Mass shooting in Denver: understanding fascism in order to stop it

On Monday December 27, 2021 at around 5:00 pm, a lone gunman initiated a targeted shooting spree which left five people dead and one in critical condition. Lyndon McLeod, also known by his pseudonym Roman McClay, was a believer in far-right ideology, anti-Covid conspiracies, masculine supremacy, apocalyptic prepping, crypto-Nazi aesthetics, and race science.

McLeod had previously owned a tattoo parlor in Denver but had his license revoked. After this, McLeod took up living in the woods by making a home out of a storage container and fetishizing tough-living, ruggedness, and survival through braving the elements. In McLeod's many social media accounts he ranted about the suppression of male honor and violence. In one such rant Mcleod stated, “I have high testosterone and low patience. I've been in more steeet [sic] 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.” Online McLeod also posted many photos of himself with guns, whiskey, and while working out; McLeod also had a clear interest in classical literature, esoteric Nazism, Odinism, wolves, and alpha male nonsense. 

Using his pseudonym, McLeod published three books that he titled Sanction I, II, and III; all of which could still be purchased on Amazon until a few days after the shooting. One of the fascist sympathizing reviews on Goodreads claims, “SANCTION is an epic, visceral journey into the dark heart of every man broken by society; the one chewed up and spit out. What if man were to put his foot down, stand up, and bellow out with brain and balls and bile: NOT ONE MORE INCH.”

Premeditated targeting

In McLeod’s books the main character, named after himself, proceeds to murder 46 individuals. The series is reminiscent of the Turner Diaries, a far-right fantasy novel that has been used to justify racial violence in the past. The first book in the Sanction series includes an image on its cover with a wolfsangel, a symbol used by both the original Nazis and modern neo-Nazis. The back cover describes the author in terms of his racial bloodlines. The books also include fantasy narratives about “shooting communists,” murdering “leftists as they slept,” and hurting anti-racist protesters; which describes at least half of McLeod’s victims. Like the Christchurch and El Paso shooters, the Denver shooter promoted ecofascist ideas on immigration—along with anti-Semitic views about the media. 

McLeod also appears to have been linked to two organizations with content on his social media accounts related to the Wolves of Vinland and to the group’s feeder organization, Operation Werewolf (OPWW). McLeod was also a self-declared member of Jack Murphy’s Liminal Order, a Man-O-Sphere group that vilifies ‘radical feminism’ as the root of social disorder. Apocalyptic fantasies that present violent men as heroes against modernity are the basic plot. McLeod summarized the plot as such, “Our entire society is made up of shitty little fucks who insult badasses and get away with it because law enforcement and social norms protect the weak from the strong. I'm over it.” 

McLeod was previously acquainted with four of his five victims and he even wrote about two of them in his books, demonstrating how this violence was premeditated. The first targeted location in McLeod’s shooting spree was Sol Tribe Tattoo Parlor, where he murdered indigenous artist and activist Alicia Cardenas, one of the individuals he wrote about. He also killed Alyssa Gunn-Maldonado, and seriously injured Alyssa’s partner Jimmy Maldonado. Both were well-known anti-racist activists. 

After this horrific murder, McLeod drove and then forced his way into a Baker neighborhood home, shot at a family, including an infant, and set their van on fire. Then in another neighborhood two miles away, McLeod shot and killed Michael Swinyard, another individual McLeod wrote about in his books. McLeod then made his way to Lakewood, a suburb west of Denver, where he murdered Danny “Dano” Schofield at at Lucky 13 Tattoo shop and Sarah Steck at a Hyatt Hotel in a the Belmar shopping plaza, after pointing his gun at bartenders in a nearby Ted's restaurant. Eventually Lyndon McLeod was shot and killed by police in a shootout. The public has since come to learn that McLeod was wearing a police officer costume throughout this entire fascist rampage.

During a press conference Tuesday, Denver Police confirmed that McLeod had targeted his victims and that the police and FBI had been investigating him off and on for several years. Police Chief Paul Pazen told the public that, “We need to dig in and find out what the motive was behind this.”

Police inaction

It is clear that the motive behind these murders is directly connected to his reactionary views on race and gender. Not only did McLeod’s books signal to his fascist ideas, but he also left a long paper trail of his visceral hate for anyone not white or male. In one of his online posts McLeod claims, “Aggro white males are violent and will be more violent as they are made irrelevant by a country that hates them.” In another post McLeod expressed his rage by saying, “You can’t treat the most aggressive men of your society like shit and expect to survive.”

Both Chief Pazen of the Denver Police Department, along with the FBI, had ample warning and information that Mcleod was capable and willing to commit such a violent attack. Such incidents go to show that the police are not here to prevent crime or harm, but to react. The police are only preventative when it concerns the functions of bourgeois society: protecting private property and repressing political dissent. Police will go to great lengths to infiltrate and disrupt social movements, organizations, and individuals who oppose the system of capitalism. There are thousands of political prisoners sitting in cages for far less, but because Mcleod was threatening and targeting leftwing individuals who also were known as anticapitalists, it did not warrant police prevention. 

The police are only preventative when it concerns the functions of bourgeois society: protecting private property and repressing political dissent.

McLeod’s vigilante murders were without a doubt fueled by the racist, misogynist, and fascist ideas that have been gaining in popularity. What is often overlooked in discussions of the paranoid and racist fear of “replacement” that pervades anti-immigrant rhetoric around the world is the far right's deep connection to the misogynist backlash that has been growing on the internet for the past decade. Men of these beliefs fear that their cultural, political, and economic supremacy is being undercut by women and people of color—even in a country in which the most powerful people are still overwhelmingly white and male. These men also are not your traditional misogynists, like GOP conservatives and Evangelical zealots; they tend to be younger and have embraced misogyny as a symbolic solution to the frustrations in their lives–whether financial, social, or sexual. Since GamerGate, the online Man-O-Sphere has only grown and become a pole of attraction for sociopaths like Lyndon McLeod. 

The class character of fascism 

It is paramount as socialists that we understand fascism and how it gains popularity in order to organize ourselves and other working class people against it. In Leon Trotsky’s original 1932 essay, Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It, he writes that “The genuine basis (for fascism) is the petty bourgeoisie.”

As the owner of a tattoo shop, McLeod was a member of the petty bourgeoisie who had been declassed when he lost his licensing and shop. McLeod felt slighted by the tattoo community and the changing of cultural norms in the industry, including: public defense and support for the victims of misogyny in tattooing, more shops being operated by women, and the recognition of body modification as a historical indigenous practice. 

Trotsky argues that the petty bourgeoisie see themselves as “elite” or a “superior in society,” but when the capitalist economic system creates precarity, they realize, unconsciously, that they are not part of the elite class. This realization causes the petty bourgeoisie to react, in most cases, by adopting ideologies that work to place them back in some type of power position. Through reactionary fascist thinking and organization towards violence, people like Mcleod feel they are countering the disenfranchisement they feel from the bourgeois state.

Fascist ideology is rooted in the oppressive and dysfunctional nature of capitalism, with inherent and perpetual crises, exploitation and enforced inequality, and the proliferation of multiple forms of oppression in order to divide, weaken, and control the working class. Therefore, to be antifascist means it is necessary to be anticapitalist as well. 

Over the last decade we have seen an increase and acceleration in violent crimes committed by followers of fascist ideology. In all of these cases it is evident that the bourgeois state and their armed agents can not be relied on to protect people from or take preventative action against fascists. Fascist ideology is rooted in the oppressive and dysfunctional nature of capitalism, with inherent and perpetual crises, exploitation and enforced inequality, and the proliferation of multiple forms of oppression in order to divide, weaken, and control the working class. Therefore, to be antifascist means it is necessary to be anticapitalist as well. This is why we need to build revolutionary working-class organizations that reject, counter, and defeat fascist ideologies.

Clara Zetkin said it best in her 1923 report to the Communist International, The Struggle Against Fascism: 

That is why the struggle against fascism must be taken up by the entire proletariat. It is evident that we will overcome the wiley enemy all sooner to the degree that we grasp its essential character and how that character is expressed. …the base of fascism lies not in a small caste but in broad social layers, broad masses, reaching even into the proletariat. We must understand these essential differences in order to deal successfully with fascism. Military means alone cannot vanquish it, if I may use that term; we must also wrestle it to the ground politically and ideologically.

Stopping the fascist creep

As socialists in Denver, we have been watching the fascist creep build for a while now. These killings have impacted the entire community, which is grieving the loss of friends, comrades, and loved ones. It is soul-crushing to watch innocent people die again and again. Far-right ideology kills and will continue to kill—from these five Denverites, to Kenosha, to Charlottesville, to Black and Jewish places of worship, to the millions of victims of US imperialism and austerity. We must stand united in the fight against fascism, meet it at every turn, and as Trotsky said, “acquaint his head with the pavement” so as communities we no longer have to fear going to a grocery store, schools, parks, or work. 

It is imperative we organize and inform our fellow workers so we can effectively push back against the fascist creep. Fascists hurt and kill people that is the very core of the belief system; Nazi violence and politics do not exist separate of each other, so we must fight fascism however we can and create a culture and consciousness that refuses to tolerate this ideology. Neither the police nor the courts will do anything to stop fascist violence. There is a greater likelihood that they will protect and support fascists; as many of their ranks are themselves adherents to far-right and fascist ideology. Therefore, the antifascist left cannot rely on the state; but must recognize it as complicit. 

Because of this, entire communities must take up the anti-fascist struggle. Today, we must honor the people who have heroically resisted misogyny, fascism, police brutality, imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism, and all of those who have lost their lives fighting for a more just world. We must work to build organization and develop cadres that are able to intervene in the struggle against misogyny, racism and fascism—and win these ideological battles to prevent future attacks against the people and the communities we love.

We are antifascists because we love each other, something antithetical to fascist thinking. The Denver Communists send all of our love and solidarity to the survivors, the families of people we lost, their coworkers, and our grieving city. 

Dusty Ray is an antifascist activist and member of the Denver Communists.