The following article is about Scott Paul Beierle, who hated women, and who one day walked into a Florida yoga studio and shot several women – at least two of whom died.
How Male Supermacy Led to Murder
by Steve Hendrix, June 2019
Snippets:
…His name was actually Scott Paul Beierle, a 40-year-old former FSU graduate student who had driven 250 miles for a yoga class in the town where he had twice been arrested for groping female students and banned from campus.
Beierle was an avowed hater of women, a man who repeatedly grabbed women in real life and fantasized about raping and killing them in the horrific collection of lyrics, poetry and novels he began writing as a teenager.
His interactions with the opposite sex had gotten him fired from teaching jobs, booted from the Army and hauled before the principal of his high school.
He traced his fury at women — “Just beneath their blushing lashes and their innocent smiles lies the most rancid and putrid, sickening essences” — to the girls who both aroused and frustrated him in eighth grade.
It is a kind of hatred that experts in extremism warn is becoming more common and more dangerous, providing what amounts to a new feeder network for white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups.
“More and more, we see misogyny as the gateway drug for extremists,” said Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of more than 20 people interviewed to compile this account of Beierle’s history and the phenomenon it represents.
In 2018, a few months before Beierle stood in that studio, the Southern Poverty Law Center added a new category to its tracking list of hate movements around the country: male supremacy.
The term encompasses a worrying new array of assaults by men who view women as genetically inferior, inherently treacherous or unwilling to provide them with the sex and submission they see as their birthright.
It’s a trend with roots both ancient and new. Condemning women as a gender dates to at least the ancient Greek myth that blamed Pandora for unleashing evil into the world.
[Add Christian gender complementarianism to this list. It’s undergirded by many of the same sexist assumptions and worldviews and male entitlement, including blaming women for everything and holding women accountable for the sins, especially sexual sins, of men]
But in the digital age, misogyny is being stoked within hundreds of online chat rooms and forums, echo chambers of grievance that drive some men to cyberbullying and a far smaller number to violence.
“What’s different today is the online space itself,” Beirich said. “Back in the day, an ad on how to meet girls in the back of a magazine didn’t open a door into the dark web.”
In a 2018 report, the Anti-Defamation League divided this “manosphere” into three overlapping tribes: “men’s rights activists,” who have channeled legitimate advocacy for equal treatment in divorce and custody disputes into a toxic male rage; “pick-up artists,” who have perverted those back-of-the-magazine schemes into a cult of predatory sexual entitlement; and “incels,” men who blame all women for their own involuntary celibacy.
All three groups espouse a generalized loathing for women and the shifting norms — from female empowerment to gay rights — that they blame for their many miseries. As the online communities swelled in the past five or six years, the rhetoric became more extreme.
“It went from ‘I got [screwed] in my divorce settlement’ to ‘Women are dogs, women should be raped,’ ” Beirich said.
But researchers say many incidents go unreported by police or by women themselves, and they expect more attacks in the future, spurred by the cross-pollination among aggrieved men and broader hate movements.
“A deep-seated loathing of women acts as a connective tissue between many white supremacists,” explained the ADL report, titled “When Women are the Enemy: The Intersection of Misogyny and White Supremacy.”
While old-guard white supremacists revered women as the mothers of the race, younger bigots despise them as just one more group responsible for eroding their status.
“Even if you become the ultimate alpha male, some stupid bitch will still ruin your life,” declared Andrew Anglin on the neo-Nazi website he founded, the Daily Stormer. Anglin has credited his site’s anti-women content with bolstering traffic even as other hate sites have seen a falloff.
“Incels are full of rage, and it is trivial to turn these guys into kike haters,” explained one of Anglin’s sidekicks, Andrew Auernheimer, known online as Weev, in a Daily Stormer post. “Few people have ever personally had their life harmed by a Jew (in a direct, personally observable sense), but every single breathing man has had it f—– up by multiple selfish, scheming hookers (likely starting with their own mothers).”
The ugly rhetoric can lead to violence. The 19-year-old nursing student alleged to have opened fire in a San Diego-area synagogue in April cited, among a litany of anti-Semitic conspiracies, the role of Jews in promoting feminism.
Incel adherents in particular — who dream of destroying the women they long for, derisively nicknamed “Stacys,” and the attractive men, “Chads,” who have better luck — have emerged as killers.
In a 2014 rampage in Santa Barbara, Calif., a 22-year-old college dropout named Elliot Rodger used guns, a knife and his car to kill six and injure 13 before shooting himself, blaming the attack on his inability to get a girlfriend and his disgust at interracial couples. A year later, a 26-year-old student shot his English professor and eight classmates at an Oregon community college, having lamented in a virulently racist manifesto that he was a virgin with no girlfriend. In 2018, a driver plowed a rented van down a Toronto sidewalk, killing 10, after allegedly posting on Facebook that the “incel Rebellion has already begun!”
The last two cited the example of Rodger before they killed. And in a video posted well before driving to Tallahassee in November and giving his debit card to Kate Pierson, so had Scott Beierle.
….In the late 1990s, when Scott Beierle was in high school in Vestal, N.Y., he wrote a novel. He called it “Rejected Youth,” a 70,000-word revenge fantasy of a middle school boy nursing hatred of the girls who had shunned and humiliated him. The protagonist, Scott Bradley, critiques their looks, ridicules their boyfriends and is enraged by their disdain. “The hot ones all detest me, and I haven’t a clue why,” he laments.
The boy murders them, brutally, one by one, even as he admires their bodies. In the final scene, he cuts the throat of the clique’s ringleader before he throws himself off a roof with the cops closing in.
According to someone who knew Beierle back then and provided a copy of the manuscript, the characters, with names slightly changed, were their real classmates.
…Beierle was one of three boys raised in a middle-class family in Vestal, a small suburb of Binghamton. His father was a white-collar office worker, and Beierle earned badges as a Boy Scout, worked as a paperboy, served as an acolyte in his Methodist church and was elected vice president of the Vestal High Class of 1997. But he also openly admired Hitler and the Aryan Nations. His class campaign slogan, against a female opponent, was “Vote Beierle, because we don’t need no woman.”
…His violent writings were already a concern to his family. One sister-in-law told Tallahassee detectives that Beierle’s parents slept with their bedroom door locked when he was in the house.
…By 2005, Beierle was living in Maryland and teaching English and social studies at Anne Arundel County’s Meade High School. Toward the end of his first year, he was investigated by police for making a female student uncomfortable by touching her on the arm, suggesting she wear low-cut shirts and asking if she would ever pose in Playboy. The police report indicates the case was suspended, and Beierle continued teaching for another year before resigning.
…It was just one of a series of episodes in which Beierle’s conduct with women led to him being questioned, arrested, fired or banned from private property — but never criminally convicted. In some cases, the woman or his employer declined to press charges. In others, prosecutors chose not to pursue them. It added up to a long record of harassment and assault accusations that did not turn up during cursory background checks.
…Beierle documented that episode, as he did many of his ruinous run-ins with women, in his bizarre catalogue of self-recorded music. In the lyrics, and a series of essays he wrote explaining them, he distills his anger at women into vengeance scenarios, including kidnapping and torture (“Locked in My Basement”), cannibalism (“Freshly Fried-up Girl”) and mass shooting (“I Will Not Touch You — My Bullets Will”).
He wrote more than 100 songs and managed to record more than two dozen of them. Some rail against women, some against minorities, the dilution of the white race, homosexuals and liberals. All are atonal howls of rage.
….After the Army, Beierle moved to Tallahassee to attend graduate school. But the college town had other attractions. He wrote of making a pilgrimage to Ted Bundy’s boardinghouse, and to Sorority Row, where the serial killer strangled two women who belonged to Chi Omega in 1978, the year Beierle was born.
“Christians have their Via Delorosa in Jerusalem,” he wrote, “and I have mine.”
…On a December afternoon in 2012, Courtnee Connon, an 18-year-old freshman, was in an undergraduate dining hall when she felt a hand firmly on her rear end. She whirled around and found Beierle, 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, denying he had touched her on purpose.
But a few minutes later, she saw him grope another woman, then a third. All three, she said, were wearing yoga pants.
[The essay goes on to note numerous more times that Beierle groped and harassed women. As he neared the age of 40, he decided to go to a local Yoga studio and murder women there. He proceeded to shoot women and kill two of them at the studio]
The misogynists rejoiced when they learned of the attack. Within hours of Beierle’s suicide, hate-site habitues had dubbed him “St. Yogacel” and were scrambling to copy and share the online caches of his music and videos that so perfectly reflected their own worldview.
Incels celebrated his targeting of “spandex wearing yoga whores.” Racists hailed his rants against minorities, interracial dating, immigration and Muslims.
“This guy is a hero,” one poster declared. “Women belong in the house, taking care of family. Not going round yoga studios to fine tune their bodies for the pleasure of random strangers.”
More info:
On Wikipedia: Tallahassee shooting
Scott Beierle: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
See Also:
On Men Not Believing Women and Being Blind to the Sexism and Harassment Women Often Endure
Miss Daisy Flower 