The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Another ‘Incel’ Weirdo: Tallahassee Shooter Was Public School Teacher

Posted on | November 5, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Scott Beierle was weird. He was from upstate New York, graduated from SUNY-Binghamton in 2002 and later got a graduate degree at FSU:

Kristi Malone, who had a graduate class with Beierle, said in a Facebook message that she did not interact with him outside of the classroom because of “his odd leering, inappropriate comments and general demeanor.”
“I know that myself and several of my female colleagues made a point to never be alone with him even at school because of his odd behavior,” Malone said. . . .
Court records show that Beierle was charged by police with battery in 2016 after he slapped and grabbed a woman’s buttocks at an apartment complex pool. Records show that the charges were eventually dismissed after Beierle followed the conditions of a deferred prosecution agreement.
Beierle was also charged with battery in 2012 for grabbing women’s buttocks in a university campus dining hall. A FSU police report shows that Beierle told police he may have accidentally bumped into someone, but denied grabbing anyone.
In 2014, Beierle was charged with trespassing at FSU. He had been seen following an FSU volleyball coach near the campus gym and was told that he was banned from campus. A month later police found him at a campus restaurant.

Friday, Beierle walked into a yoga studio in Tallahassee and shot seven people, killing two women, before committing suicide. It turns out Beierle had been posting stuff online identifying as an “incel” (involuntary celibate), praising Santa Barbara killer Elliott Rodger, and recording punk rock songs with titles like “Homicidal Impulse” and “American Massacre.” He wrote lyrics like this:

If I cannot find a decent female to live with,
I will find many indecent females to die with.
Finally, I find that if I cannot make a living,
Then I will turn, to be successful, I will make a killing.

Did I mention he had been working as a substitute teacher?

At Deltona Middle, he earned a reputation among students for being lazy, detached and downright strange.
“He just gave off a psychopath vibe, like someone crazy,” said Samantha Mikolajczyk, 14, who had Beierle as a sub in her history class about a dozen times last year when she was in eighth grade. . . .
“He would never really smile, never gave off much except a really weird aura, I guess,” she said. “He would put you on edge if he was talking with you or you were alone with him. A lot of the students in my class used to make fun of him.” . . .
Mason Roberts, a 13-year-old eighth grader at Deltona and a friend of Samantha, said Beierle showed up as a substitute teacher in her language arts class once last year.
“He was very quiet,” she said. “He seemed just out of it, I guess. He seemed very lazy. And even when we asked him a question, he seemed not to care. He was really creepy. He didn’t do things like a substitute would normally do.” . . .
Mason’s mom, Allison Roberts, said she was shocked Beierle was ever allowed to teach. Beierle had a history of arrests, but not convictions, for grabbing young women around the campus of Florida State University, where he earned graduate degrees. She found out about Beierle on Saturday night, after her daughter mentioned it at dinner.
“I was very upset,” she said. “Someone with charges like that? How in the hell did he get in the classroom with my daughter? Anyone that’s got a history of being arrested for things such as that should absolutely not be around teenage girls or children period.”
Beierle also taught high school English and social studies in Anne Arundel County in Maryland from 2005 to 2007, according to WTOP of Washington, D.C. He resigned at the end of the 2006-2007 school year, district officials told the news station.

Left-wing sites describe Beierle as a “far-right misogynist”:

In one video called “Plight of the Adolescent Male,” Beierle named Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 in a shooting in Isla Vista, California. Rodger is often seen as a hero for so-called incels, or those who consider themselves “involuntarily celibate.”
“I’d like to send a message now to the adolescent males … that are in the position, the situation, the disposition of Elliot Rodger, of not getting any, no love, no nothing. This endless wasteland that breeds this longing and this frustration. That was me, certainly, as an adolescent,” Beierle said. . . .
Unlike the YouTube videos, Beierle’s songs on Soundcloud were all uploaded in the last few months. Shortly before Friday’s shooting, he uploaded one song called “Fuck ’Em All,” with the lyrics: “To hell with the boss that won’t get off my back / To hell with the girl I can’t get in the sack.” . . .
In a punk song he made called “Don’t Shame,” Beierle sang of walking into a girl’s locker room and going on an “ass-grabbing rampage of underage girls.” He also spoke about grabbing women in the song “Handful of Bare Ass.” . . .
“I have no shame, but this is to blame. I would do anything. I just don’t care. I have no fear of any consequences,” he sang.

So, you’re a 40-year-old loser can’t get laid, who has been twice arrested for sexual battery against women and, in your twisted mind, this justifies shooting random strangers? Identifying this loser as “far right” might serve some political purpose for the Left, as a guilt-by-association smear, but it does nothing to help us understand the psychology of weirdos like Scott Beirle. “He was very quiet. . . . He seemed just out of it,” as one of his former students described him. His “demeanor” was unsettling, as a former FSU classmate said. He recalled his adolescence as an experience of “not getting any, no love, no nothing.” He complained he could not “find a decent female to live with.” Shouldn’t reporters ask why?

When I was in school, our teachers taught us that a journalist should seek answers to six questions: Who, what, when, where, why and how?

Not everything can be explained in terms of partisan politics or ideology. The fact that Beierle expressed some “far right” opinions is enough to cancel any journalistic curiosity on the part of liberal writers who only care about constructing a political narrative, but it doesn’t explain how someone like Beierle — a once promising young man who was an Eagle Scout and football player in high school — ended up as a sexual pervert full of frustration and rage: “He was very quiet.”

The introverted boy who fails to attract any girlfriends as a teenager can very easily end up as a permanently frustrated loser like Beierle and nobody seems to care about this kind of social failure unless and until the loser becomes a dangerous criminal. Why don’t educators care about the developmental problems that are so apparent in the lives of guys like Scott Beierle? Why did no one intervene in his life when he was a teenager “not getting any, no love, no nothing”?

The why and how questions here aren’t necessarily political, although it would be very easy to blame feminism’s influence, as our educational system nowadays seems to care only about “empowering” girls. Our schools do not merely ignore the problems of boys, but rather appear to be systematically causing male failure, as evidenced by the declining levels of scholastic achievement among male students. We must also wonder what’s going on with the parents of these boys.

If your teenage son has never had a girlfriend — a total loser — shouldn’t you become concerned? I’m certain I would, because I understand that adolescence is a sort of game of romantic musical chairs. Teenagers naturally start “pairing up” into couples in high school, and kids who aren’t part of a couple are regarded as social misfits. It may seem cruel and unfair to adults that, in high school, the boys without girlfriends and the girls without boyfriends are labeled “losers,” but this harsh verdict reflects an underlying reality. The teenage loser has failed a crucial test of adolescent development, i.e., the ability to attract and form a romantic relationship with a member the opposite sex, and adults are behaving irresponsibly if we fail to recognize this kind of teenage social failure as a sign of potential trouble in later life. Beware of rationalization:

In psychology and logic, rationalization or rationalisation . . . is a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable — or even admirable and superior — by plausible means. . . .
Rationalization encourages irrational or unacceptable behavior, motives, or feelings and often involves ad hoc hypothesizing. This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly unconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt or shame).

The rationalizations of teenage losers often take the form of disparaging the opposite sex, and casting aspersions on more successful rivals. The unpopular fat girl dismisses the romantic success of her more attractive classmates by blaming boys for being “superficial” in their pursuit of pretty girls she considers vapid, ditzy airheads. The nerdy boy disparages as “sluts” the girls who chase after popular jocks. All such blame-games are merely a rationalization of failure. The homely girl who can’t get a boyfriend engages in rationalization when she explains that she’s just “picky” and doesn’t want to “lower her standards” by dating any of the ordinary boys who might actually be interested in her. She thereby indulges an unrealistic fantasy that, at some future point, the good-looking popular boy will stop dating pretty girls and instead prefer her.

It is considered cruel — an assault on the precious “self-esteem” of these teenage losers — to point out the delusional nature of their rationalizations. How dare you tell the truth? How dare you identify the most obvious and realistic explanation of their adolescent failure? We are not supposed to throw cold water on the fantasies with which these losers comfort themselves, but there’s a sort of magical thinking involved in these rationalizations — “wishcasting” — and if they are never compelled to confront reality, they will never learn effective ways of coping with their problems. This avoidance of reality is dangerous.

By the time he was in his 30s, Scott Beierle had been failing with women for so long that he exuded the unmistakable vibe of creepiness (“odd leering, inappropriate comments and general demeanor”) which is so characteristic of the desperate loser. Perhaps if someone had intervened in his life when he was 15 or 16, Beierle could have corrected his problems, but like so many other introverted losers, he drifted along silently for years and, by the time the warning signs started to become evident — grabbing women’s butts on the FSU campus — it was probably too late for him to recover from his loser habits.

Most journalists don’t want to dig too deep into the how and why of this problem. It’s easier just to label Beierle a “far right misogynist” than to attempt to understand the social processes that produce these mass-murdering monsters. Also, the media’s liberal bias causes them to avert their eyes from a deeper exploration of such cases, because it can be argued that liberalism is itself implicated in the monster-making process. Our public schools are controlled by Democrats, a fact demonstrable by the campaign contributions of teachers unions, and classrooms are experimental laboratories where social-justice cult beliefs (“self-esteem,” “diversity,” “gender equality,” etc.) are the prevalent ideology. Parents shocked that someone like Beierle was hired as a teacher — “How in the hell did he get in the classroom with my daughter?” — should start paying closer attention to the education system more generally.



 

Category: Crime, Education

Comments

One Response to “Another ‘Incel’ Weirdo: Tallahassee Shooter Was Public School Teacher”

  1. Saturday Links | 357 Magnum
    November 10th, 2018 @ 12:21 pm

    […] Other McCain has a post on Tallahassee. Another ‘Incel’ Weirdo: Tallahassee Shooter Was Public School Teacher. Was a graduate of a teaching school really “right-wing?” or is that the bias of the […]