On 27 December 2021, Lyndon McLeod shot and killed five individuals in Denver, Colorado, before being shot and killed by a Denver police officer. McLeod’s writings and social media content suggest his worldviews were heavily aligned with accelerationist themes and narratives promoted by the esoteric fascist movement Wolves of Vinland. Two of the individuals targeted by McLeod were named in his novel Sanction – a book rife with violent accelerationist imagery. According to Denver police, the shootings appear to be motivated by personal grievances. Denver police claim McLeod was known to law enforcement and had been investigated in “two separate investigations” in 2020 and early 2021, although the basis of these investigations have not been made public by law enforcement.
Evidence suggests McLeod was deeply influenced by the misogynistic pro-masculinity culture which pervades the alt-right’s so-called manosphere – particularly the views of Paul Waggener, a co-founder of the Wolves of Vinland; Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Men and a former member of the Wolves of Vinland; and Jack Murphy, Claremont Institute fellow and founder of the “international men’s organization” Liminal Order. On Donovan’s podcast, McLeod expressed the belief that his natural masculine traits were actually stumbling blocks in modernity and that Sanction became a post-mortem of why his life was always so contentious and he didn’t “fit in.”
Read more at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology
