted mind of the Creepy Little Weirdo. Speaking of twisted minds, Amana Marcotte’s got a long rant headlined, “How ‘Pick-Up Artist’ Philosophy and Its More Misogynist Backlash Shaped Mind of Alleged Killer Elliot Rodger.”

PJ Media’s Dr. Helen Smith fires back: “The Elliot Rodger Case: If Pick-Up Artists Are Guilty, Then So Are the Feminists.” Dr. Helen is a psychologist who has specialized in studying male violence and is also the author of Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream — and Why It Matters. If anybody is an actual expert in this area, she is.

The focus on “pickup artist” (PUA) culture as an influence on Roger is probably misguided. As his manifesto makes clear, the Creepy Little Weirdo had been overwhelmed by resentment and a sense of failure since he was in middle school, and he didn’t start ranting on PUA forums until after he had already decided on his “Day of Retribution.” So he acquired from PUA culture a jargon (“Alpha males,” etc.) but this was not the source of his anger, nor did it exercise a determining influence on his actions. As for the PUA culture itself, they are denouncing Elliot Rodger as “effeminate.”

 

 

59 comments

  1. High gas prices are really pissing me off. Clearly, they are also what drove this little shitstain to murder.

  2. If his daughter was “devastated by this,” why did her father decide to make this public? These are things that, if they are truly sickening to the family, normal people keep quiet!

  3. You have to forgive the lovely Miss Marcotte: for a feminist writer, Elliot Rodger must become a symptom of or the result of something “that feminists have been raising alarms about for many years now,” because to treat him as just an individual headcase threatens the feminists’ entire raison d’être, without which they have nothing left but to fade into the background and become just normal working people.

    Feminism needs constant crises, constant things about which to complain, because the original goals of feminism — the right to work, the right to own property in their own names, the right to copulate with whomever they choose, and basically equal rights under the law — have already been achieved. Women already make up a significant majority of students matriculating at our universities, and even the (supposed) pay gap has disappeared. Without the crises, the feminists have nothing to do, and feminism becomes a non-paying “profession.”

  4. As for the PUA culture itself, they are denouncing Elliot Rodger as “effeminate.”

    OUCH! If he wasn’t already dead, that would leave a mark.

  5. Because in the modern CNN inspired 24/7/till the next big news environment, these people would be stalked and asked to explain thier “leaning in” daughter’s actions on TV. The dad was probably trying to get ahead of the cycle by acting out as he did and hopefully shut down debate on his daughters actions (or inactions) of a decade ago. Also knowing some of the tin foil brigades at a certain national broadcasting channel or some Web based political philosophy explanation sites; she would receive a rip apart for not noticing this rich and we’ll connected kid and that she was an evil woman to the letter C level of description. That she is ultimately guilty of this crime as well, ala Nancy Grace style of punditry.

  6. Isla Vista mass murderer Elliot Rodger’s 7-minute video and 141-page manifesto have become a Rashomon — a story whose meaning is different to everyone.

    Not unusual. It’s almost second nature to try to find some meaning in seemingly random instances of violence. My attempting to find the cause, we seek to reassure ourselves that we will never find ourselves in the position of victim; that it cannot happen to us. Of course, that’s ludicrous. While there may be a number of factors underlying young Rodger’s killing spree, the fact of the matter is, evil exists in this world. Rain falls upon the just and the unjust. As long as there are humans with all their flaws, there will be such events.

  7. It’s the ghoul factor again. Somebody dies in a manner that draws media attention, then ghouls try to make political hay out of it.

  8. I agree. I think I’ll go postal on a few Burger Kings in retribution.
    Not serious, but it makes as much sense as what he did.

  9. Not me. I’m just a spectator. I was glad to sit back and watch my puppy discover her tail and laugh. Not funny in this case, but getting into the circle with them gets you nothing but dizzy.

  10. I posted this link and comment in updates over at my post on Cotes’ reparations article: AoSHQ: “The Power of Whiteness:” Touré’s Glib Dismissal of a Descendant of a Holocaust Survivor Raises Eyebrows  This reminds me of The Sopranos episode where every character was narcissistically focused on their own historical persecution.  That episode is generally hated by most fans, but this little speech by Tony at the end is awesome.  The Sopranos visited the issue of victim-hood in other episodes previous to this (this theme definitely plays into the creepy little weirdo’s shooting in California).

  11. It is also important to understand that the kid was messed by the time he entered puberty. That Dad & Mom may have suggested he see a shrink after he dropped out of college is meaningless. The idea the signs haven’t been there for a decade at least is preposterous.

    And who the heck is Ann Hornaday to chime in on it? She’s a “leisure” writer whose background is as a movie critic. I suppose having worked for NYT, the Austin American-Statesman, the Baltimore Sun, and now WaPo, that she thinks herself qualified to write about abnormal psychology, but she isn’t.

    My question is: why does anyone care what she thinks?

    Of course, that goes double for Mandy, because you don’t need to read her drivel to know what she thinks. “If it’s male, hate it; if it’s a baby, kill it” pretty much sums up her philosophy.

  12. As I keep saying, Elliot Rodgers’ problem wasn’t that he couldn’t get laid; it was that he was a friggin psycho, and one side effect of being a friggin psycho is that women don’t want to sleep with you.

  13. Not if you hang back and wait for them to fall down at your feet, anyway. There seem to be a fair number of women out there who like their men with a side order of crazy.

  14. While it is an ambitious topic (that I am glad they took on), most of the dialog is too preachy and obvious in that episode, but that particular scene works incredibly well. It remains one of my favorite scenes from The Sopranos.

  15. Her father didn’t make this public, that sick twisted nasty sh*tstain did. He mentioned her by name, so the bastard gets to slander her from beyond the grave, the f*cking d*ckless coward.

    Yeah, he was a “supreme gentleman” all right.

    Were I the girl’s dad I’d be trying to break into the morgue, just to kick the evil SOB’s ass. Well, maybe not – but I would put the media on notice that if any of them approached my family it would be at risk of their lives.

  16. He isn’t a side order of crazy; he’s not even the main course of crazy. He’s an entire (mad) cow worth of psycho.

  17. Well, of course I favor the reasonable restrictions on voting that were in place in the late 18th century, when only white, male property owners could cast ballots!

  18. From The Victory Girls:

    Isla Vista Tragedy: Rodgers Family Calls For Gun Control
    by Jodi Giddings on May 27, 2014

    Over the Memorial Day weekend, twenty people were murdered in heavily gun-restricted Chicago. Eight more were wounded in gun-restricted Detroit.

    But those victims are mostly nameless and faceless, unworthy of mention by those who profess compassion for victims of gun crime. The Left stands notorious for their exploitation of the victims of violence, specifically gun violence that results in attention-grabbing headlines, to push their agenda to disarm America. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” they say. And the reaction to the atrocity committed by an evil, and highly unstable young man (whose name deserves to be forgotten) in Isla Vista last week against innocent, unarmed citizens is no exception.

    Well, of course those aren’t major stories: only one or two were killed at a time, and most (if not all) of the shooters were black, and most (if not all) of the victims were black. There were no 141-page ravings left by the killers, and those stories are just not news.

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