Give a boy a target for his grievance and he might get it in his head they need to pay
Roy Den Hollander — who killed the family of a federal judge and a fellow professional misogynist attorney last week — is yet another product of the world Rush Limbaugh made. Here’s a deeper look into how he just took things to their logical extreme:
An examination of Mr. Den Hollander’s life shows how he represented the most violent elements of a male supremacist movement whose discourse online has become increasingly threatening toward women.
He made his views clear in thousands of pages of writing. In his final months, he uploaded the last version of his autobiography, a 1,698-page manifesto that ended with an ominous epilogue about his determination to fight “feminazis” until his last breath.
His beliefs swirled between the worlds of self-proclaimed anti-feminists and men’s rights activists. He ranted about what he perceived to be gender discrimination against men in family courts and other institutions, a focus of men’s rights activists, but also wrote blog posts calling for women to be killed.
After a contentious divorce in 2001, Mr. Den Hollander began using the court system to address his grievances, suing nightclubs for advertising ladies’ nights discounts and Columbia University for having a women’s studies program. When he lost in court, as he almost always did, he would sometimes respond with lawsuits targeting the opposing lawyers personally — and even once sued a judge who had ruled against him.
The fact that the nation’s political press treated a female presidential candidate’s compliance with email server management best practices as a much more important issue than her opponent confessing to serial sexual assault seems like a too-on-the-nose plot point in a feminist novel, and yet it’s actually what happened in 2016. Beating Trump is an important objective, but the deeply misogynist culture that propelled him to the White House will still be there.