Suspect In Shooting At Judge’s House Decried ‘Feminists Meddling With Nature’ Warned Most Guns ‘Owned By Guys’

It’s an established pattern at this point that aggrieved loners, many of them Trump supporters, write of the unfairness of their lives and how persecuted they have been — and then they go out and kill innocent people, shooting them in stores, schools or even in their homes. Roy Den Hollander, the chief suspect in the murder of Judge Esther Salas’ son in New Jersey, and the shooting of her husband, fits the bill perfectly. He published a manifesto on the internet, as did the El Paso shooter.

The themes are virtually identical. The El Paso shooter, also a Trump supporter, wrote about how immigrants were unfairly displacing him. Den Hollander writes about people of color, but most particularly women of color, who are upending the natural order of things, apparently, by going out in the world and being successful. He wrote, on page 1776 of his screed, quoted in The Atlantic:

“The Feminists should be careful in their meddling with nature. There are 300 million firearms in this country, and most of them are owned by guys.”

And on page 1,880: “It makes no sense for men to disarm in the face of an evil that wants to exercise totalitarian power over them. They have a right to revolt against that tyranny, to take it down. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the tyranny of George III or the Feminists.”

Interesting that he sees gender equality as an evil that wants to exercise totalitarian power over men. It’s particularly interesting in view of the fact that men have exercised totalitarian power over women for centuries — but that’s the natural order of things, excuse me, I forgot myself for a moment there.

Den Hollander’s screed goes on with a melange of racist and sexist comments, but if you filter through them, they all distill down to a few basic concepts: 1. Women, no matter what their color, are designed solely to please men, primarily in a visual sense and 2. Women of color should please men and stay cleaning ladies — again, this is the natural order of things, in the “manosphere” as some people refer to this particular body of deranged thought.

Den Hollander does not see Judge Salas as having earned her way to a district court judgeship. He sees her as an “affirmative action job.” He’s not crazy about Sonia Sotomeyer, either, because he doesn’t consider either one of them babes, and he wants you to know that. This is a guy who started forcing his attentions on little girls in the third grade, bear in mind, until parents reported him to the school.

Den Hollander, who turned his hatred of women into a string of media appearances over more than a decade, saw Salas’s biography differently. “It was the usual effort to blame a man and turn someone into super girl—daddy abandoned us, we were indigent, which means they lived off of the taxpayer, but we overcame all odds,” he writes in one of the documents posted online last year. He describes Salas’s decade as a public defender as “representing lumpen proletariat ne’er-do-wells.” Her “one accomplishment,” he says, was being a high-school cheerleader.

He also attacks Justice Sotomayor, [who he claimed was “angry that nobody had invited her to her high school senior prom”] saying she was “52 years old, prime age for a Feminazi.” His voluminous writings—more than 10,000 pages of PDFs—show a deep sense of grievance against women, especially his mother, who he claims told him, at age 4, “I wish I had listened to your father and never had you!” He calls her a witch, a “Nazi loon,” and “another malevolent female.” He also describes kissing girls in third grade frequently enough that their parents complained to their teacher. The document, one of several he uploaded to the Internet Archive, is a disturbing but by now common coda to high-profile incidents of gun violence: the suspected shooter leaving a trail of arguments and anger in random corners of the web. Many of them involve a hatred of women and people of color, and connect broad claims about the world with very personal claims of grievance.

The man is a sociopath, as he candidly admits.

“All my life I saw other people, even strangers in the street, as potential enemies with whom conflict seemed more likely than cooperation,” he writes. “I understood that, except for my few friends, I didn’t like people because they scared me; and when someone is afraid, he hates others for causing him the humiliation and himself for allowing it. But where did this ever-present fear come from—my genes or the way my mother raised me? I opted for the culpability of my mother with some assistance from my father.”

He also writes viciously about a Russian woman he says he married, calling her a “mafia prostitute.” Den Hollander writes at length about the time he spent living in Russia, including time he says he spent working for Kroll Associates. At one point, he describes difficulties he said he was having with the U.S. government, claiming it had “confiscated” his U.S. citizenship. “Boy, was I glad I didn’t vote for Obama—wrote-in Putin instead,” he writes.

Den Hollander identifies as a Trump supporter, not surprisingly. “I did volunteer work for Trump’s campaign because I hate PC-Feminism more than I hate America.” He hates everybody, America, people on the street, his own mother. He got a law degree and weaponized it, filing lawsuits against his political enemies, real or imagined, and then he finally just got a gun and went to shoot the judge. It’s now being reported that he had a picture of New York Chief Judge Janet DiFiore in his car, along with her address. Maybe he was about to embark on a serial killing spree of women judges? We will never know. In any event, he took his own life, rather than strike out at another target.

Hillary Clinton spoke of “deplorables.” I’m not sure that’s a strong enough word. In fact, I’m not even sure that there is a word that encompasses the level of hatred and conflict that so many Trump supporters are apparently in, that makes them want to lash out and destroy everything and everybody. America, like any society, has always had its malcontents. That won’t change. But the advent of Trump has taken a message to them, “Hey, you’re alright, in fact, your thinking is right, it’s the way things should be.” Trump is an inadequate man speaking to other inadequate men, and he makes no bones about advocating violence — and making toxic masculinity seem cool, rather than the way of the loser.

Donald Trump spoke of “American carnage.” He’s the architect of American carnage. Look at all the lives that have been lost on his watch, from COVID-19 killing more people early on than died in Vietnam, to mass shootings, to a spike in hate crimes and the suicide rate, and now people are demonstrating in the streets. Trump speaks of a “China plague.” He’s the plague we need to get rid of first, no other. The cure, happily, for TRUMPVID-16 lies at the ballot box November 3.