By David Futrelle
Was Men’s Rights attorney Roy Den Hollander, who on Sunday night gunned down a federal judge’s husband and son, also the man who shot fellow Men’s Rights lawyer Marc Angelucci dead a little over a week ago?
It’s looking a lot like it. Let’s consider some of the facts of the case as they are now emerging.
Den Hollander had a motive — professional and personal jealousy. According to the Daily Beast,
In one of his online screeds, “men’s rights” lawyer Roy Den Hollander made it clear he blamed U.S. District Judge Esther Salas for robbing him of a legal victory that instead was claimed by activist California attorney Marc Angelucci.
Den Hollander did not name Angelucci in his bile-filled memoir, but law-enforcement sources told The Daily Beast that papers mentioning Angelucci were found in or around the car where Den Hollander killed himself on Monday.
The Daily Beast has more on the case and Den Hollander’s feelings about it.
He was apparently targeting various people he considered enemies.
The New York Times notes that he had the name and a photo of New York State chief judge, Janet M. DiFiore in his car.
In a lengthy screed he left behind he mused about revenge. “The only problem with a life lived too long under Feminazi rule,” he wrote, “is that a man ends up with so many enemies he can’t even the score with all of them.”
Den Hollander had cancer and had apparently decided he had nothing left to lose.
“Death’s hand is on my left shoulder,” he wrote, “nothing in this life matters anymore.”
In both cases, the shooter reportedly wore a FedEx uniform as a ruse to get his victims to open their door.
This is the detail that absolutely clinches it for me; there’s no way this could be mere coincidence.
On the A Voice for Men website, a eulogy for the murdered Angelucci declares him a “modern martyr like ancient Saint Vincent.”
Now it appears that he was martyred by one of his own. Not only by a fellow Men’s Rights attorney but one who had once published an article on A Voice for Men and who had been described by AVFM founder Paul Elam as a hero. “[A]s much as I loathe the idea of anyone claiming authority on what a “real” man is, ” Elam wrote in a post on the site, “if I had to venture a guess, it would be men like Hollander.”
I would call this a great irony except that there’s really no irony here at all. The Men’s Rights Movement attracts desperate, delusional, angry and unhinged men (and some women fitting the same general description); it’s really not a shock to learn that one of these men decided to take revenge on those considered his enemies. Indeed, I’ve been expecting to see someone with ties to A Voice for Men lose it like this for years; I’m just a little surprised that it turned out to be Den Hollander and not one of the other seemingly more likely candidates.
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Just posted something about this in the other thread.
This post made me blink, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
I’m frankly surprised it took this long for a well known MRA to kill another: they’re all powder kegs a spark from detonation and often hate each other almost as much as they hate feminists or women in general.
It appears Paul is now trying to pretend he never said that, as today he said in a post that he always found something off about Hollander and never trusted him. The fact that he is trying to redact what he said is to be expected, though, as he still wants to on some level pretend he’s part of a human rights movement.
Hollander is the first because he got cancer and decided he had nothing to lose. Other more obviously dangerous MRAs don’t have that.
I hope this doesn’t cause a chain reaction where they take people unrelated to their grudges down with them.
Not to prod this particular hornet’s nest again, but does that mean the idea that Den Hollander was an Epstein-linked operative is less plausible now? He clearly had a long list of people he wanted to see dead for personal reasons.
OTOH, we can at least entertain the possibility that he was a manipulated patsy à la Lee Harvey Oswald (who, interestingly, also decamped to Russia for a spell before coming back disillusioned to the US).
Whoa! Break out the 5-D chess board! Just imagine what the conspiracy crowd will do with this.
=Epstein was murdered to keep him from testifying about all his sex clients.
=The judge was peripherally connected to the case, so she had to be dealt with. Why? No reason, it’s how conspiracies work.
=So they frame some pathetic Trump-adjacent loser for the attack on the judge, then kill him, making it look like a suicide. This allows them to tarnish Trump and deflect attention from the real conspiracy.
=A competent hit man would have gone through the house looking for the judge rather than shoot the first two people to come to the door and then run away. So obviously the intent was to intimidate the judge and get control over her.
Hyper-knight at K5j3beta takes nano-pawn at F7h4epsilon.
There’s already one post here hinting Hollander may have been a manipulated patsy.
It was blatantly absurd from the get-go, so no. Seriously, y’all, what the fuck?
(Deadpan) Have you read the previous thread.
It was more than just one post.
Epstein, schmepstein. The real threat that case poses is to the Russian mob, and by extension, Putin. Ergo, if it was a hit, look at them rather than Trump for the puppetmasters.
As for who whacked Epstein himself, so many powerful people were at risk of being implicated by him, in perhaps the one thing the proles would be least inclined to forgive, that there would have been a line. It’s entirely possible several of his wealthier clients collaborated. Maybe even all the plausible suspects are guilty, ala Murder on the Orient Express.
One thing this world sorely needs is a binding international treaty for banking and ownership transparency. No more untraceable funds and transactions, no more dark money flowing into campaign coffers, no more shell corporations with fictitious principals and head office address listings … of course, good luck getting such a thing past the current crop of elites, every one of whom has mountains of skeletons in a hotel’s worth of closets.
Most likely it would take either a Depression/World War II scale event (and realignment of international power) knocking the current system over, or else a whole series of major Panama Papers type leaks that exposes a lot of those skeletons anyway, or else a group of up-and-coming nations with leaders who are non-participants in that sort of corruption to develop the trading clout to include such a demand as a condition of trade agreements and make it stick. Perhaps a future trading bloc of African nations, after having thrown out the corrupt post-colonialist governments they currently have and started over from scratch, will be able to do such a thing in 40 or 50 years. Assuming any of us live that long, that is.
Before you think that last is outrageously unlikely, consider how much the current Western nations bend over backwards to accommodate the horrific Saudi regime, simply because it is sitting on a metric shitload of oil. Or more recently how willing they are to look the other way at Chinese genocides and creeping imposition of censorship beyond its own borders.
In another 40 years Saudi Arabia will be irrelevant, because either the oil will be gone or the oil will be obsolete. (And it will suffer state collapse. There’s a reason it’s the only remaining feudal kingdom. You get feudal kingdoms when the primary productive capital in your place is land. When most countries underwent the agrarian to industrial transition that stopped being the case and the big landowners lost more and more power relative to the big manufacturers, until the latter captured the government. In Saudi Arabia land is still the productive capital, with its gooey black crop running everyone’s industrial machines, but only so long as it hasn’t run out and the demand is still there…)
On the other hand, Nigeria is now roughly where China, Japan, and Taiwan were about forty years ago … if it becomes part of a larger bloc of nations, cleans itself up, and avoids going the autocratic route as China did, it could well push a reform like this. It could anyway. Much of the reason the existing powerful nations are bound up with this dark-money web has to do with colonialism and, when it began to get increasingly politically unpopular with their home populations, the methods developed to launder the proceeds from it. Methods corrupt post-colonialist warlords often co-opted for their own ends, which might thus be extremely unpopular with the general population there. Meanwhile the population is leapfrogging the “West” in many respects: from little energy to green energy, skipping wireline for wireless networking infrastructure, and so forth. They’re underbanked just as they were undersupplied with wired infrastructure, and may wind up leapfrogging there as well, going straight to digital fiat currency of some sort (not necessarily cryptocurrency). If the proles build a whole new banking system, then overthrow their current old-school leaders, they will have no investment in preserving the old one … or its opacity. And forcing transparency on it would be a way to strike back at the colonialist looters. All that would then be needed is for them to have enough clout to make an “offer that can’t be refused”. Now what might give them that kind of clout? Well, how about if they were sitting on a big pile of lithium in a world quickly moving to electric vehicles because it was running out of oil?
Now, it’s sadly likely that they’ll just end up caught in a West/China tug-of-war instead, so it might take something that weakens the latter two to create the opening for them to take charge of their own affairs. China itself suggests how that might happen: instead of ending up firmly in the Soviet orbit, or staying in a tug-of-war between them and the US, the opening provided by the energy crisis of the 70s appears to have given them the opportunity to start forging their own path around then, until now they stand strong with clout of their own. And guess what’s coming down the pike now, almost with certainty? Another energy crisis, sparked by peak oil and growing climate change risks, and maybe accelerated if the COVID-19 oil demand slump triggers the demise of that Saudi feudal state just a bit earlier than otherwise, so that when COVID is dealt with and the demand slump ends we wind the region in serious political turmoil and the remaining oil there much more expensive and unreliable to get.
@Dalilama : it wasn’t absurd from the get go. It’s still not absurd, but it’s less likely. Generally speaking, trying to use people who have heavy problem as hitmen is common, but it tend to fail spectaculary.
^I dunno, define common. Because “misogynistic asshole kills people who threatened his fragile ego, turns gun on himself” without a conspiracy seems like it happens a lot more often.
@Ooglyboggles
Unfortunately, that already happens all the time. Angry men are often shooting random civilians because they’re angry in general, not because of those specific civilians.
Oh. Last night I posted a few comments on AVFMs post about this case and they have deleted them and banned me. One of my comments was about how Paul Elam once posted a manifesto about wanting to firebomb people and how to build a “male bomb”.
I also wrote that he has said that it was never about men’s rights to begin with but being against feminism. He can’t claim otherwise.
I said that Hollander was an men’s rights lawyer, look at his website, folks. Why do AVFM deliberately ignore something so obvious?
Now that Peter Wright guy claims that MRAs have nothing to do with antifeminism even though Karen Straughan calls herself an antifeminist. They really don’t want people to know that they have anyhing to do with murderous antifeminists, do they.
@Painteyelash
Probably because they’re a hate group that occasionally attempts to masquerade as a human rights movement. Generally not worth trying to post, they ban any critics.
It’s fascinating how much conspiracy theories rely on a just world fantasy. All these rich people going to absurd (Exciting and entertaining also) lengths to cover up their crimes. In reality, several rich and famous people have already been very clearly linked to Epstein. And nobody cares. Because we live in a world where raping teenage girls with coercion and implied threats might as well be legal. There’s video of the current president partying with Epstein and Co and he’s still the president. These are open secrets. Nobody cared. A little more witness testimony isn’t going to change anything. Hell it might exonerate a few people who just happened to get photographed next to the guy.
@magnesium
Exactly. Why bother to cover up anything when the elites know that (much like in 1984) the overwhelming majority of the proles won’t give a fuck anyway?
Part of why conspiracy thinking is so dangerous is because it allows people to overlook the real abuses of power and issues in plain sight in favor of fictional conspiracies that supposedly lie below the surface. It’s how the QAnon fans can position Trump as good by saying he’s actually working against some secret deep state conspiracy rather than admitting that he’s kidnapping protestors.
@ magnesium
Indeed. Trump isn’t even bothered about his association with Ghislaine Maxwell. Quite the contrary by the look of it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/21/donald-trump-ghislaine-maxwell-i-wish-her-well
@Ohlmann
Yes, it was completely fucking absurd, and remains so. Reactionary assholes deciding to shoot someone they’ve decided to blame for their problems is a daily occurrence, and people with ridiculous cases attacking the judge presiding is hardly unheard of. There is zero evidence that this is anything else, and the judge being tangentially involved in an unrelated case is, in fact, unrelated.
@painteyelash
Out of curiosity, how sophisticated is the banning? Is it your username, or are you IP banned? I wonder if they have ever been seriously brigaded and had to put in place IP banning or not. Like I just wonder if anyone cared enough, if they got enough exposure, or if their foot-stomping is mainly at each other, for the purposes of radicalising each other.
O/T: it looks like now Graham Linehan has gone off on a really creepy tangent about children having orgasms. When TERFs accuse trans* people of pedophilia, they’re telling on themselves big time.
@Big Titty Demon
Hmm, I think it is just my username because when I tried to post again it said “you have been banned”. I don’t know how IP banning works so I assume it is just my username. Peter Wright responded to my comment, I got an email with the response and found out I was banned. Weird how he responds and then blocks instead of just blocking.
Wasn’t an IP ban the last six times I got banned from there – just a username ban.
Hey – I get snappy with whining and wimpishness.