On that day, college sophomore Elliot Rodger stabbed his three roommates to death before driving to a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and shooting several women. He then killed or injured several pedestrians with both gunfire and his vehicle before exchanging fire with police and eventually taking his own life. He ultimately killed six and wounded 14.

Rodger left behind a sprawling 107,000-word manifesto titled, “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” which contained passages lamenting his inability to find a girlfriend, expressing extreme misogyny and various racist positions including disgust for interracial couples (despite the fact that he was multi-racial himself).

“How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself,” Rodger wrote. “I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.”

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In a video, uploaded to YouTube just prior to his violent rampage titled, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” Rodger tells his audience, “Well, this is my last video, it all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day in which I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you. … College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. Within those years, I’ve had to rot in loneliness. It’s not fair.”

Rodger frequented PUAhate, a deeply misogynistic forum populated by failed “pick up artists” dedicated to revealing, “the scams, deception, and misleading marketing techniques used by dating gurus and the seduction community to deceive men and profit from them.” Discussions about women on the forum are at best objectifying and at worst, violent.

In his manifesto, Rodger fantasized about putting all women in concentration camps to starve while he watched “gleefully” from a tower. It is celebrated on some alt-right sites, like The Right Stuff’s 504um.

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User “Doctor Mayhem” annotates excerpts from Rodger’s manifesto in a thread titled, “Elliot Rodger Did Nothing Wrong: Why Yellow Fever is Okay.”

“Basically, all you need to know is that seeing blonde girls with niggers made Elliot RRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEE like a billion pissed off Pepes,” Mayhem writes towards the end of his post. “We all know the end result. DEAD SLUTS! So White men of all kinds! No need to fear creating hapas! [a term denoting someone of partial Asian or Pacific Islander descent] In fact, you are a much superior man for the creation of them! LET ALL NEGLECTED HAPA BOYS KILL SLUTS IN THE NAME OF WHITE SHARIA!”

He concludes, “ALL HAIL THE PATRON SAINT OF WHITE SHARIA!”

The term, “white sharia,” allegedly coined by Sacco Vandal of the popular alt-right site Vandal Void, is a radical response to Patrick Buchanan’s argument in Death of the West: that the increase in immigration and decline of white birthrates is leading to the end of Western civilization.

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Vandal argues for an end to women’s suffrage and stripping them of all political, legal, and economic power. “Our men need harems, and the members of those harems need to be baby factories,” Vandal writes. “This is not about muh dicking nor beta revenge uprisings. These are cold, calculated plans to save our dying race. … White Sharia is a blueprint for salvation.”

Rodger’s celebration at the 504um, one of the premier alt-right forums, is the rule rather than the exception, and locates misogyny at the core of the alt-right.

Take for instance “Just what are traditional gender roles?,” an article written by notorious hacker and troll Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer at the Daily Stormer — one of the alt-right’s most repugnant and successful propaganda engines — in response to those “counter signaling” the “white sharia.”

“Rape is a property crime and nothing more,” Auernheimer writes. “Regular slapping and the occasional vicious beating of a woman was a necessity in every household. Women need to be regularly disciplined to keep their heads about them.”

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Auernheimer continues, “Man up, put women under your heel, throw away their birth control and make them bear your children and take care of your house. If they resist, discipline them … All we are pushing for is a return to the status of women we had in the early 19th century before Jews and their feminism ruined our civilization. This should not be controversial. If you are opposing WHITE SHARIA because you disagree with women being reduced to the status of property to be beaten and fucked at the whims of her husband, you are a faggot and a cuckold and have no place in any right-wing site, and instead belong at the bottom of festering bogs like Reddit and Voat.”

Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer’s founder and chief propagandist, has his own troubling history of vicious misogyny, tracking all the way back to high school.

According to an account published by The Atlantic, Anglin’s high school girlfriend told him that she was raped by a friend’s older brother while passed out at a party. He allegedly responded by calling her a “slut” and encouraged girls from another high school to harass her for weeks. Both the misogyny and harassing behaviors are recognizable on the present-day Daily Stormer.

In the aftermath of Rodger’s killing spree, a user at 4chan/b/ posted a photo from Rodger’s Facebook page with the note, “Elliot Rodger, the supreme gentleman, was part of /b/. Discuss.” This sentiment was echoed by other /b/ users who found similarities between his lexicon and that of the noxious board, including the term “beta,” used by men online to describe themselves as lacking the physicality, charisma and confidence associated with alpha males. It also denotes a level of isolation or withdrawal.

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The term resurfaced on 4chan/r9k/ in the wake of a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, by Chris Harper-Mercer, who killed nine and wounded at least seven others at the college on October 1, 2015.

“This is only the beginning. The Beta Rebellion has begun,” one anonymous user wrote. “Soon, more of our brothers will take up arms to become martyrs to this revolution.”

Although never proven, it is widely speculated that Harper-Mercer was a user on the board as warnings against attending school the following day that circulated on the eve of the shooting. Authorities believe Harper-Mercer, who like Rodger was multi-racial, was also motivated by white supremacist ideas. The Government Accountability Office categorized the Roseburg killings as “white supremacist” in an April 2017 report.

Many on the alt-right, including some of its most notorious leaders, like Anglin, spent their early ideological years submerged in extreme image and message boards like 4chan and 8chan. Many credit them with their “red pilling” — a reference to a scene from The Matrix in which the main character chooses between remaining in a comfortable illusion or facing a harsh, but true, reality — which requires taking a red pill.

As the alt-right spread, the subculture had another effect on its adherents: the inculcation of cruelty. As Angela Nagle and Jacob Siegel wrote:

The far right knew what progressives are only beginning to realize: “Lulz” wasn’t just an amoral defiance of moral categories, it was an ethical claim. Through years of pre-political collective bullying, it trained those who would go on to become alt-right to deprogram the moral codes that might cause feelings of guilt and empathy by aestheticizing the collective dehumanization of enemies.

Anonymous and disparate interaction with online extremist content, frequently without any real-world connection to hate groups or far-right extremism, is becoming an established pattern for those on the alt-right who have gone on to commit acts violence.