Matt Walsh:
I won’t put his picture on here or link to his stupid YouTube videos. I won’t give you excerpts from his “manifesto” or tell you about his boring, predictable biography.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. You’ve seen it everywhere by now. This man-child wanted to be famous, and now he is. He wanted to captivate the nation with his tedious, pitiful ramblings, and how he has. He wanted to be sexually desired, and his rampage has even accomplished that. He killed six people just to get attention, and the media is happy to oblige.
Indeed, whenever some depraved narcissist tries to elevate his lonely, meandering existence to mythological status, all he has to do is record a couple of videos and then go out and slaughter a few innocent civilians. Every time, the message we send is clear: OK. We will give you exactly what you wanted. We will plaster your face all over the news and our Facebook pages. We will talk about you incessantly for weeks. Your name will be known, while your victims remain nameless.
Why do we find evil so incredibly fascinating, when, in truth, it is one-dimensional and mundane? It wreaks havoc and causes great tragedy, but that does not make it some sort of cinematic, awe-inspiring thing.
But I suppose it’s useless to complain about it. Humanity has always seen something intriguing and mysterious in the banality of evil. That’s how it lures you in. That’s how it catches you, converts you, empties you out and turns you into nothing. And when you finally implode and disintegrate, everyone will stare slack-jawed and riveted. Your nothingness will seem so damned interesting to us.
So I will try not to contribute to The Coward’s legend as I make just a few points in light of his murder spree in Santa Barbara:
First, if you immediately attempt to use the mass killing of innocent people to score ideological points, you are demonstrating many of the same characteristics as the mass murderer himself. You are displaying the same kind of detachment, selfishness, callousness, manipulativeness, and lack of compassion, integrity, and empathy that ultimately drives people to do these terrible things.
Calm down. Get a grip. Go away. The bodies aren’t even in the ground yet. Shut up with your inane hash tags and your sickening, smarmy “See? I told ya so!” victory laps. It’s gross. It’s disturbing. People are dead and you’re coming up with cute Twitter slogans? Have we all completely lost our minds?
It’s true that The Coward apparently hated women. He also hated men, his family, himself, and all of humanity. He lamented his lack of sexual experience in a series of YouTube videos and said he wanted to kill women to exact vengeance upon them for not sleeping with him. Ultimately, he murdered three women, three men, and himself.
That’s all it took for the liberal feminists to pounce. They trotted out their #YesAllWomen hashtag and declared The Coward to be a “symptom” of a larger issue. He’s an example of something all women have experienced, they say. See? SEE? LOOK AT US. FORGET THE VICTIMS. ALL OF OUR FEMINIST TALKING POINTS ARE VINDICATED!
They said he’s nothing but a product of a misogynistic culture. “Misogyny kills,” they said. Not “evil kills,” or “hate kills,” or “this particular individual kills” — just misogyny.
The deranged psycho in California can’t just be a deranged psycho in California. He has to be a point. An example. A case study. A platform. We can’t weep for the lost and grieve with their families — we have to argue about the War on Women, as if this lunatic somehow exemplifies and illustrates the universal misogynistic feelings of all men everywhere.
I have to wonder whether the Eternal Victims who’ve used this tragedy to advance their feminist agenda ACTUALLY think that most or all or many men share even one shred of one crumb of one iota of this maniac’s views about women. Do they hate men so much that they’ve convinced themselves we’re all one step away from murdering sorority sisters, or are they callously pretending they believe it because it makes for great propaganda (and it gives them something to do on a lazy Memorial Day weekend)?
Sadly, I think the latter might be closer to the truth.
Most appallingly, I saw dozens of women on Twitter using this event as an opportunity to complain about the ‘sexism’ they’ve personally suffered — like allegedly not getting paid as much as their male coworkers, or being criticized for their skimpy attire. Suddenly, fashion and salary issues are put in the same category as cold-blooded murder. Truly, the narcissism and tone deafness of many in our society never ceases to amaze me.
A woman told me today that the point is this: he’s an awful man, and “awful men cause harm to all women at some point.”
Alright, sure, but I think this is a better way of putting it: awful people cause harm to all people at some point. This story no more ‘says something’ about men, than Andrea Yates or Aileen Wuornos or Jodi Arias say something about women. One lone mass killer doesn’t prove anything about a man’s nature anymore than your neighbor’s cheating wife proves something about a woman’s nature.
Besides, for every act of violence and cowardice a man perpetrates, a dozen men commit acts of courage and kindness. But you’ll notice that those men never get thrown on stage for examination. Liberal feminists never give them credit, or point to their virtues, or turn their valor into encouraging and supportive hash tags. If anything, they’ll find a reason to turn even the heroes into villains. It’s this propensity — this constant, relentless, soul-sucking cynicism — that will forever make the purity of their motives appear, at best, dubious.
Second, and in the same vein: this has nothing to do with gun control.
The Coward killed three people with a gun and three with a knife. He shot several more, and injured several others with his vehicle. If this proves anything, it proves that murderous people will use any tool at their disposal to carry out their violent fantasies.
He left ten crime scenes in his wake, and committed dozens of crimes in the process. None of these laws prevented the massacre, because laws can do very little in the face of men who care not for the law nor their own safety.
As usual, the ethically challenged MSM simply sees this as another way to restart and sell the far-left’s gun control agenda. They talk about his “motivation” almost as if to portray him as a victim of his presumed “mental instability”. It is my opinion that he was nothing more than a vengeful punk who was brought up listening to the “all must be made equal” socialist mantra. This spoiled brat’s problem wasn’t “income inequality”, it was “sexual participation inequality”. When you are a socialist, living amongst fellow socialist cliches people of a particular status quo, you are lead to believe that you should have an equal “piece of the action.” What he did doesn’t necessarily indicate he was “insane” it only indicates that he was an evil vengeful self-centered killer.
Millions of “involuntary virgins” live with this social stigma and are even suffer at the snide remarks and sniggers of their peers. Yes it hurts to be painted as a “loser”, and such individuals should be encouraged to seek out sympathetic individuals to help them deal with the rejection, but they don’t go on killing sprees because of it.
@Ditto: I have only seen the very basics of this story and have not been even slightly interested in it. I don’t care about the fact that he only wanted publicity, or whatever. Don’t even know his name and don’t care.
Even Drudge and a number of other websites have plastered his picture and manifesto and whiny complaints on the public wall of the Intartubes…laying the groundwork for the next round of copycat knife/gun/car wielding maniacs to try the Triathlon he’s effectively set up. Sorry…bury him face down in a manure pile with a tombstone that reads “Total Loser”. and remove his photos from the entire web. Harsh, but so is being stabbed or shot by this pollution in the gene pool.
Anyone in California who drives a BMW, has movie industry connections, enough money (he bought three handguns and a ton of ammo, despite Californistan’s draconian gun laws), is a liberal, and can’t get kissed, let alone laid, is truly a L.O.S.E.R. and unworthy of the adulation and notoriety that is being lavished on him….a dead-eyed creepy psychopath whose parents were nowhere to be found in his life when they might have made a difference…
Yeah they saw his manifesto and videos, and were trying to get to him…too little, and way too late.
K.Kat.
@Redteam:
I wish I could say that, but it seems like reports on this pr*ck keep popping up. Now the television news is continually repeating videos by one of the victim’s fathers who want’s to blame the whole thing on the NRA, rather than the punk who killed his kid. This ‘distraught’ father is using the death of his kid to beat the drum for more gun control rather than considering that: (1) Three of the victims were stabbed to death, not shot. (2) The “perp’s” parents had advance knowledge of his mental state, and that he had “issues” since he was a child but I suspect they didn’t want to harm his fragile psyche by getting him help. (Because it the parents didn’t seek counseling for him, he did not set off any mental health flags. (3) He had posted various disturbing videos and rants to the internet, that his family knew about. (4) The local police knew he had issues from past calls, but they apparently didn’t take it as seriously as they should have. (I suspect because this was a child of an affluent family). Why the grieving father doesn’t even consider those directly effecting failures as having more valid bearing on what lead to the killers ability to buy his guns, I don’t know. Sadly, I suspect it is due to ignoring the fact of the case, in order to attack an organization that the parent already hates. I have sympathy for the victims and their families, but I am disturbed that at least one of them appears to be using the death of their child as a weapon against an innocent organization. I have experienced people before using this very emotional and irrational blaming of an innocent fourth, fifth, sixth, (etc.) level detached entity before, while they at the same time ignoring the obvious.