Nor, for that matter, do autistic individuals typically hyper-focus on their appearance, crave admiration and sex, act as if they are consumed by envy and the need for revenge, desperately try to undo shame and humiliation by shaming and humiliating others, or harbor grandiose fantasies of fame and fortune—all of which percolated in the mind of Rodger. We are squarely in the realm of pathological narcissism here.

By definition, people afflicted with ASD are under-concerned with their appearance, not over-concerned. They exhibit a fundamental deficit in wondering about what people think of them and absorbing and learning from social feedback. They are often “fashion blind,” looking scruffy, or in the habit of making a habit of dressing with bland clothes that become a daily uniform to be worn. This was not Rodger. In My Twisted Story, his antidote to feeling inferior and invisible when he went off to college was to buy and wear name-brand clothes: “When I wore these to school, I saw I was wearing better jeans than most guys, and that made me have a slightly higher sense of self-worth. …Doing this started a new obsession for me. I became more obsessed with my appearance.”

He was so obsessed with his appearance that when he was in shock after being beaten up by partygoers whom he had provoked, limping around with a broken leg, his main concern was locating the Gucci sunglasses his mother had purchased for him. Rodger’s videos and personal story are rife with references that substantiate his status consciousness, materialism, and vanity, often with a racist and misogynistic bent. ASD individuals do not obsess over Hugo Boss and Armani threads, BMWs, winning the lottery, and insisting that one’s mother marry a multi-millionaire, all of which Rodger apparently did. They obsess about quirky topics like dinosaurs, Civil War memorabilia, names of exotic trains and planes, and the like.

Neither are those ascribed an ASD diagnosis consumed by feelings of envy. In fact, to feel envious in the first place there has to be conscious and unconscious social comparison going on, which is atypical of ASD people, who tend to come across as socially ill-attuned. Being psychologically caught up with admirable traits and social options that others have—that you feel deprived of—reflects a degree of social awareness and “mind reading” that should rule out ASD. No real digging around is necessary to uncover the role envy played in Rodger’s life.

Close to the beginning of his manifesto he confesses that “[j]ealousy and envy … those are two feelings that would dominate my entire life and bring me immense pain. The feelings of jealousy I felt at nine-years-old were frustrating, but they were nothing compared to how I would feel once I hit puberty and have to watch girls choosing other boys over me. Any problem I had at nine-years-old was nirvana compared to what I was doomed to face.”