Not everyone will agree, but I consider mass murders committed by deranged individuals motivated by “hate” ideologies as human rights violations. The UC Santa Barbara killer Elliot Rodger, who posted videos and a 141-page autobiography before killing six and wounded 13, is the current example of a psychotic who achieved temporary infamy (and also a cult following) by ideologically-motivated mass murder. A plethora of explanations—most based on skimpy evidence and often more interesting as symptoms of the current cultural moment than as convincing analyses of the killer, have been offered. It may be worth having a look at these in order to get a sense of where our precarious mental economy as a people is at this juncture in history: 1. The War of the Sexes. Rodgers’ manifesto makes clear that the primary target of his three-stage murder scheme (he never got the opportunity to act out the third stage targeting for death his step mother and step brother) was young women, particularly blonde blue-eyed sorority girls who never showed sexual interest in him. Rogers did indeed read “male supremacy” posts on “manosphere” blogs. I think that the historical record since Jack the Ripper and H. H. Holmes (America’s first documented mass murder at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair) shows that misogynists have always been predominate, with a secondary category of what might be called homosexual killers like John Wayne Gacy. Speculation is currently rife that Rodger may have been “a repressed homosexual.” If so, there are no hints of this in his autobiography except, perhaps, in his longstanding friendship with one young man even more passive and ineffectual than himself. Rodger actually killed more men than women, but only because his two roommates and a visitor to his apartment were obstacles he deemed it necessary to remove before moving on to the centerpiece of his “Day of Retribution”: murdering women. 2. Racism: Some Neo-Nazi web sites are portraying Rodger as a sinister Jew. They allege, falsely, that his father was Jewish, but in fact his grandfather photographed Bergen Belson concentration camp soon after liberation. Leftist analysts are uninhibitedly picturing Rodger as a “white racist.” On its face, this is a bizarre analysis given that Rodger not only was “a Eurasian gentlemen” but described himself as such. On the other hand, there were racial prejudices reflected in his apparent distaste for “dark-skinned” women and hatred of Black and Hispanic men, and his lesser contempt for Asians and Middle Easterners including his mother’s Chinese ancestry and his step mother’s Moroccan (presumably Arab) ancestry. Underlying his racism seems to be self-hate for his own mixed-race heritage which he implicitly associates with short stature and puny build. This self-hate went at least as far back as his repeated attempts as a pre-teen to dye his hair blonde to the roots. Ethnic and racial self-hatred take many forms, but have been most written about among Jews and Blacks. Otto Weininger’s “Sex and Character” (1903)—dissecting women, Jews, and gays as inferior types—was analyzed by Freud. Rather than commit murder, Weininger killed himself, as did Rodger following his killing spree. 3. Hollywood’s Baneful Influence: According to film critics Ann Hornaday in the “Washington Post,” Rodger was profoundly influenced by sexist films, especially comedies appealing to a young male audience made by or starring Judd Apatow and Seth Rogin. I confess to sampling many of these on cable. Some are funny, some not, and all deploy vulgar sexist stereotypes, but none in my opinion either explicitly or implicitly promotes male rage against women. If one is really looking to novels and films portraying women as “noir” femme fatales, a better place to look is to the classic Hollywood films of the 1940s, often starring Humphrey Bogart. Moreover, Rodger doesn’t mention Apatow and Rogin’s films in his autobiography. He also never mentions “The Hunger Games” on which his father worked as a second unit director. But he was a fan of the “Star Wars” saga and of “The Games of Thrones” both in print and on television. He doesn’t seem to show a misogynist obsession with either, though his fascination with Anakin Skywalker’s transformation into Darth Vader may reflect his unhealthy preoccupation with “the dark side.” Violent video games were also a major influence, but less so toward the end of his life. 4. Therapeutic Narcissism: Brendan O’Neill in “Reason” Magazine suggests that Rodger—whose wealthy Hollywood father financed his treatment from the age of eight—was a time bomb produced by therapists who preached and practiced a “love thyself above all” narcissism, sometimes in “self-help” guise. Rodger’s autobiography certainly displays a deep-seated narcissism of which Rodger himself uses the clinical vocabulary to present himself “a perfect god.” Yet there is no teaching of religion of any kind in Rodger’s upbringing or thinking. He also seems entirely devoid of empathy or of compassion for anyone but himself. Various clinical labels have been attached to Rodger including Asperger’s syndrome, an intellectually functional form of autism which, however, is rarely associated with violent tendencies. I can’t help but draw a connection between the overstated argument that Rodger was driven crazy by misguided therapy and the far-fetched interpretation that Hitler developed into a psychopathic mass murderer only after a Jewish psychiatrist treated him immediately after World War I in a way that accentuated his megalomaniacal tendencies. 5. The Power of Evil: Virtually all analyses of Rodger reflect our contemporary culture’s obliviousness, not to psychotic acting out, but to pure evil in action. More gun control may be a good idea, but advocating it as a substitute for understanding the motives of killers seems to me misplaced. Rodger murdered on a miniscule scale compared to Hitler, but his autobiography—a bit like “Mein Kampf”—also boasts about his ability to deploy charm, to disarm authority figures (his parents, therapists, and ultimately the police), and to hide his malevolent plans until he was ready to act. His diminutive stature aside, he was morally puny—not at all like Milton’s towering Satan—more like Goethe’s coy, corrosive Mephistopheles. Beneath Rodger’s skillful deployment of today’s self-justifying image by the victimizer of himself as victim (in his case of supposedly sluttish young women), Rodgers was truly a bad seed. I suspect the only “cure” for him from early on was institutionalization.