Even now that we know his name, the Umpqua Community College shooter remains an enigma, and commenters online and in the media have attempted to fill in the details with a lot of speculation, much of it fairly wild.
But the strangest speculation I’ve run across so far came from Mike Cernovich, the juice-hawking manosphere blogger who’s perhaps best known as #Gamergate’s “based lawyer.” Yesterday, Cernovich thought the long delay in reporting even the most basic information about the shooter was likely an indication that something nefarious was up.
Police inspecting bags of students at Umpqua Community College after the shooting today
UPDATE: The shooter has been identified as 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer. Rumors spread earlier in the day that the shooter was a a regular 4channer and active Youtuber known as “the eggman.” Obviously they were wrong.
This is beyond fucked up. In this archived thread from 4chan’s /r9k/ board, the apparent shooter at Umpqua Community College told fellow channers yesterday of his plans to shoot up a school today. He didn’t specify which school, mentioning only that it was in the “northwest.” /r9k/ is a board heavily populated by so-called “incels,” and the media is reporting that the apparent shooter regularly posted bitter complaints about his lack of success with women,
UPDATE 2: There is a lot of confusing and contradictory information out there, and the IDing of the killer has actually raised more questions than it’s resolved. An apparent Myspace page for Harper-Mercer suggests that he was obsessed both with guns and with the IRA.
There have also been reports that he was targeting Christians. According to the New York Post, a “woman who claimed to have a grandmother inside a writing class in Snyder Hall, where a portion the massacre unfolded” reported that
“The shooter was lining people up and asking if they were Christian,” she wrote. “If they said yes, then they were shot in the head. If they said no, or didn’t answer, they were shot in the legs.
Is the Myspace page really his? Is the report from the alleged granddaughter bullshit? Was the 4chan posting yesterday actually from him, or a comment from a troll that just happened to have been posted the day before a school shooting in the northwest?
I don’t know. But I still recommend that you read the rest of this post, if only to see the comments from the other 4channers.
Has pickup artist shitbag and wannabe philosopher Roosh Vaizadeh gone all Jack Chick on us?
Chick, you may recall, is the legendary fundamentalist Christian cartoonist who built a tiny publishing empire on miniature comic-book “Chick Tracts” spelling out the terrible temptations that lurk everywhere in our fallen world.
And we return once again to the Red Pill subreddit, where the locals are finding intellectual inspiration in the manifesto of one slightly problematic Norwegian, er, thinker — Anders Breivik, a far-right, antifeminist ideologue who decided to promote this manifesto by murdering 77 people with guns and a bomb.
The regulars in the Red Pill subreddit are working themselves into a little bit of a lather over a story about an angry wife who tossed her beta-bucks-providing husband out of the house after he was photographed dancing on a table with a belly dancer at a bachelor party. Adding insult to injury, this was very the same woman who, only a week earlier, had been out on the town with “a handsome French bowling instructor.”
That woman’s name? Marge Simpson, her beta-abusing, alpha-chasing ways dissected in a blog post titled “The Simpsons: Hypergamy, and Male Disposability in “Life on the Fast Lane” and “Homer’s Night Out” (1990).”
Yep. They’re getting worked up about two quarter-century old Simpsons episodes:
Rebel Wilson: Giving Red Pill dickweasels heart attacks since whenever she started doing that
So over on the Roosh V Forum, the regulars are wondering if anything can free them, and the world at large, from the terrible injustice of having to share the planet with fat women no man would ever want to have sex with, except for all of those men who do.
In another grand public relations coup for the Men’s Rights movement, Paul Elam’s drunken party tape has been featured on The Majority Report with Sam Seder, a sharp and funny political podcast I’ve started listening to on a fairly regular basis (and that you all might want to check out).
The sound you hear is a thousand #GamerGater heads exploding
So a couple of days ago, as you probably have heard, Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn testified at the United Nations about online harassment of women. The two, along with a number of other victims of/experts on online harassment also paid a visit to Google Ideas to share their thoughts on the matter.
This is, in essence, what #GamerGate has achieved over the past year: By launching an unprecedented wave of organized harassment, mostly aimed at women, the Gators have brought about a new awareness of the seriousness of online harassment. And they’ve given the women whose lives and careers they’ve tried most energetically to destroy an influence they never would have had otherwise.
