There Was A Denver Spree Killer Again. He Was A Racist Men's Rights Asshole Again.

Are you not SURPRISE?

The gunman who killed five people and injured two in a Denver shooting spree Monday was a self-published author of racist murder fiction who really liked to quote himself on social media, and who believed that the very best alpha males should be free to use violence to keep inferior humans under control. Big surprise, he also was obsessed with women's "purity" and thought that government suppression of completely natural "male Honor violence" would eventually result in disaster, as men had no choice but "blowing up catastrophically."

ABC News reports that prior to Monday's shootings, which took place in several locations around Denver,

federal law enforcement was aware that the suspect, Lyndon Mcleod, harbored extremist views and had a history of psychiatric episodes, multiple law enforcement sources confirmed to ABC News.

Law enforcement is now scouring the suspect's writings, both physical and online, and trying to determine what led up to the shooting spree, sources said. Police said they had investigated the suspect in 2020 and 2021 for previous incidents, but he was not arrested either time.

Police said at a presser yesterday that McLeod knew all of the victims he shot, either personally or through business. Two of the shootings took place at tattoo parlors, and a third at a location where McLeod had run a tattoo parlor that was open at least until 2017. One of those shot by McLeod was a Lakewood police officer, who police briefers said was in stable condition but will need additional surgeries. McLeod was shot and killed in a gunfight with police.

While it's not clear whether McLeod left any notes about his motives for Monday's deadly rampage, the guy had some seriously fucked up beliefs that are disturbingly popular with members of the asshole manosphere community. The Daily Beast reports that McLeod

appears to have operated a plethora of Twitter and Instagram accounts under the alias Roman McClay, which he used for his three-book series Sanction. The book series, with its first book described in an Amazon review as “eloquent reflections on dominance hierarchies, psychology, technology, nature, violence, anatomy and physiology, sexual morality, drug use, politics, and a whole mess of stuff,” follows a character named Lyndon McLeod, a persona named after its author who “commits 46 murders” in the book and one he seemed to allow to seep into his real life.

Gosh, that sounds a little bit like wingnut rancher and Bundy Oregon standoff personality LaVoy "Tarp Man" Finicum, who wrote an exquisitely bad novel about one brave cowboy standing up to tyrants and killing off a posse of rogue lawmen, and who ended up getting shot dead as he tried to escape the wildlife refuge standoff, nearly running over a cop in the process.

According to reviews on Amazon examined by Newsweek, McLeod's literary oeuvre had far more in common with the blatantly racist fantasies of The Turner Diaries,     but with extra ranting about modern white alpha male concerns.

"[T]his book is packed full of rants on diversity, women, and globalization," one reviewer wrote. "There are fantasies of killing people involved in the [Black Lives Matter] movement, and bizarre threats to Ben Shapiro/Sam Harris/and others."

One positive reviewer, who said the book features "racial slurs abound," wrote: "Taboo topics like incest, murder, racial inferiority, and genocide, are written in an almost casual tone. It puts language to what most people secretly think, and then suppress, in the deepest recesses of their hearts."

No, don't think I'll be reading that one, thanks. The reviews, or at least most of them written before yesterday when the author was revealed to be the Denver shooter, are disturbingly positive , from weirdos who think they've found some kind of prophet. Gross.

McLeod hadn't updated his Twitter feed since 2020, but it's full of all sorts of insights about the world, many of them framed, as the Daily Beast notes, by quotations from his own books, because it's not like any other writer understood the world as well as he did. I

This is basically the plot to my stupid book. Our entire society is made up of shitty little fucks who insult badasses & get away with it because law enforcement & social norms protect the WEAK from the STRONG. I’m over it.

The weak better buckle up... shit is about to get real.

McLeod also explained — see if this sounds familiar! — that in the good old days before we were saddled with "democracy, of breeding" some 2000 years back, alpha males (exactly like him!) "USED to breed almost all women, and how sad it is that this is no longer the case. In a connected tweet, he praises the great Chad Messiah Jordan Peterson for recognizing that manliness is in manly men's DNA, and ultimately explains his superior genes have made him a jerk, and hence, a winner:  

Yes I’m a jerk. I have high testosterone and low patience. I’ve been in more steeet fights than you have teeth. I’ve been arrested on felony weapons charges. I’ve had 3 women in bed at once. I’m Aggro as fuck dude. And I have MAO-A gene; and 4% Neanderthal DNA too. See? Genes.

Newsweek says that McLeod claimed in a separate tweet that the threesome was with three "teenaged girls," making him the alphaest alpha that ever alphaed.

Women, on the other hand, need to be kept virginal for the alphas, because again, that's just evolution; McLeod tweeted that "Men must be protectors and providers and women must be chaste. Each sex wants different things. Read evolutionary psychology books to see why. It’s built into our DNA." He also explained that while he wasn't religious, "I love religion. All religions place a massive sanction on female premarital sex! Religion DEMANDS virginity in women!"

Put that whole mess of bargain-counter evolutionary psychology together and stir in some contemporary politics, and you get McLeod explaining that when men aren't allowed to do violence to those who threaten to defile their women, because "Honor," you'll just end up causing more trouble, since in his understanding of Steven Pinker, men need to do the violence evolution demands of them:

My only half-original thought was this modern/liberal supresssion of male Honor violence ... having the effect of destabilizing the state itself. Large numbers of innately aggro men fuming but with no release & then blowing up catastrophically.

McLeod seems to have thought a hell of a lot about how society would be to blame when perfectly normal men like him finally lose their shit. It was a whole theme with McLeod, leading him to bizarrely agree with CNN's Don Lemon in 2018 — when Lemon, after the racist murders of two Black men in Kentucky and the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, called white men "the biggest terror threat in this country." While he considered Lemon a racist for saying so, McLeod said it's simply understandable that "Aggro white males" are absolutely seething with justified rage, so don't be too surprised when it spills over in our wimpified diverse world that keeps real men down:

Aggro white males ARE violent & will be more violent as they are made irrelevant by a country that HATES them. Their limbic system is in revolt against the modern world. War is coming. “And the birds fine in song & feather took no warning” — Dickens

As far as we can tell, Charles Dickens never wrote "And the birds fine in song & feather took no warning,” so we'll assume that's another self-quote there.

Again, all we know from his social media posts and his supremely manly literary output is that Lyndon McLeod had a lot of violent, fucked-up beliefs, which are shared with a lot of guys in the incel and Men's Rights movement. Hell, they're also being voiced by such mainstream manthinkers as Tucker Carlson and Sen. Josh Hawley, not to mention university professors now and then. How, or even whether, those beliefs may have played a role in Monday's killings remains unknown. Even aggro white men have bad days and business disputes, after all.

We bet only a few more of these birds will actually end up going on murderous rampages, regularly, so it's not like this is a problem or anything.

[ Daily Beast / Newsweek / ABC News ]

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