Scott Paul Beierle’s attack on a Florida yoga studio was fueled by male supremacy, a movement with ties to other hate groups.
By Steve Hendrix June 7, 2019
TALLAHASSEE — The first thing Kate Pierson did after unlocking the yoga studio that November afternoon was set the mood, plugging in the soothing waterfall, selecting a cheery lemongrass oil for the scent diffuser. The thermostat was turned up to 98 for the 5:30 class.
Hot Yoga Tallahassee was styled as a calming haven for a mostly female clientele. The men who practiced there, Pierson said, were men at ease with the “light and love” mission of the place.
But the man who walked in about 5:15 that Friday was different. Pierson was still alone in the lobby when he entered, a big guy whose maroon Florida State University T-shirt was stretched over a paunchy belly, the wrapper still on the yoga mat under his arm. A black Planet Fitness bag was strapped across his chest. Inside, she would learn soon, was a Glock 9mm pistol.
The man wasn’t on the list of 11 students preregistered for the evening class, and he seemed disappointed so few were expected. Handing over a debit card for the $12 walk-in fee, he identified himself as “Scott . . . Paul,” hesitating between the two words.
His name was actually Scott Paul Beierle, a 40-year-old former FSU graduate student who had driven 250 miles for a yoga class in the town where he had twice been arrested for groping female students and banned from campus.
Beierle was an avowed hater of women, a man who repeatedly grabbed women in real life and fantasized about raping and killing them in the horrific collection of lyrics, poetry and novels he began writing as a teenager. His interactions with the opposite sex had gotten him fired from teaching jobs, booted from the Army and hauled before the principal of his high school. He traced his fury at women — “Just beneath their blushing lashes and their innocent smiles lies the most rancid and putrid, sickening essences” — to the girls who both aroused and frustrated him in eighth grade.
It is a kind of hatred that experts in extremism warn is becoming more common and more dangerous, providing what amounts to a new feeder network for white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups.
“More and more, we see misogyny as the gateway drug for extremists,” said Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of more than 20 people interviewed to compile this account of Beierle’s history and the phenomenon it represents.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/local/yoga-shooting-incel-attack-fueled-by-male-supremacy/?utm_term=.3588ccba9336&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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