The Elliot Rodger Phenomenon-Hate...Misogyny...Racism....Fascism...and Elitism

There are many distinct viewpoints on the life and death of Elliot Rodgers, but I only want to discuss two distinct schools of thought.

The tell-alls and the tell-nothing-at-all.

Which school do you fall in?

See, I'm writing this now, 5 days after writing my initial blog, Elliot Rodger and visions in His Twisted World, in response to all that has happened since that fateful day on May 24th, 2014, when Elliot Rodger decided to go on a killing spree that killed 7, including himself, and wound 13 others in Isla Vista.

I was prompted to write this second article, based on the multitude of conflict the the Elliot Rodger massacre has created in the media--or not. Five distinct interaction or exchanges prompted me to write this second installment about the subject, and I will name them as follows.

1) Take 10 news blog on Facebook
2) Pia Glenn on twitter @PiaGlenn
3) Charlie Peach on twitter @PoliticsPeach
4) youtube
5) The Elliot Rodger manifesto

The last one on the list came first. I write. I seldom blog, nor do I pretend to be a journalist of any repute. I delve into shit that most people will never venture into out of fear or ignorance. It's called history. Everyone has one. Almost everything has one. Then you have current events. Then you have those blurred lines in between the two, where they simultaneously meet and join and become one and the same. This would be the case with Elliot Rodger. He is both a current event and history, at the same time.

I woke up Saturday, May 24th, 2014 to find an odd invitation in my twitter DM's. It was from a group called Take 10. They're a group of journalist who just hit the pavement, hot and hard, and are trying to make a name for themselves in the world of journalism. I'm not a journalist. I'm a writer. That didn't stop one of their people from looking at a story I wrote on google, called Racism--Oakland--and other stories, and asking me to join their ranks as a contributor.

I was excited, to have such and offer. See, any writer loves to be asked to join a group that will get their writing seen, by placing it before the public eye. This was not to be though. Being the Saturday before Memorial Day, I was given two major assignments to complete. 1) I had two days of smoking Barbeque and making my homemade-by hand-from scratch family barbeque sauce and 2) write my first article for Take 10. I was thinking about something simple for them, but a rarely do simple when I write. I like to sink my teeth into the subject I'm writing about, and they breaking news on Elliot Rodger seemed like a good idea at the time.

Here's where I went wrong,---but my intentions were honorable.

I get gut feeling about news and history. I see how things will play out by the way thing are being reported in the mainstream media. So, as a historian, I try my best to capture the moment as it happens, while it's happening, because all of this social networking we are privy will one day be used to study past events. Like reading the works of Mary Chesnut's 'Dairy From Dixie', and relaying the message via Ken Burn's Civil War. Yes--I read extensively. That's when I had read in one on the many 'flash' articles that there was a Elliot Rodger manifesto on-line. I was excited, because the news hadn't been very forth coming about why Elliot had decided to go on this shooting rampage that was breaking news everywhere, with little breaking about the reasons.

As I prepped my grill and dry rubbed the brisket, ribs, tri-tip and chicken, I began to ponder what I would find in this manifesto of this man's twisted mind. When I finally sat down to read it, it made my brain hurt. 141 pages, with the last few left blank, which means there was a bit of editing going on as it was written. There are things we will never know about Elliot Rodger. but there are things we know for certain.  The excerpts below are from My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger; By Elliot Rodger [1]

1) He did not like African American people at all.

2) He did not like Hispanic people at all.

3) His parents knew he was troubled and even sent him to Morocco, only to weaken and bring him back to America after one week.

4) That he admittedly had 'fascist' leanings

5) That he tried to whore out his own mother for the sake of living in a well-to-do family

6) That he was visited by police officers who never took the time to really look into his videos.

So, after reading Elliot's full manifesto which took two whole days, in order to write my first article about this lost elitist, I began to see a number of article pop up on the internet, from major news sources, although none of them addressed any of the findings within his manifesto. I also found in odd, as of this writing that not one article I've read mentioned how Elliot acted out his massacre exactingly in accordance with manifesto. I was so eager to have my first article post by Take 10 that I pushed hard for someone to review it so I could move on to this one. Alas, it would never come to fruition. See, Take 10 wanted me to make a choice between using their weblink address or my own blog address. I was under the impression that when you ask someone to work as a "contributor", that they link to your page, or figure out a way to work with you. This was not the case.

I'm not a journalist.

I have no journalistic aspirations.

I document events, tell stories, and cite facts.

So, before I began my new career as a contributing journalist, I was fired--which was fine with me, because if not done appropriately, journalism can be a time eater and cut into your literary aspirations. I think the group had nice people in it, and I think that using the pseudonym "21 Century Mark Twain" confused the editor-in-chief as to what I was all about. She was stuck on "Mark Twain"--not "21 Century". After a bit of choice words between us, we decided that I didn't fit their mold and visa versa. I wish I could care more, but I think I asked her too many pertinent questions like, "What does Take 10 stand for?", and I didn't like the answer I was given because the title stands for 10 writers, and at the point of accepting their offer to publish my work, they had 17 in-house writers stable.

I guess they forget to ask me if I do math.

I do math.

A few of you nice people looked at the article, and I appreciate that. Supposedly--in order to write for Take 10, they prefer if you write at the 8th grade level--which is merely a suggestion based on internet hits and a "score made by" some guy named "Flesch" (of Flesch-Kincade). I'm pretty sure the editor-in-chief didn't think I knew what she was talking about--but I did. I just wanted to hear her reasoning for such an inane concept about why a newly established, web based, liberal bastion of truth and supposed wisdom would want to lower their standards, to compete with the likes of Breibart and The Drudge Report. I also have my own personal writing deadlines to meet, which meant being a full time writer for Take10 for free did not fit my concept of writing, and it did not fit their "team player" concept of being involved as a contributor to their start-up web-zine.

I'm smart enough to know when smoke is being blown up my ass, and I also did a internet search on the name Take 10. In less than .48 of a second you'll get over 8.870,000 results, in which none of them has anything to do with a group of 'liberal journalist involved in liberal media. Again, when mentioning SEQ in a FB chat-meeting, it might be prudent to name your organization accordingly so that it won't be the last one on the search engine list when looking it up. If you want to be like HuffPo or better, and be at the top of the internet engine search request, please--pick a name that hasn't been used by everyone, for everything.

Again, they came and asked me to write for them, not the other way around.

I saw no need in doing so--so I hedged my bet and continued to questioned her actual motives for trying to recruit me by asking her if she actually read, Racism--Oakland--and other stories, and what she liked about it. Of course, I knew that she hadn't read the actual story, but had only "skimmed it", (one of the 6 suggestions if one decided to write for Take 10) to see if it fit Take 10's platform, which it didn't. She was seeing if she stroked my ego by asking if she could post one of my stories, would that be sufficient enough to get me fully on board with writing for Take 10. I guess I had too many pertinent questions that she wasn't ready to answer, yet--the clock was still ticking on the Elliot Rodger story--as we watched the information about Elliot Rodger disappear or transmorgrify from new and ever exciting concepts with the formal media. Seeing that both my stories were about racism, when I talked about about the era of Jim Crow, the editor-in-chief of Take 10 was interested. But when I wrote about modern day white supremacy in 'America's, in supposedly today's post-racial society' in the upper echelons of wealth (I laughed as I wrote the last bit), she wasn't one bit interested in reading it at all.

And she made no bones about it.

In fact, she told me she wasn't interested in anything I had written.

Now, she was beginning to make sense, so I cut her loose.

I knew she wasn't looking for writer. She was looking to turn a writer into a journalist, while wasting his time. Don't confuse the two. It only makes the journalist mad, and the writer should always have better things to do with their time.

I pondered this a bit and went back to twitter to see what was trending.

I follow this beauteous spirit called Pia Glenn.

Pia Glenn was upset with me for posting the Day of Retribution video on her time line. I don't blame her. I didn't do it to intentionally make her angry. I did it because I thought she, or the people she were conversing with  couldn't find it anymore. My bad. She's right, I should have read her time line. See--when this thing went down, this Santa Barbara Massacre, this Elliot Rodger Massacre, this PUAhate,com connected Massacre, this unnamed as of yet Massacre--the video was up and running on youtube, and within a few hours, it was gone. I found and alternate copy of it on Hatewatch, which if they posted it, they felt it was pertinent enough for people fighting against hate to watch it in its entirety. I'm a firm believer that we would have never stopped lynching in America if we hid the ugly truth it entailed, in its numbers and in its cold hard, facts. We could have never stopped the Jewish Holocaust if we couldn't stomach the hideous images that genocide produces, placed directly in our face.

Pia Glenn wrote a piece on it called--Not All Men Are Dangerous, But Yes, All Women Do Live With The Fear Of Elliot Rodger's Fury. 

Never the less, we parted, Pia and I, with a mutual understanding.

My world wasn't totally shot to hell by this exchange between Pia and myself, because I learned something about one side of this issue, on how some people are dealing with this awful tragedy. 

Still, the videos on youtube, played a significant role in understanding the wherewithal of how a twisted mind--one that had every advantage in the world given to him on a silver platter seems to contemplate murder and suicide as the only solution to not feeling like you could ever have enough; or that others are not worthy to have what you don't have. Like sound relationships with people.

The clock was formally ticking down--and the message I was trying to disseminate was that, IF--we allow mass media--and social media to place their own twist on what is right in front of us, without looking at the facts while we still can,--if we are wise enough to view it, then we won't be ignorant enough to accept whatever they want to tell us about it when it happens again (the next time), or they try and make it happen again because we didn't heed the warning the first time. In other words, when someone tries to tell me that the Civil War was fought over "states rights", I tell them to check the Southern Redneck bullshit at the door.

I'm a historian.

I don't have time for nonsense. 

Then I ran into this other beauteous spirit on twitter named Charlie Peach. Her main concern with Elliot Rodger is how mass mainstream media had silenced the racist aspect of Elliot Rodger's Massacre. She was correct. They had totally shut it down, because Elliot Rodger had come from seemingly well-to-do family, and shot up a seemingly well-to-do town. Charlie felt much like I did, that this man-child was cultivated and nurtured to hate people of color and kill his own people for engaging with them.

People like Elliot never associate with people of color.

Those that do, in some circles, are called race traitors.

Among the wealthy--one can only suspect what they are called at Sunday Brunch at La Dome!

I'm not privy to the conversations that Donald Sterling has with people that are his financial equals.

Charlie Peach is a fireball--and to put it simply--when she said this, she was on target.

She's right, because society is actually in the process of breeding literally thousands of Elliot Rodgers.

The reason I focus on this, because from the aspect of who he was and where he lived, has some bearing on how entitled he thought he really was. One of my best friend's in college father was Head Master at Harvard-Westlake Prep. Kids who live 'South of the Blvd.'--or in the gated communities of Calabasas or Hidden Hills, who grow up with platinum spoons can be quite annoying. Those that are raised in Woodland Hills and West Hills think that way. They'd prefer to be the kid who lived South of the Blvd. It's called privileged, but the "P" word seems to be an ugly thing to say out loud today.

People get very defensive about it, because they don't understand that just because privilege exist--that doesn't mean you have to exercise it.

That "P" word is also attached to race, respectfully speaking.

White Privilege is defined as:

When you can write a hate-filled manifesto about how you want to destroy white women who date outside of their race and people of color who date them, killing 6 people and yourself, while wounding 13 more, just for good measure, and you complete the mission of doing so, by having youtube delete ANY trace of your existence at all, then you have White Privilege.

When 7 law enforcement officers come to your apartment, fully ready to arrest take you (they don't send 7 to say "hi"), because you've made internet threats of mass murdering people, but you can talk them out of it, then you have White Privlige.

When you have people change the focus of your manifesto's racist dissertation to fight for their own social causes, while they totally disavow any knowledge of your original real intent, then you have White Privilege.

When social media and mainstream media completely minimize your racist viewpoints about inter-cultural dating, or Conservatives blame your actions on President Obama, then you have White Privilege.

When evidence of your real intentions can be deleted and not archived, (so they can be studied to help end the ugly racial hatred you intended to represent in the first place) then you have White Privilege.

When I saw this article this morning-I felt a chill.

Youtube Removed All Of Elliot Rodger's Video.

5 days later, we've removed the all remnants of one of the biggest problems in America, because as much as we'd like to believe with the election of a bi-racial President, America's media would like to conflate their premise of a "post-racial" America, by erasing history one piece of evidence at a time. It's the reason that most people think that African Americans have had an equal playing field in America since 1865. These are the same people who think that Jim Crow was a Southern institution. Well, I'm old enough to know that it wasn't, so I guess you can believe me or not. That's even if you have an interest in level playing fields at all.

We can continue to read post about the evils of a young weed smoking, Trayvon Martin, but the evils of Elliot Rodger are disappearing in record time. The facts will be entombed, never to be objectively discussed. That, as a historian, fascinates the crap out of me, in this supposed "post-racial" America, that chooses what evils it will erase, based on the color of one's skin, and not the content of their character.

The content of Elliot Rodger's character is right here, if you choose take the time to read it from beginning to end, before they delete that too!


[1] My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger; By Elliot Rodger, Scribd, 141 pages, uploaded by Mathew Keyes

As a side note: 

I don't write for 8th Graders,  nor do I write for people who "skim". Just thought I'd put that out there. I also don't change, ignore, or delete historical facts to please my reading audience.