2014 Isla Vista killings/Elliot Rodger's manifesto

My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger  is a 140-page screed written by spree killer Elliot Rodger that was emailed to about a dozen people, including his mother and father, on May 23, 2014, immediately before he embarked on the shooting portion of his massacre on the streets of Isla Vista, California (and after he had already stabbed his housemates to death). The document was posted online shortly after the incident.

Widely described by the media as a "manifesto", the document is really more of an autobiography, albeit a particularly self-absorbed and spiteful one. It primarily covers the last few years of Rodger's life as he became increasingly embittered and obsessed with "retribution", with elf-pity, misanthropy, misogyny, and bile dripping from every page. The manifesto exposes him as a disturbed, insecure and highly immature individual who barely understood other people at all and reacted appallingly with even the most basic of frustrations.

The full text can be accessed online at the following link, and all page numberings refer to this copy. Warning: abandon hope all ye who enter here.

My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger By Elliot Rodger

Recurring themes
The manifesto makes clear that primary targets for Rodger's hatred and his plans for "revenge" were:
 * 1) girls, for failing to be attracted to him or show him any attention
 * 2) guys within his age bracket who were popular and/or had girlfriends, "for the crime of having a better life than me" (p. 101; similar phrases repeated throughout).
 * 3) and in particular, black, Asian or Hispanic guys who dated white girls (even though Rodger himself was half-Asian).

With an astonishing lack of self-awareness and perspective, Rodger repeatedly referred to these things as "injustices" and "crimes" that deserved "punishment". Near the end of the manifesto, he wrote:

Rodger's attitude was very much that if he couldn't get to have sex, nobody should:

Anger and violence
Rodger had an active hatred for the people around him, writing:

The manifesto relates numerous incidents when the mere sight of public displays of affection from young couples did indeed throw Rodger into a quivering rage, sometimes inspiring him to throw coffee or other drinks at them. The first such incident, occurring at Starbucks, is recounted as follows:

In another incident, he lashed out at two girls after they failed to smile when he leered at them from his car:

Shortly before his last birthday, in a "last ditch effort of desperation" to lose his virginity, Rodger crashed a party, alone and drunk, and tried to pick fights with various people, including trying to push girls off a ledge with a ten-foot drop. This resulted in him being pushed over the ledge himself, resulting in him breaking his leg. When he returned to demand what had happened to his Gucci sunglasses, he wandered into the wrong house, got kicked out and beaten up (pp. 121-3). The broken leg delayed his "Day of Retribution" for several months.

Magnificent gentleman
A highly entitled "nice guy" rhetoric runs throughout the manifesto, with Rodger (oblivious to his own aggressive and anti-social behaviour) describing himself repeatedly as a "magnificent gentleman" or similar phrases, and insisting that every pretty girl he met should be devoting herself to him:

Strangely, for someone who claimed to be a gentleman, he never mentions specific nice behaviors that he did, just how he looked. He had an extremely snobbish and materialist attitude, and was outraged that his designer clothes and flashy car did not help him score with women (apparently, the clothes don't make the man):

He also determined that becoming a multi-millionaire at a young age would be the answer to all his problems, making him irresistible to women. Lacking any particular skills for accumulating wealth, he spent hundreds of dollars on lottery tickets, even persuading himself that he was "destined" to win the jackpot. At one point, he also harassed his mother to marry to a wealthy man she was casually dating. She refused to do so, despite Elliot telling her that "she should sacrifice her well-being for the sake of my happiness" (p. 68).

Misogyny
Throughout the story, it is clear that Rodger did not appreciate women as people, but saw them as objects to be attained and a target for hostility when they remained unattainable to him. Yet in several places, he wrote more explicitly about his conscious hatred and contempt for women, whom he did not believe should have rights or be able to choose their sexual partners. For example:

Rodger expounded on this theme in the manifesto's epilogue, visualizing a world in which women are confined to captivity and "eradicated" (see below).

Racism
Unsurprisingly, this belief that women are attracted to "barbaric, wild, beast-like men" had a heavily racist dimension. Probably the strongest example of this is when, upon learning that a black acquaintance had lost his virginity at a young age to a white girl, he responded:

Day of Retribution
It seems that Rodger had been fantasizing about a massacre for several years before planning and committing one. Explaining his intentions, he wrote:

In writing about his massacre plans, Rodger continued to identify himself as the victim, but also aired his messiah complex, describing himself repeatedly as a god:

The full extent of Rodger's brutal plans, only a fraction of which he was able to accomplish in reality, consisted of a number of "phases", involving killings and torture within his apartment, stockpiling his victims' severed heads, slaughtering every girl at a sorority house (the one with the hottest girls, Rodger having done "a lot of extensive research" on the subject before selecting it), running down pedestrians in his SUV and shooting more people in the street (specifically targeting "the good looking people, and all of the couples"), before finally committing suicide when the police caught up with him (pp 132-3). The text also reveals that Rodger intended to carry out the massacre on May 24th (rather than May 23rd when it actually occurred) and that he intended to kill his stepmother and younger brother first, "denying him of the chance to grow up to surpass me" (p. 132).

Having posted videos on YouTube expressing or at least intimating some of his intentions, which his mother saw and was disturbed by, Rodger was visited by police officers. Rodger "tactfully told them that it was all a misunderstanding" and they left without searching his apartment, much to Rodger's relief (p. 134).

Epilogue
The final pages, styled as an epilogue, are the part that most clearly resembles a manifesto. Here Rodger again vents his resentment for sex that he wasn't able to get, denouncing sexual activity in almost Puritanical terms, as well as reiterating his hatred for women. He also elaborated on his vision of a "a fair and pure world" in which women would be "quarantined" in concentration camps and starved to death, other than a few kept in laboratories for breeding purposes.

As the fullest insight into Rodger's disturbed psyche and twisted worldview, the epilogue is reproduced here in full: