And so we kick off 2022, IDSG's fourth year, with an episode about the Denver shooter and self-published SF novelist (who put himself and his own murder plans in his own books) Lyndon McCleod, AKA Roman McClay, and his relationship to the infamous 'Manosphere', AKA a network of misogynistic and 'masculinist' fashy chudlingers like Jack Murphy, Jack Davenport, etc. We follow up a bit on our last episode (Part 1 of our post-verdict Rittenhouse coverage) and drop back in on the nauseating You Are Here podcast, and Baldy McDickface's Tim Pool's show, as we explore the recent flap around Jack Murphy's 'Cuck Letter' (don't ask... well, just listen), before delving a tad into McCleod/McClay's fiction and his worldview, including some hardcore stoopid genetic determinism. Lots going on in this one, and so we're issuing bigtime content warnings, not least for the recorded voice of a multiple murderer. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 * Episode Notes/Links CBS Denver, "Denver Couple Shares Moments Lyndon McLeod tried to kill them" You Are Here, Buzzfeed Vax-Only Event Becomes "Super-Spreader" Cuckold Rage -- Jack Murphy's Freak Out at Sydney Watson Sydney Watson, Addressing the Incident Timcast IRL 22DEC2021 Jack Murphy Live Liminal Order Jack Murphy, Cultivating Erotic Energy From a Surprising Source Today I sent my adoring loyal hot young girlfriend of two years to have sex with a stranger from tinder. She is currently at his apartment, checked in with me via text and is presumably sucking and fucking her way to a good time. I’m alone writing. Couldn’t be happier. Now before you write me off as another salon.com freak who wants to be a cuckold or some kind of spineless beta under male, hear me out. This has been a long road. My manhood is intact and my dick is hard. [...] It is suspended disbelief. This disbelief allows us to create a gap to close. It creates space for desire to reach out to the other person. Role playing stranger rape puts us into different personas for the moment, creating mystery danger and desire. Ie. its fucking hot. Matt from Tinder helps us to introduce another element which requires suspended disbelief. Just like my girlfriend knows I could nor ever would actually rape her, I too know that my girlfriend is not going to leave me for some guy she met on tinder today to fuck. The entire experience is regimented according to my rules. I introduced her to the idea. I pushed it. I told her to go on Tinder and find someone. On the day in question, I tell her when and where to do it. She checks in with me via text. I know where she is and I am waiting for her. She is not alone. She is on a mission sent directly by me. And the entire point is for me to get turned on in a way that wouldn’t happen otherwise. The excitement, eustress, and anticipation put me in a different state. I get turned on knowing someone else wants my girl as badly as I do. Yes, I get turned on knowing she is fucking someone else. We’ve done it together where we picked up a guy at a bar, took him home and I watched them have sex. Or we’ve brought a guy from craig’s list over and I took pictures as he banged her. This time, I just sent her on her way and gave myself time to write and relax, knowing that exceptional sex awaits upon reunion. The time she spends with the other guy, isn’t really hers alone. Its ours. Its mine. Its her acting out my ideas. Her behavior is manifestation of my will. Rod Dreher, The American Conservative, Queer as Volk It turns out that back in 2015, Murphy, who now sells himself and his masculinist advisory services as an extreme chad, wrote a piece extolling the erotic pleasure of being a beta cuck. You can find this online; I’m not going to link to it. Some Redditors got busy digging, and found that Murphy and his girlfriend had acted in a self-made porn broadcast back in 2019 (Murphy admitted this on Twitter today). In the film, there is apparently a sequence in which the super-masculine Murphy impales himself with a plastic phallus, while simultaneously pleasuring himself. This is not a rumor, alas; I stumbled across the image online, and can’t unsee it. Denver Post, Denver gunman's novels named real-life victims, described similar attacks McLeod named both Alicia Cardenas and Michael Swinyard as murder victims in his novels. Cardenas, 44, and Swinyard, 67, were both killed in Monday’s shooting spree. Police believe McLeod killed Swinyard inside his home at One Cheesman Place, an apartment building in the 1200 block of Williams Street. A property manager for the building told residents in an email that McLeod wore tactical gear, a police logo and a badge when he entered the building. In McLeod’s first novel, “Lyndon MacLeod” wears police gear and kills a character named “Michael Swinyard” at his apartment on Williams Street. The character in the book also kills other people in the building and robs them. The character has a list of people he wants to kill and considers some to be more important than others. “The murders were like food in the belly, like wine at rest on the tongue,” the first book reads. “Killing people nourished the soul.” Heavy, Lyndon McLeod aka Roman McClay: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know Wineberserkers forum, Have you dealt with LJ McLeod Matthew Kriner, H. E. Upchurch, and W. Aaron, Global Network on Extremism and Technology, Examining the Denver Shooter's Ideological Views Shane Burley and Alexander Reid Ross, Bellingcat, How the Denver Shooter’s Digital Trail Exposes the Violent Fantasies of the ‘Manosphere’ Left Cost Right Watch, Nazis Made a Murder Calendar and Counterterror Analysts are Helping Spread It Mack Lamoureux, Vice News, Tattoo Parlor Killer Named His Victims in VIolent, Misogynist Novels Albion's Seed at Wikipedia American Nations at Wikipedia Jack Donovan interviews Roman McClay Jack Donovan Interviews Roman McClay (sanctionthebook.com) On John Goldman (Jack Murphy) D.C. Charter School Board Investigating Senior Employee For Alleged Alt-Right Links – WAMU McLeod's weird tweet about Yankee genes (5) Jack Three on Twitter: "Americans have been sold the lie that a Connecticut Yankee and a Western outlaw are the same because they're both 'white.' Nothing could be more wrong (genetically speaking). From Billy the Kid (McCarty) to The Hell's Angels, the Ulster & Highland Scots are not American https://t.co/Cbba3MNrjI" / Twitter Jefferson Davis' speech to House Chamber, Mississippi Capitol, December 26, 1862 Jefferson Davis' Speech at Jackson, Miss. | The Papers of Jefferson Davis | Rice University
So we moved into this other room in between the two rooms of my shop and he fired six shots through the door at us.
They finally found a safe place in a neighboring tattoo shop but it didn't end there.
Jeremy's van was the next target.
Minutes later we heard like a huge explosion and the guys in the tattoo shop came back and they're like there's a there's a van on fire just exploded.
I'm like my heart sunk because this person in my heart like was trying to kill him.
Jeremy learned years ago that McLeod had planned to kill him, but he didn't know that he would follow through.
I was pretty much his number one target.
The two owned a tattoo shop back in 2015 called All Heart Industry.
So I broke that business off with him, and he hated that.
I never would have thought it would come to something like this.
After that, the shooter left flares on his new business, Six Collective, promoting a book.
I guess he wanted me to read it to see that in the book, a character that was his own name, Lyndon MacLeod, was going to kill me and then behead her.
The two are devastated.
Others were killed.
I mean, everybody that was involved in this is a victim.
We survived it.
And I honestly have to thank Jeremy for that.
And of course, the Lord.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
So, welcome to episode 101. welcome to episode 101.
It's the worst thing in the world in here.
And yeah, it's the first new IDSG of the new year.
First new IDSG of 2022.
We're entering our fourth year doing this.
Still no sign of our subject matter ending, sadly, so plenty more scope.
What is it the Joker says?
We're going to be, we're destined to do this forever.
This would be one job that would be nice to be, it would be a good feeling to be out of a job doing this, ultimately.
Yeah, yeah.
Except that I really need the money.
Yeah, no, me too.
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
It's very, it's very helpful for my bottom line.
But, you know, it's also, you know, hey, yeah, you know, if I had to go find another shitty job again, maybe, maybe that bad for me, good for the world.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah, there you go.
Like many things.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's the new episode.
I'm your host, Jack Graham.
From hell's heart, I stab at thee.
No particular reason, it's just the way I am.
And my co-host here, Daniel, doesn't have a beef with you, as far as I know, do you, Daniel?
Uh, not with, not with the Patreon supporters, you know, like the rest of the audience, the, the, them maybe, maybe, but yeah, no, not at all.
Not at all.
This is a, this is a gift to you.
Believe me.
Uh, if you can't afford, uh, to support us, that's fine.
Let's crash straight into it.
So this episode is, uh, about Roman McClay.
Uh, no, God.
I've done it already.
I've done it already.
I've fucked the name up already.
Look, this guy is not a joke.
OK, he murdered people.
But the name, the name thing, it's just driving me fucking.
This guy has so many names.
I just want to call him Duncan McLeod of the Klan McLeod.
Yeah, exactly.
That's what I keep in my head.
Yeah.
Because because his real name is Lyndon McLeod.
Lyndon McLeod.
Lyndon McLeod, which just sounds like a character from In the Loop to me.
It just sounds very much like the senator, like the sitting defense chief or whatever should have been named Lyndon MacLeod.
And then he went by the pen name Roman MacLeay, which is just similar enough.
I've literally got it on like a post-it note in front of me so that I don't fucking forget which one is which.
But the thing is that Lyndon MacLeod is a character in Roman MacLeay's books, isn't he?
Yeah, but he very cleverly spelled it differently.
Because the real name of Lyndon Macleod is M-C-L-E-O-D, and in the book it's Lyndon M-A-C-L-E-O-D.
So, completely different character.
That's amazing.
That reminds me of Kafka, you know, Kafka's directly autobiographical novels, and nobody figured it out because he called his protagonist Joseph K. It's amazing.
Yeah, no.
So, you know, Linda McLeod, Franz Kafka, equal in literary importance, I'm sure.
That's actually really offensive.
I wish I hadn't said that.
It is.
So we are we are laughing about this because we do go into this darkest dark material with a light heart because there's no other way to to cover this material most of the time.
But obviously, if you heard the Neil and they call it open, we are definitely talking about a man who murdered people.
And that was just a clip from one of the survivors of the attack.
From a local to Denver news source.
And so I wanted to lead off with that.
And just let people know, we are going to be playing a little bit of audio from this guy.
And that might sound a little ghoulish, but that's kind of what we do here.
And if that's sort of over the line for you and you don't want to listen to that, then I'll let you know before we get there.
But I think it's important to sort of hear this guy in his own words to a certain degree.
And we're going to be kind of putting him into some of the context in the world in which he lived.
And the people who are kind of absorbing what he did and where some of these ideas come from that I think brought about this murder, this mass murder.
So that's what we're going to be talking about.
That's what we're going to be doing.
So just be warned.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is, you know, this is dark stuff and it's definitely not a joke.
And if we laugh, it's not because we think what he did is funny because it's not.
I think before we get into that, we have a little bit of catch up from the subject of the last episode, don't we?
Which was about Kyle Rittenhouse.
So we were going to do Kyle Rittenhouse Part 2 as the first episode of 2022, and then this sort of took precedence.
So we're going to do this now, and then the next one will be more about Kyle Rittenhouse and sort of the connections into the larger far right community.
Kyle Rittenhouse has continued to go on various channels and, you know, he spoke at AmFest, which is a TPUSA event.
Yes, rapturous welcome he received there.
Yeah, we will be talking a lot more about that in the next episode, but I thought it was one of the things that's going to come up is that the You Are Here show that I placed very prominently in episode 100 is also sort of central to this episode in some complicated ways.
And so I've been watching a lot of this show.
It's quickly become this, it's like, you know, for someone who does what I do, this show is like crack because it just, it's all the, all the connective tissue to all the terrible things in the world, like run through the show right now.
You know, Nick Fuentes has been on this show.
Believe me, this is a one-stop shopping in some sense, and the show is only three months old.
After we'd recorded the last episode, I saw Cindy Watson and Elijah Schaefer of the You Are Here podcast got into a little conversation about the after effects that they got from their audience and from people who had seen the show and spreading Kyle Rittenhouse's message.
And in particular, they have opinions about the blacks and how they responded to Kyle Rittenhouse being featured.
On you are here.
So yeah, I'm sorry to do this, but we're going to talk a little bit more about the kinds of women that Kyle Rittenhouse thinks are attractive and how they, how these hosts respond to that, because it gives you a sense of sort of the, this is not a like Nazi show.
This is not like a full on, you know, daily show a type show, but It steeps in the same memes, it steeps in the same swamps, it is in the same genre, and it shows, I think, really convincingly just how a lot of the meme culture that the alt-right generated back in 2015 and 2016 has just seeped into everything on the internet now.
And so I thought it was an interesting sort of follow-up to just give you more of a sense of what this show is like.
So let's Again, you always know how bad the show's going to get by how we begin, and so this is how we begin.
A lot of angry black people too.
Just a mistake.
Well, they don't work at YouTube.
So many people calling us mayo.
The blacks, the blacks for mayo.
They don't know how to code.
Why are they not wilding out, though, in terms of, like, freaking out about things that don't matter?
It's like, their community needs to figure some shit out and figure it out, because it's, no, it's, it's like, it's, it's, no, it's just... And so, I just, I'm dipping in here, just, the blacks are mad.
They're calling us mayo.
They're wilding out.
They don't know how to code.
They're wilding out.
These are all...
Very explicit far-right language.
Not that anyone listening to me has to hear me say that's fucking racist, but it's racist in a very particular way.
This isn't your Sean Handy racism.
This isn't your Bill O'Reilly racism.
This is alt-right language racism.
You know, well, this is, you know, this is Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly when the, you know, the cameras aren't rolling.
Right.
I mean, if you know, that's probably worse, actually, when the cameras aren't rolling.
Right.
But this is with the cameras on, you know, like this is this is this is what passes for like entertainment culture in, you know, these kind of young right wing circles these days.
Anyway, just wanted to highlight that right there, you know, and then finish the clip.
Yeah, there is an extent to which comment really is superfluous, I think, in response to this stuff, isn't there?
So, you know, if what I mean, where do you go to?
I mean, there's no there's no analysis needed.
All I have to do is find the clips.
I mean, this is something that I think you and I talked about with, like, Anita Sarkeesian's, you know, stuff that got people so angry a few years ago is that Ultimately, even if the quality of her writing, the quality of her criticism isn't 100% up to snuff, we could quibble with a lot of the stuff that she was saying, but just the volume of the clips and just the way that things were edited together, she's making really valid points about the misogyny of video game culture, even if
You could quibble with some details.
And I feel like that's kind of what I'm doing with some of this is just to go like, look, most people won't listen to this.
Nobody's going to listen to two hours or multiple episodes of the show the way I have by now.
But I can play you a minute and a half of it and say, yeah, this is representative.
So that's kind of what we're doing here.
That's true.
There are real issues that the black community faces and they choose to get mad about things that won't change any situation for black people and it's like you really have all the problems that you know in the black community you're gonna be mad that somebody had Kyle Rittenhouse on their episode and that he likes thick girls.
There was a filter that came out from the show on TikTok and a trend that came out from the show where what it would do is it would start out because you would mirror it and it would be Kyle who was sitting in that chair was like Oh, yeah.
I'm like, so do you like them thin or thick?
And he's like, I like them thick.
And I'm like, damn, boy.
And then it goes to the woman.
And this is where the self-own comes.
They always think they're getting us.
Then it goes to a filter that makes you extra thin.
But like, the girls that were doing it were fat chicks, not thick chicks.
And it was like, so it was both sad, because they don't realize that they're just fat, and that Kyle wouldn't want to have sex with them anyways, because he likes attractive girls, and thick references curvy and attractive, not lazy, lethargic, and disgusting.
And so they were all a bunch of disgusting girls doing this, and then on top of that, When some of them were so fat and ugly that when the app was supposed to make them like unrecognizably thin, it actually made them look like normal people.
And so it was just, they went from fat to thick.
And it was like, oops!
The app just said like, it's the best we can do.
Yeah, but it was just, but I'm saying it was like, it was like a self-owned because it was all these like, just fat chicks.
It was like, dude, Kyle likes attractive women.
Entertainment at its finest.
Yeah.
Sorry for the just immediate fat phobia there, but I mean, this is par for the course with this stuff.
And ultimately this is an episode about the manosphere.
And again, all of this stuff, all of the, like, he likes them thick, not fat.
He likes, he doesn't like the unattractive ones.
He doesn't like the porkers or whatever.
Like this is all built right into like this kind of like internet subculture that began with the manosphere.
Obviously, the roots of it go back much further than that, but as an organized socio-political culture, it begins with the manosphere.
We're seeing it now in this You know, I don't want to say this is not a mainstream show, but this is this is on like the Blaze TV, you know, kind of family of podcasts like this is a professional production like they will get more views on that video.
Well, that's this is that isn't true.
They will get more views on that video than we will get in several of these podcasts.
You know, let's put it that way.
And that's just that's just the reality of it, you know.
So anyway, that was the response.
Yeah.
To the Kyle Rittenhouse thing.
They don't understand why black people would be upset that they brought Kyle Rittenhouse on the show and talked about how much he likes thick girls, because all those people were fat and who cares?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's again, you know, analysis picking this apart just seems completely superfluous, but Yeah, it's just pathetic stuff.
It's school bully stuff.
It's, look how outrageous I am saying these mean things.
I don't even care.
Listen to the mean, nasty things I'm saying.
Are you shocked yet?
It's so fucking pathetic.
It really is.
And it's all aimed at obscuring actual issues, obviously.
It's meant to say, if I let that clip go on, they're like, and why do they care so much about Kyle Rittenhouse?
I bet they think he killed black people.
But they're wrong about that because he only killed white people.
So of course, the fact that he was carrying a rifle and killing people at a protest for black lives, that clearly has nothing to do with anything.
It's just, it is very deliberately missing the point.
And believe me, we are coming back to this.
I've watched enough of Elijah Schafer at this point, and I know what he does and does not say.
We're going to get into this in a future episode, for sure.
But he definitely knows which questions not to ask which people, let's just put it that way.
Yeah.
So as is usually the case, what's happening is a cynical deployment of stupidity.
Right.
No, we're just hanging out.
We're just telling some jokes.
We're not, you know, we're just like, you know, there were a bunch of fat chicks and they didn't even make them skinny.
So people are disgusting.
I listen to me.
I'm so outrageous.
Are you shocked yet?
You fucking pathetic little child who gets paid more to do this than you and I do together.
Like, yeah.
Anyway.
So moving on, the reason I was watching that episode, not just because I'm fascinated by the show now, but because their guest on that episode who did not speak during that segment was a man named Jack Murphy.
Now, his real name is John Goldman.
He goes by Jack Murphy, like Murphy was like his grandfather's name or something.
And, you know, Jack was his grandfather's name and Murphy is Somewhere in his name.
I don't remember exactly what the story is, but he goes by Jack Murphy, but everyone knows his name is John Goodman.
He is ethnically Jewish, which comes up a lot in some of the online discourse around this guy, particularly when you know where this story is going to go.
But he was a guest that day on You Are Here, and it was a very friendly, nice interview.
I mostly know Jack Murphy from his appearances on Tim Pool's podcast, where he's on like every, basically, I think every other Wednesday he shows up and he's sort of like one of their rotating guest hosts.
He comes on, he talks about the current events of the day.
He's in his mid-40s at this point, He has a very distinctive long, kind of white on the sides with a very kind of like dark center beard.
Very distinctive.
Yes, indeed.
I'm looking at a photograph of him now.
Very distinctive beard.
Yeah, no, I mean, and, you know, as these guys go.
I mean, it looks like it's kind of made of cardboard and colored in with felt tip pen and sort of stuck to the front of his face.
He swears it's natural.
I mean, you know, look, I have, I have weird colors in my beard too, you know, like, you know, you get to a certain age, your beard just does what it does, you know?
And like, I'm not here to, you know, sort of say he's definitely lying about his beard, but like, Hey, look, I can't even grow a beard.
I'm so, I'm so lacking in testosterone.
I'm such a, I'm such a Sigma that I can't even grow substantial facial hair.
The Sigma's the good ones.
No, Jack, no, this is the thing because like, actually, we're going to get, we're going to get into this later, but it's worth like highlighting that now.
So Jack Murphy.
That's wolf porn, isn't it?
Forget it.
Forget it.
I give up.
Jack Murphy is this guy who came up through the Manosphere, basically, and he had this Manosphere blog talking about sex and relationships and big alpha male energy and all this sort of thing.
Well, I stopped paying attention to the Manosphere around the time that I started paying attention to Nazis, because I used to sort of follow the, not in the way that I do the Nazis now, but I used to sort of I was conversant with a lot of the kind of the major personalities.
I'm pretty sure I'd seen Jack Murphy around, you know, like a guest spot or something.
You know, he had written something here and there.
He wasn't someone that was like well known to me.
And so, again, mostly what I know him from is his ongoing relationship with Tim Poole.
Now, he was he was sort of he was around, you know, he wasn't sort of front and center.
But if you were following the MRAs and the Manosphere in like the mid 2010s, he was around.
He was haunting the edges of it.
Yeah, no, he was, he was a personality, he was just a lesser known personality, you know, and so, you know, whatever.
So, Jack Murphy was on this show, and apparently some memes were being spread of him.
As this kind of show started going on, like in the days or weeks ahead of this appearance, because if you watch the live chat replay, you can see people putting up cuck images, like cuck emojis, like rooster emojis, and they do a whole bunch of those at a time, and it's always pointed at Jack Murphy.
And Tim Pool's show recently, you started to see the new ones and every Tim Pool episode has people posting all that.
And what happened was the internet, this sort of like reactionary dipshit dweeb internet, discovered the Jack Murphy cuck article.
And one of the super chats that Sydney Watson reads in the chat was asking him about this cuck article.
She knows nothing about it.
I mean, I believe her on this.
It's something that she will just read whatever's in the super chat.
And sometimes this gets them into some serious trouble.
But other times, it's just like, she'll just read it and then go, oh, what's this about a cuck article?
I don't know about the cuck article.
And Jack Murphy hears it and says, I'm not talking about that.
We do not discuss that issue.
I just choose not to.
That is in my past and I'm not here to talk about it.
And so five minutes later, another super chat comes in asking about the Cook article and she reads it again.
And he kind of flips his shit.
This is what we're going to play.
I'm going to play the second ask of this question.
And suffice to say that after this, like the show goes on, he sits quietly in his chair.
And then after they sort of turn off the microphones and it kind of cuts back to the wide shot of the studio, you can see him like storm out of the studio.
Jack Murphy is pissed.
So let's play this bit.
Am I supposed to know what the cuck article is yet?
No, no, no.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
I think it's worth getting this in the order that I got it, right?
In terms of all we know is that there's a cuck article and we don't know what the content of it is.
Okay, fine.
Yeah.
Okay.
I have read it.
There is a link to it in the show notes.
If you want to spoil this, you can you can go read it now.
And it's not.
It's fine.
It's fine.
It's not what you think it is.
It's worse.
So let's just.
It's OK.
I'll follow that.
It's it's it's it's it's Chekhov's cuck article.
You know, it's mentioned in act one.
I find out what what it what it means in act three.
It's fine.
It'll be like act one and a half.
Believe me, you're about 10 minutes away from it.
But right.
Let's go.
It's true.
Breda and Dad said, unfortunately, the proliferation of technology leads to authoritarian collectivism.
Future looks gay.
Merry Christmas, Sid and Jack and Elijah.
Ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, ja.
Okay.
That's an internal meme.
The Elijah, ja, ja, ja.
They have like, there's a joke.
I put this in heavy quotes of Elijah with the hard R.
In other words, they call him Elijah.
So they're saying a hard R word live.
That's the level of, you know, and so mispronouncing Elijah's name in like creative ways is meant to reference that, you know?
Okay.
I, yeah, I sort of get that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just didn't want to.
That's why I included that little bit of the clip was just so that I had, I got to explain like the toxicity is fractal on this, right?
Sorry, how old are these people?
Are they like 12?
These people are in their 30s, I believe.
Right, okay.
Yeah.
I mean, these are maybe late 20s, early 30s.
That's kind of my read on it.
But yeah.
I was going to say they act like edgy teens, but really that's giving them too much credit.
Yeah, I mean, if they actually were 15-year-olds recording this for free in their basement, you would just call it like, yeah, they're just stupid 15-year-olds.
Well, I'd be concerned, but I wouldn't, yeah.
But this is, again, a professional production under Glenn Beck's banner, right?
That's what this is.
Mr. Dickenbold says, hey, Jeff.
See, that's what she does!
She does this!
Like, she reads it like that's normal.
Like, it's not even, she's not even just like, I'm not gonna skip the name.
She just goes, Mr. Dickenball said.
Could you please clear up the cuck article you wrote?
I am not gonna talk about this.
And basically, you know what?
Fuck you for bringing this up right here and right now.
Why are you doing this to me?
I didn't know that.
I didn't know what it was.
Well, just use a little bit of fucking common sense.
Sorry.
Apologies.
Yeah.
Fuck you.
Heartfelt.
So, that's kind of the end of it, right?
Like, that's sort of the thing.
He storms off.
I should know!
Do you want me to tell you what the cuck article is before I play you Tim Pool talking about this incident with Sidney Watson?
Because this thing blew up in this version of the internet.
So Watson had to respond to it.
Explain the cuck article and then play me Baldy McDickface.
OK, fair enough.
Fair enough.
So everybody had to respond to this because this is right before Christmas.
I was just complaining about other people being immature, but never mind.
That's fine.
So this is this is right before Christmas.
This is like the last show they did or like the next last show they did before their Christmas break.
And so.
Everything kind of stews online for a while.
Cindy Watson did a response to a response to a response on her independent YouTube channel.
Jack Murphy goes on Tim Pool to describe this.
And so now I'm going to tell you.
They're arguing back and forth about the fact that she raised the cut.
Both that she raised the issue twice when he didn't want her to.
And now he claims, I said, don't do that.
You shouldn't, you know, I don't want to talk about this issue.
You should let it go.
You should have not brought it up again.
You read all these like really toxic memes because they were doing some sort of pseudo Holocaust denial stuff.
Oh, no.
Did they read out toxic memes?
Oh, no, Jack.
How could you possibly have known that they were going to do stuff like that?
You put Murphy on a very concerned with his optics, you understand.
And so, yeah, this is this was a toxic situation.
I let myself get into to be to be to be tricked into, you know, going on a show where they would do something so utterly unacceptable as to just read out people's toxic memes.
Oh, I feel for him.
I really do.
And his beard.
And, uh...
Anyway, so he's complaining about that.
The other big contention that you kind of run into is that he yelled at her because he said, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you a couple of times.
And, you know, of course, the toxic masculinity of, like, the commenters is like, well, if I'd have been there and he'd said that to some, like, woman that I was, I would have beaten the shit out of that guy because he's just a, you know, and of course, it's like, well, I'd have defended the blonde Aryan womanhood as a man should.
Yeah.
Right.
And in fact, apparently they got to like Elijah Schaefer like was on was getting like, you know, weak and masculine man memes because he didn't, you know, stand up in her honor.
And he was anyway.
It's a whole big thing.
If you want, you can Google this on so you can you can search the YouTube bar and you can watch.
Oh, yeah.
All sorts of reaction videos to this.
Like this was this was a big topic.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
Yes, please.
And don't worry, we're going to get back to the Denver shooting here in a second.
But it's also worth, I am now going to read you a selection from the Cook article, okay?
Oh, great.
And this is an archive.org link, because he did take this down in the years since.
But this is how it opens.
Today, I sent my adoring, loyal, hot young girlfriend of two years to have sex with a stranger from Tinder.
She is currently at his apartment, checked in with me via text, and is presumably sucking and fucking her way to a good time.
I'm alone writing.
Couldn't be happier.
Now, before you write me off as another Salon.com freak who wants to be a cuckold or some kind of spineless beta undermail, hear me out.
This has been a long road.
My manhood is intact and my dick is hard.
And then he goes on like that for a while and then down the list.
He's talking about, first of all, he's in this like DS relationship with this young woman.
He got divorced at 40.
He had already raised his kids.
His kids were adults and he went out and he was having a good time at this point.
And he gets this hot young girlfriend who's 15 years younger than he is.
And he's talking about, I'm a big dominant alpha male and I really need this kind of thing in my relationship.
And relationships need like that little space between you so you don't get comfortable because like, I need to be the man.
Then he talks about like how, you know, we have an agreement that I can just, and I apologize for the, you know, toxic stuff is coming up here.
I mean, he uses the language like I can rape her whenever I want, and that's cool with it because we've like predefined these boundaries, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is what a big manly man I am that like I have this like hot young girl in my life.
And this is how he describes the her going out and fucking other guys thing.
It is suspended disbelief.
The disbelief allows us to create a gap to close.
It creates space for desire to reach out to the other person.
Roleplaying stranger rape puts us into different personas for the moment, creating mystery, danger, and desire, i.e.
it's fucking hot.
Matt from Tinder helps us to introduce another element which requires suspended disbelief.
Just like my girlfriend knows I could nor ever would actually rape her, I too know that my girlfriend is not going to leave me for some guy she met on Tinder today to fuck.
The entire experience is regimented according to my rules.
I introduced her to the idea.
Highlighting this here.
I pushed it.
I told her to go on Tinder and find someone.
On the day in question, I tell her when and where to do it.
She checks in with me via text.
I know where she is and I am waiting for her.
She is not alone.
She is on a mission sent directly by me, and the entire point is for me to get turned on in a way that just wouldn't happen otherwise.
The excitement, oostrus, and anticipation put me in a different state.
I get turned on knowing someone else wants my girl as badly as I do.
Yes, I get turned on knowing she is fucking someone else.
We've done it together where we picked up a guy at a bar, took him home, and I watched them have sex.
And we've brought a guy from Craigslist over and I took pictures as he banged her.
This time, I just sent her on her way and gave myself time to write and relax, knowing that exceptional sex awaits upon reunion.
The time she spends with the other guy isn't really hers alone.
It's ours.
It's mine.
It's her actually got my ideas.
And then he puts this in bold.
Not me.
Her behavior is manifestation of my will.
Right.
So let's just start.
Let's just start.
Let's just start here.
That's really fucking noxious stuff, right?
Like that's about as noxious as anything that we've done on this show, frankly.
If people...
If people want to do this sort of thing as a couple, and they're both into it, I think that's fucking great.
Knock yourself out.
Don't have none of my business.
Enjoy it.
That's not what this sounds like.
This sounds like this sounds controlling, toxic.
It sounds like bullying.
We're not hearing her perspective on this.
I couldn't find anything that was like her talking about this issue at all.
Just from him, we're getting, I'm telling her to do this.
I'm telling her to do that.
It's done for me, etc.
And that's fucking creepy.
BDSM is not abuse and people can do consensual non-consent things.
People can do this sort of thing.
You do it with full communication from all parties involved and you do it above board.
That's how this shit works.
Consent, communication, safety.
It's not a problem.
Right.
Exactly.
Picking up some guy on Tinder who who knows how deeply invested they are in like that.
Like, of course, Matt from Tinder, his opinion is never asked for.
You know, does he know what he's I mean?
I mean, presumably if he's I mean, look, if if, you know, a hot woman comes up and it's like, I want to fuck you.
And my my older man wants to take pictures of us or something.
There are people into that.
There are people who are, you know, like, hey, I just want to get laid.
You know, it doesn't you know, it's not It's a thing, you know, people, people do all sorts of things.
People get involved in, in kind of shady stuff to have an orgasm.
And, you know, for me, it's the emphasis.
I'm not a cuck because I'm doing the, you know, I'm the big manly man.
I'm the big domly dom doing the thing.
And she does it because I told her to do it.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Her behavior is a manifestation of my will, you know?
The things she's doing is because I made this happen.
He even says, like, I pressured her into this, you know?
Yeah, he says that, yeah.
Yeah, he says it in that many words, right?
Like, completely, you know?
Whatever the truth about what's actually happening here, what we have from his account is, you know, I'm using this woman as my puppet to get what I want, and she's doing stuff that I'm telling her to do, yeah.
Now, I'm gonna, like, Take the mask off slightly and say pretty sure your 15 years younger girlfriend getting to go like fuck younger guys Probably not something that she's like completely 100% doing on your behalf.
All right That just that just seems unlikely to me, you know, just knowing what people are like, you know No, no, you know Ultimately, I have no window into the nature of this relationship.
I have no window into the nature of what's actually happening between these two people, or multiple people.
Their sex life is not my business, except to the degree that Jack Murphy made it, made it my business, right?
Or to the extent that, you know, crimes against people are being committed.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
You know, again, BDSM is not abuse, but from the way he's describing it, this sounds like an abusive situation.
And so if there's a reality that is not abusive beneath the abusive rhetoric, the abusive rhetoric is still an issue, right?
Because ultimately the fundamental thing that we're talking about is, you know, the sort of performativity of masculinity within this manosphere space, within this relationship space.
He can't be like, it turns me on to watch my wife fuck another guy.
And I have my own internal reasons for that.
It has to be.
I'm doing this.
I'm edgy.
I'm on the edge of this, like, hardcore sex situation that involves threesomes.
I'm going to tell you that, like, it's not that hard to set up a threesome if you really want to.
You know, there are places online where you can do that pretty easily.
And it's basically like the bottom rung of the ladder of the, like, kink ladder.
All right.
Like, this is not like, you know, some super hardcore thing.
It's going to be on Amazon soon.
You know, it's.
I'm not talking about my own personal sex life here, but it's the bottom rung.
This is what bored suburbanites do on a Saturday while their kids are away on a play date or something.
This is fine.
What the memes in this reactionary community are talking about, they're not recognizing what you and I are talking about here.
The toxicity in the article.
The way that this ideology infects everything around them.
The awfulness that would actually come with someone doing this.
They're just calling him a cuck because his girlfriend is sleeping with other men.
And then it comes out that the two of them had done porn together, like some amateur porn.
And there were like videos of him, like getting stuff put in his ass and like, you know, other.
That's interesting because I remember in the last episode we were listening to a clip of the same fucking show and they were talking about somebody, a guy who was one of Kyle Rittenhouse's victims, who ended up with a bullet in him from Kyle Rittenhouse.
And they were laughing about that because this guy had done homemade porn and therefore was not a human being.
That's ironic, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and that guy was actually the guy who they were talking about in that episode.
This is something I meant to kind of throw in at the beginning here as an addendum.
Something that I just kind of slipped my mind when we were recording Episode 100 was that that guy, Malensky, I think his name was, After Kyle Rittenhouse.
He was one of the, he was the guy that fired the gun into the air.
He wasn't one of the people that got shot.
Is that right?
He's the guy who fired the gun in the air that sort of led to the initial like shooting of Joseph Rosenbaum.
Okay.
Well, my point.
Oh, no, no, no, absolutely.
Oh, no, it gets worse.
Kyle Rittenhouse, after shooting... Why would it do anything else?
Kyle Rittenhouse, after shooting Rosenbaum multiple times, calls his buddy's cell phone and runs away despite holding a first aid kit.
Like, his sensible reason to be there was to provide medical aid.
Yeah.
Malinsky was the person who was actually trying to perform first aid on Rosenbaum in that moment.
And so while they're mocking Malinsky in that clip for being for doing amateur porn, He's the one who actually behaved honorably in that situation.
Doing the thing that Rittenhouse claimed he was able to do.
If Kyle Rittenhouse had gotten on his knees in that moment and put himself in danger to try to save Rosenbaum's life, he'd put a bullet in his head like it wasn't going to happen.
But if he had done that instead of running off, then this would have turned out very, very differently.
That's just the reality of that situation.
Anyway.
Anyway.
So, the right-wing Chetosphere is talking about The porn aspect they're talking about.
There's a video of him lying in bed, of Jack Murphy lying in the bed.
And it's sort of unclear when it was filmed, but he's like, Oh, I've had sex with guys.
I'm kind of heteroflexible, you know, like when you do a little bit of everything here, you know?
And the criticism is not the toxicity of this relationship or, you know, like the abuse that's clearly implied here.
It's just all like, Jack Murphy is a cuck.
Jack Murphy is putting dildos in his ass.
Chuck Murphy has weird kinds of sex.
And that's all it is.
And then Jack Murphy said, fuck you to Sidney Watson, and now we have to like protect that.
That's the controversy and not the actual thing that's going on in this article.
And that's fascinating because it shows you how much that sort of thing is completely invisible outside this outside.
In this world, the sorts of things that I'm talking about are normalized and invisible, right?
Let's listen to Jack Murphy defend himself on Tim Pool just a little bit.
Oh, well, just on that one point, like, why was it so jarring for people to read that article about me?
Because I don't ever talk about it.
Because I don't ever push those ideas.
Because it's not a part of my life, right?
It was something that I wrote when I had like a hundred Twitter followers and I was using a fake name.
Jack Murphy is not my real name, everybody.
Spoiler alert!
My real name is John Murphy Goldman.
My grandfather's name was John Murphy.
Everybody called him Jack.
So I picked Jack Murphy as a pseudonym and I wrote an article about like one element of my sex life all those years ago that was meant to be seen by basically nobody and I deleted it like a few months later and now for years people have been digging through my internet trash to like bring it up and to wave it in my face and the only reason people are waving at my face is because We're having a good impact on society.
We're like doing good.
We're spreading good out there.
And if it felt jarring to you to read this one thing, well, yeah, that's because I don't talk about it and it's not something I'm pushing and it's not something I advocate.
After I got divorced, we just, we had fun, man.
We did a lot of kinky and crazy things and I don't write about it and I don't talk about it anymore.
Joey Salads hired black men to vandalize a car with Trump stickers in it.
He staged the whole thing and I forgave him and had him on the show several times.
No, I promise you I did not cut that.
Tim Pool just decided to share that information.
And so Tim Pool is comparing not even the bad parts of the Cook article, just the fact that like Jack Murphy had had some kinky sex even in the past.
Like Jack Murphy's like his whole thing now is like, well, look, I'm kind of become more responsible and I'm, you know, trying to get people off of drugs and get people out of alcohol and, you know, be, you know, kind of a better, be better men, you know, and we'll get to that here in a minute.
But Tim Pool's thing is like, well, yeah, and I'll bring somebody who's kind of had some mistakes in their past onto my show.
I mean, look, Jack Murphy having some kinky sex, equally as bad as Joey Salads doing this attempted slander against African-American people, Black Lives Matter, right?
You know, as part of a campaign stunt.
They both get to be on my show.
That's how moral and ethical I am as a human being.
I don't hold people's past against them.
Yeah.
Two months ago, you were trying to slander, you know, a whole race of people.
Hey, bygones be bygones.
Let's talk about Marvel movies.
Yeah.
Like that's, that's simple.
Yeah.
Like, yeah.
Jack Murphy has not been back since that episode aired, you know?
Now, that episode aired on, I believe, December 22nd, which was a few days after the last You Are Here episode.
I haven't seen him back.
I went and looked through the feed, but he may just not have come back in the rotation yet.
So, I will report back when I see Jack Murphy on Tim Pool's show again, because As the episode title indicates, this isn't really a show about Jack Murphy.
It's a show about the Manosphere and this guy, Roman McLeod, or Roman McClay, Lyndon McLeod.
Apologies.
Yeah.
Jack Murphy Runs an organization called the Liminal Order.
It's a man's club, the Liminal Order.
The Liminal Order, he claimed on the You Are Here podcast, and he has about 850 members around the country, maybe worldwide, but around the country.
And he does like stops.
So, you know, he'll show up in Louisiana and everybody gets, we all go out for a nice meal together.
And it's just men doing manly things and smoking cigars and drinking some whiskey and eating some steak.
And, you know, just talking about being men together.
And it's like a paid club that you come on and, you know, but it's all, you know, we're, we're just trying to, you know, be men together and, you know, kind of reinforce these, like these traditional ideas of masculinity together.
Sounds like a total grift, whatever.
I am unashamed to be masculine.
I see myself holding on to something which is under attack.
There is a war against men and boys.
Being myself and holding strong is an act of protest.
The world always needs a villain, and today that villain is the straight white male who knows what he wants and is not afraid to get it.
That's a quote from From Jack Murphy.
And he might as well be saying, yeah, I don't deny I'm awesome.
It's true.
I'm not ashamed of how awesome I am.
Well, it turns out that one of the members of the liminal order was a man named Lyndon MacLeod.
Wow.
Really?
Really.
So we will see if Jack Murphy comes back on Tim Pool's podcast because on December 29th, a week after the, well actually December 28th, a week after, nearly a week after that appearance where Jack Murphy was already dealing with all the terrible things about being revealed as having kinky sex five years ago or seven years ago.
Linda McLeod murdered five people.
Yeah.
And he was a known figure.
That's the thing that kind of like comes out about this.
I mean, you know, like, yeah, it's one thing.
Yeah.
Very much like Murphy himself, sort of in those mid 2010s, you know, McLeod is one of these people were not at the front, but he's very much a figure, you know, controlling the the boundaries.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Right.
Exactly.
And he's a guy now... Joe Public on the street might not have heard of this guy before, but people in that world, they're going to know him.
They're going to know the name.
Now, I'll admit, I didn't know who he was.
I never heard of him.
And I mean, you know, and given the amount of work I do in these spaces, like he had a certain prominence in very particular spaces that I don't track.
It's sort of the ultimate thing there.
He had been on several, there are a lot of like Manosphere podcasts and don't worry, we're going to get into some of this in future.
Basically what this incident tells me is that I need to start spending more time looking at the Manosphere as it currently exists and less time on the IDW.
So we're going to be leaving the scientific papers behind and we're going to be talking about alpha male bullshit.
Although, speaking of the IDW, Linda McLeod was trying to be friends with Eric Weinstein.
So, let's rewind.
2018, he publishes the, so let's rewind.
I don't know much about Linda McLeod's history, right?
Except for like sort of what he has said about himself on various podcasts.
Now, as the details of the shooting came out and as people decided, Oh no, we don't need to be associated with this person anymore.
A whole lot of like podcast appearances and video appearances got very quietly deleted.
Certain tweets got deleted.
It turns out that there are ways of archiving that before they do that.
I immediately, as soon as I started seeing like the news articles about it, and I went to YouTube and started searching him, I just started downloading like every video I could with like Roman McLeod's or like Roman McLeod or Linda McLeod's name in it.
And so I literally spent like six hours one night just like finding URLs and added them to an archive list and then going like, all right, hopefully they'll download, you know, and And there were a lot of other people doing, like, screenshots of old tweets and, you know, so this got, like, extensively documented.
I was, like, refreshing my Twitter feed, like, every, you know, two minutes for a while, just, like, finding all the, like, new stuff that people were coming out with.
There are suddenly lots of people's Twitter feeds went private for a while.
This is a, I'm going to read a very short quote from an article which we discussed before we started the show proper.
You know, I said, you've probably got this in your list of sources and you knew exactly what I was talking about.
This is from an article called Examining the Denver Shooter's Ideological Views from the Global Network on Extremism and Technology.
Notably, McLeod was a guest on Jack Donovan's Start the World podcast on March 2020, where Donovan spoke approvingly of Sanction, that's McLeod's novel series, in the episode's description.
While now deleted from Donovan's podcast episode lineup on YouTube, McLeod's Sanction website still retains a record of the appearance, and third-party podcast sites retain an archive of the episode.
There you go, that's one example of what we're talking about.
Yes, I did manage to grab that episode.
I was not archiving Donovan's podcast previously, but I'm archiving it now.
So, if future episodes get deleted, I have them.
So, it's great.
Jack Donovan.
Now, there's an interesting chap.
Anyway, sorry to interrupt.
Yeah, no, no.
And so, Jack Donovan is the author of this book, The Way, what is it?
The Way for Men?
The Way of Men.
The Way of Men.
Yes, yes, you got it.
He sort of, He's in some ways sort of like the godfather or the grandfather of the Manosphere in that he's actually a gay man who, you know, wanted to teach men how to be men.
He calls himself an androphile, not gay or homosexuals.
You know, he won't he won't call himself gay because to him, the word gay is too associated with effeminacy and left wing politics.
Yes.
So we are going to have to like sort of brush a little bit of this aside because there are all kinds of connections here.
And as I've indicated, we're going to like kind of go back and look at some of these massive figures, both kind of then and now, and kind of start tracking that a little bit more in sort of future episodes.
I've spent quite a few hours on that just in the last week.
A week or so.
Just trying to sort of, because I really like to really be like an expert on these subcultures, so that I know all the personalities and I know kind of all the stuff that's kind of happening before I get into it.
I feel comfortable kind of producing this episode, but like there are still like large things of like, there were years where I wasn't tracking this, so like I'm still getting caught up on some of it.
But I put three great, actually four great articles, both the one that you mentioned, Shane Burley and Alexander Reed Ross wrote a piece for Bellingcat.
Yeah, Friends of the Show.
Hopefully, maybe they'll come back sometime.
You know, How the Denver Shooter's Digital Trail Exposes the Violent Fantasies of the Manosphere.
Definitely check that out.
Also, check out both the Global Network on Extremism Technology, which Jack referenced.
Go and click on all these links because there's a lot of great source work done here as well.
I found a, one of the, kind of the first pieces that came out is an article at Heavy.
Now Heavy is very good on sort of like pulling out, you know, popping up like immediately right after some incident and sort of going, this is what we found on like two hours Googling about this guy.
One of the things that he is very, that McLeod was very open about was that he had a string of failed businesses.
And the funniest detail for me was that apparently one of those was retailing wine online, like super high-end wine online to elite customers.
And he was apparently like shorting them on bottles that they had paid for and then like disappearing from the internet.
Wow.
Very masculine.
Very, very, very, very manly behavior there.
There's a link to a... Genetically predisposed to do that kind of thing.
There's a link to a Wine Berserkers forum of people going like, has anybody done business with so-and-so?
And then literally just a list of people going like, yeah, he promised me three bottles of such and such, and I only got two.
And when I tried to email him about it, he had disappeared.
It's amazing.
I can't validate that it's actually the same person.
I didn't see any kind of validation on that, but it seems like people who knew this guy kind of were in the know on this.
He was kind of a known figure.
Again, I can't validate it independently, but it seems likely to be true.
Otherwise, I wouldn't report it, but I do want to just kind of leave that little bit of epistemic wiggle room there.
I wasn't able to independently verify this, but I think the thing that that heavy article is pretty good, because it gives it gives kind of a brief account of the of the shooting spree, as well as giving you some background on this guy.
And I was very interested in reading that because it goes into like some of this.
He had a Twitter account at Jack three, the word three, and then the number six at Jack three, six.
And it goes into like some of it.
And this guy is this guy is a hardcore, like genetic determinist.
He is obsessed with what he takes to be genetics.
Oh, yeah.
We're going to play some audio here in a second.
I'm sure we are.
But that's of interest to me.
And there's one tweet in particular they quote, where firstly, he kind of uses this hashtag war is coming, which I've learned is like a slogan from his novel series.
And I was thinking something is coming now, you know, a series of fantasy novels with the slogan, you know, X is coming.
That's familiar.
Where have I heard that before?
You know, war is coming.
Winter is coming.
I don't know what's going on here.
And I bet this guy has some George R. R. Martin on his shelves.
Not that that's George R. R. Martin's fault.
But the thing that I was reading this tweet where he says, Americans don't understand their own history.
Northern Yankee fucks are genetically different from Southern rednecks.
We are nothing alike.
And that was kind of tolling in my brain.
And I was thinking that reminds me of something that reminds me of something that reminds me.
And I realized what it was.
It's a speech given by Jefferson Davis where he talks about, I've actually got it up, where he says, our enemies are a traditionalist and homeless race from the time of Cromwell to the present moment.
They've been disturbers of the peace of the world gathered together by Cromwell from the bogs and the fens of the north of Ireland and England.
They commenced by disturbing the peace of their own country.
They disturbed Holland to which they fled.
They disturbed England on their return.
They persecuted Catholics in England and they hung Quakers and witches in America.
There's this speech that Jefferson Davis gave to, what was it, House Chamber, Mississippi Capitol, December 26th, 1862, where he basically gives you a racial explanation for the outbreak of the American Civil War.
And that's what this powerfully reminded me of.
Yeah, this is very prominent among certain spheres.
In fact, yeah, I mean, we can do it now if you want.
That's a byway, but it just told in my brain when I read these tweets.
It really did.
Yeah, no, I mean, the thing that you kind of run into, and I think part of what people are trying to, both what I think is I don't know, the word compelling seems wrong.
At least to people who sort of study this field, right?
To people, the reason that, you know, this seemed to have hit harder For people who kind of do the work that we do than other things of this ilk is that I think it doesn't fit into any sort of like a comfortable category, right?
Because yes, he writes a series of novels and two of the people that he ends up murdering were People who are named as being murdered by the fiction.
So, the novels are written under the name Roman Maclay, and there's a Lyndon Macleod character where it's just spelled slightly differently.
Instead of M-C-L-E-O-D, it's M-A-C-L-E-O-D, right?
And so, the fictional Macleod is This serial killer who killed 46 people in this, like, string of incidents.
And this, like, future supercomputer is trying to work out, you know, sort of the biological and, like, how to remove these biological impulses and, you know, this sort of thing.
Genetic predisposition for crime is a huge theme in these books.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, no.
I started reading.
I mean, I started reading these books and it's just there's so much material I have, you know, it's not Literary analysis is not what we're trying to do here, right?
I will try to get through these.
I glanced through just to see how certain themes were developed, but it's a structural mess.
These three books are like a million words or something like that, all told, and it's real It's a guy who has a high school education, who's read a lot of popular science articles, who's really into Jack Donovan and Jordan Peterson and the IDW, and he has these certain ideas, and he's able to throw words around
From popular science articles, but he doesn't have any like real deep understanding of anything, really.
And it's just kind of like if you treat it as just kind of like science fiction and sort of like someone like a bright person, and he's clearly a bright person in interviews.
And, you know, like you can't be a fool and write like this, you know?
It's like this sort of degrade Neal Stephens stuff.
Neal Stephens, you can get away with this because he's actually really bright and a good writer and is able to compellingly craft words on a page.
Roman McClay's Sanction, it reads like a doorstopper.
It is painful to sit through more than a couple of pages at a time.
There's just nothing happening.
There's no cleverness with language.
It's just...
It's not gibberish, but it feels like you read five pages and you want to go back and read because there's a lot of stuff being forced down your eyes, but it doesn't actually move anywhere.
It's just sort of There is a particular type of amateur fiction, which I haven't read Sanctioned, so I don't know, but it sounds to me like what you're talking about.
There's a particular type of amateur fiction.
It's not just bad, it's just It's the product, not of a desire to create or tell a story or to create or to talk about characters or anything.
It's the product of a desire to do something fundamentally else, which is to just, you know, bloviate these obsessions.
This is the real problem with this kind of writing, which is that it's not aimed at another person.
It's not an attempted communication.
It's just, it's like the person talking to themselves.
This is why Fifty Shades of Grey is really, really bad.
It's not because it's about, you know, wine, mom, sexual fantasies or anything like that.
That's fine.
I don't give a shit.
Enjoy yourself.
The reason that it's so bad is because it's fundamentally a person talking to themselves Over and over and over again about a very, very narrow range of incredibly insular personal obsessions.
And I think this sounds like the same thing.
I've never read Fifty Shades of Grey and I don't plan to.
I read enough of it to form an opinion.
Let's put it that way.
Anyway, I do have, I actually did like, I don't think this is going to be in the show notes, but I did, I was looking at maybe doing something with the novel.
So I did like kind of like copy and paste, like one little section of it from the, you know, the 10th page or something.
If you'd like to get a sense of how the prose flows, I could read that to you now.
And this is, this is in context of.
I love audio books.
The computer, the computer who is the narrator of these books.
is talking about an experiment, like not even a real experiment, but like a virtual experiment, like a, like a computer model that had run about like certain species of ants.
And apparently this is supposed to be like modulated at like the neuron level for these different types of ant colonies.
And like, I'd use this one kind of ant that has this one kind of behavior, and then I have this other kind of ant.
And anyway, it's too complicated to kind of get into here because he's, At page 10, you know, Roman McClay is already trying to do like genetic determinism hardcore.
But like, again, this is just a text here.
He also compared the metabolic and qualia measurements to reports of such feelings from human psychology dossiers and confirmed that there was a 98% chance that he was feeling both awe and meaning as he realized the Argentine ants were impossible to colonize and infect and enslave.
As long as they maintained their two central traits, monolithic monk-like lack of violence towards themselves and ubiquitous blitzkrieg-like murder of anything else.
They were Zen Buddhist Shaolin monks.
They never attacked themselves, their unkind, and yet always attacked others.
It was a Chia Caruso of violence.
And it held no gray between dark and light.
So, yeah, that's that's imagine a million words of that.
That's what Sanction the book is.
And that really is, I mean, right in on the on the obsessions of this kind of this little corner of the manosphere like Jack Donovan and so on are obsessed with this idea of kind of, you know, highly disciplined, hermetically sealed tribal masculinity, you know, recovering virtue and honor and so on.
And he's focused in on that.
In-group and out-group obsession, right?
This is what I'm trying to talk about here, right?
And I know that we're sort of babbling through it because we're talking about a lot of different things here, but this was hardwired into what the Manosphere became, was this idea that there's certain kinds of wolf behavior, and there are alphas and betas and gammas and deltas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And then this is all built on- The wolf porn reference from earlier paid off, listeners.
Sorry, sorry.
This is all built on what I used to read this stuff and like, 2010 or whatever, like kind of the early days of the master.
I started seeing this sort of pop up on my, like my, my Google reader RSS feeds, you know, and like early Vox day stuff and where they would like, you know, alpha game and the, you know, and all these, all these blogs back when it was just a bunch of weirdos writing blogs.
Right.
And they were getting it.
And I always used to think like, you're just comparing like this, like nerds and jock shit from like 80 sitcoms.
You know, the nerdy kid with the glasses is not going to get with the girl because she's a bitch and she just wants to date the jock or whatever.
And but really, he's like the better person is ultimately stronger, but like not.
And so like the nerd just needs to be more like the jock.
He needs to learn to be an alpha and like stand up for himself.
And it's like it's the Charles Atlas fitness course advert, isn't it?
You know, it's like it's the sand kicked in his face.
So he goes and becomes muscly and then he gets the girl.
And it's like turning that and not into like a literary trope or sort of like a personal trope or like sort of a story about, you know, like how, you know, look, people have problems in their dating lives.
People feel emasculated.
People want to feel, you know, Many men want to feel masculine.
They want to feel strong.
I'm not making a blanket admonition for wanting to feel certain things or being interested in certain things.
Look, I like beer and whiskey and naked girls too.
It's great.
It's fun.
But, yeah, everybody wants to feel a certain power and a certain control and a certain independence.
And, you know, everybody wants to most people, I should say, want to be attractive to somebody, et cetera, et cetera.
And yeah, that's not that's not exclusively a male preserve.
And it's not about it's not about ruling over other people, or at least it shouldn't be.
That's that's what people mean when they talk about toxic masculinity.
They associate these things with men exclusively and they make it into a form of abusive dominance.
And it's not supposed to be.
Well, and like the pretty girl, like the head of the cheerleading squad, didn't look at me or didn't want to date me when I was 17 years old.
And so civilization is howling chaos of dragons.
There were other people that she felt more attractive for whatever reason.
Maybe you should have showered more often.
There's all kinds of reasons for that.
And maybe she really was a terrible person.
And maybe you two would have been great together.
Or maybe you didn't have any interest in common because she was cheering all day and you were pouring over Isaac Asimov books.
It's a thing that happens.
It helps to have something in common with people.
But And then that experience of rejection or indifference gets filtered through this, what I think of the 80s sex comedy thing.
The Revenge of the Nerds thing.
Oh, Revenge of the Nerds is 100% about rape, by the way.
And it's rape.
The nerds are the ones doing the raping, just to be clear about that.
I adored those movies as a child, and revisiting them as an adult was an experience.
Because you grew up!
So you view it through that Revenge of the Nerds, not even the real Revenge of the Nerds, but the false remembrance of Revenge of the Nerds, and then apply that lens onto Completely unrelated, like, evo-psych, which is mostly bullshit anyway, even though there may be some kind of, like, solid stuff.
In fact, the wolf studies that all this stuff was based on ended up being rejected.
Like, it ended up being completely false when more research was done, and the original author even admits that.
That's fairly infamous now, that the guy that wrote the original alpha male wolf study thing now says, yeah, it was wrong.
And so they're filtering a personal experience through a sitcom trope, and then applying it using bad readings of faulty science into this universal way of the world.
And this is kind of like the Jordan Peterson hierarchy is everything.
Because of certain chemicals in the brains of lobsters and humans, therefore they all work the same, and evolutionary psychology is true, and we need hierarchy and order, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And it sounds like bullshit when I say it, but that's because I'm describing it accurately.
There is no there there, right?
Like there is even the like people who like do this work and who are more, who are considered more rigorous and academic.
Like the second you get into this at all, you find faulty studies and just complete not like there's, there's, and there's absolutely no kind of, Attention paid to, you know, complicated social dynamics that create this in history and sociology and all those things, you know, the critical theories, you know, there's no sense of that.
It's just, you know, it's built from the genetics.
It comes up from genetics informs culture.
Genetics informs personality, and personality informs culture.
Ultimately, the culture that exists here exists for a reason.
It's because of genetic similarity.
That genetic similarity is being altered by outsiders.
People outside of our genetic community are coming in, and they have a different kind of genetics, and they form a different kind of culture, ultimately.
And you can see how this same kind of logic about Manusferian stuff, of men like certain things, women like certain things, and there's no gray area between them, and you're just programmed to like things of a certain kind, and maybe there are exceptions here and there, but that's not how society should be ordered.
You can understand how this Manusferian thought, once you understand it through this pseudoscientific lens, leads its way into Genocide.
It's fundamentally the same logic.
And that's what the alt-right realized.
That's what people in these Nazi farms realized in 2014, is they could take all these Manosphere types and plug them into, suddenly apply that to the Jews, apply that to blacks, apply that to immigration, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Extend the logic they already use in certain areas.
Right, in certain things.
Just take that a bit further to see it our way.
Yeah, exactly.
And they will make the same arguments.
And so like the modern day Manusferians kind of see like, well, yeah, and there were some Nazis that came through our community a few years ago and like, I don't believe all that kind of stuff because we've got Jewish friends or whatever, you know, but like still completely believe in all the other horseshit.
They don't, they haven't interrogated the sort of like basic reality of it.
And so The reason that all this is important, and here's where we're going to get back on to Roman McClay, is that sanction is filled with this stuff.
Yank ourselves ruthlessly back onto the general sort of direction of the point.
Yeah, sorry.
Right, but this is what I really wanted to discuss here, and I'm glad that we sort of found our way here, because I wasn't sure exactly how to, you know, tie all this ribbon together.
This is why talking about the IDW was important on this podcast, because we can We can show it's all sort of coming from the same logic on a certain level.
You know, Roman McClay, under his various Twitter handles, was asking questions of Eric Weinstein and receiving responses.
Now, does that mean Eric Weinstein is responsible for the Denver shooting?
Of course not!
We're not making that claim here.
He was part of this community and the book... We will be caricatured as claiming that, but we're not.
Right.
The book, Sanction, you know, Jack Posobiec was like, his audience was telling him, Hey, you should really read Sanction.
And he like tweeted at some point, Hey, everybody tells me to read Sanction.
Is it any good?
Who knows whether he actually read it or not.
But again, it's part of the same community.
It's part of the same, like the audience that was following Roman Maclay writing this book was also following Jack Posobiec and they wanted Jack Posobiec to be more like Roman Maclay.
And now's the time where, if you're going to tune out of this, now's the time.
Because we are now going to play a bit of McCloud talking about himself and his influences.
And I've spent many hours on this.
There may be another follow-up episode on this as we get more details on it.
But this is McLeod saying what we've already said, basically.
So it's a little bit of an overkill at this point, but it's worth hearing it in his own words.
So if you don't want to hear this man's voice, I completely understand.
Tune out now.
We've hit the high points already, but he is Interestingly, he is definitely much more charming and much more personable than many people who kind of get into this material.
He's a good guest for a podcast.
If you kind of agree with him, you kind of agree.
He is a good guest.
He is personable and he knows how to talk.
He's a middle-aged, he's like 45 years old at this point.
And I think it's important to sort of hear him in his own words.
Like Boyd, can a better understanding of our genetics or just genes in general help us understand America?
So this is from a podcast called Primalosophy, which I have not listened to any other episodes of it, but very much this sort of primal philosophy, manosphere, you know, we are You know, our truest nature when we recognize our genetic influences, et cetera, et cetera.
The reference there to the character that he's referencing is the person who is like a billionaire running for president or running for governorship who wants to have a plan to reprogram the DNA of violent criminals using CRISPR technology so that they are no longer violent.
But in order to get elected, he knows that he has In order to engage in that process, he knows he has to get elected.
So he creates artificial intelligence to solve the technical problem of how he gets elected to the governorship.
It's all very convoluted, but it's all like, this is like the premise of, you know, sanction the book.
It's not about like, it's like, you know, so there's this guy, this rich guy, and he wants to get elected.
So he wants to do this thing in the world and reduce violence in human beings.
So he knows I have to get elected first.
So, oh, in the meantime, I'm just going to create AI on the side.
And that AI is going to be not just silicon, they're going to be embodied AI.
So they have like physical human bodies that, you know, actually can be influenced by serotonin and all these various things.
So it's actually like a super advanced, like better than AI, because it's rooted in the real world.
And then the plot of the book series is apparently like the AI is kind of go off in their own direction.
And so like, I, I'm going to eventually have to read this.
It sounds like a fucking train wreck, but so that's here.
He's just like kind of describing like the basic plot, like the basic premise of the book.
You know, and I've tried to summarize it as best I can, not having actually read it.
It's interesting.
It also sounds like it partakes of sort of the general sort of tech billionaire genius worship thing.
Oh, my fucking God, man.
Like the first page.
OK, OK, OK.
I do.
I actually have the book open here.
So I did want to do this.
God, I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry to do this to you people.
This is like, the main character is in like, you know, a Humvee in Iraq with some American soldiers and he gets blown up and, you know, hidden by the ten rings and invents a suit.
It's not, it's not, it's not like that either.
Many marriage crimes.
He didn't go that far, but this is the opening like bit of the book, like, you know, after the quote from Jack Donovan, the quote from, so he has like epigraphs on- The epigram is Jack Donovan?
The very first, so like the first chapter is actually negative one.
So there's a negative one chapter and then a zero and then a one.
And then two, three, four, however many you get.
So, minus one.
Jack Donovan, it bears repeating.
Jack Donovan is like, I mean, he's like a vulkish fascist, isn't he?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And Satanist, fascist, vulkish type, you know.
This has been kind of covered elsewhere.
Donovan is a bottomless pit of awful in and of himself, you know.
The articles that I link to have like kind of covered the connection between like Roman McClay and like the Wolves of Vinland and a lot of these kind of other characters.
And I've done it better than I am going to.
So I decided to kind of focus on the Manus Furion stuff because I thought that was something that had not been discussed in as much detail.
So that's why I started with like Jack Murphy instead of like Jack Donovan.
But there are absolutely other ways of kind of getting into this.
So the book, every chapter has like usually like three like epigraphs in each chapter.
Sorry, every chapter has epigraphs.
Yes, yes.
So at the beginning there's like, so the first is from Jack Donovan.
The third is from Ted Kaczynski, from an interview he gave.
Right, okay.
And the second is from... That's the Unabomber, in case you didn't know.
Yes, in case you didn't know.
I'm just, thou shalt see it shinning in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike, dot, dot, dot.
The, uh, uh, the attribution there is the whale, and then in quotes, the author.
So he's quoting Melville, he's quoting Moby Dick.
He describes Moby Dick as like his favorite book of all time.
And I'm just going to say, if you're looking for traditional masculine figures, Moby Dick is not really the place to look!
There's a lot else going on in Moby Dick that maybe you should have paid more attention to.
You should have actually read it, maybe, instead of just getting stuff from dictionaries or quotations.
This is weird, because I quoted Moby Dick at the start of this episode.
I thought that was intentional, honestly.
It's a complete coincidence.
So here's the very, so the first actual text of the book after these is Pain demands a response.
That is not to say it requests or invites or suggests an answer to it in a timely manner.
It demands acknowledgment.
Now.
This is biology, not politics.
Never, ever forget this.
Biology trumps politics each and every time.
That's how the book begins.
He goes on, like early in this book, it's like this billionaire is talking about this.
Firstly, that's Rothbard.
Like, you know, you can trace all politics back to reflexive human action.
And secondly, wow, that's a really interesting hooking first line.
Well done.
Early on in the book, very early on, he talks about this billionaire has this mansion where he's got this tank.
It's a cube 100 feet on the side.
On the inside, he's got a shark.
The shark is in this holodeck simulation of what it's like to be in the ocean.
It's all this like very detailed description of like how they manipulate the neurochemistry of the shark and how they use like screens to like and to simulate exactly and how like badass it is that the billionaire would like, you know, swim in the water above the shark, far above it, because like the machines are so good that they couldn't possibly allow the shark to ever rise far enough of the water to actually like hurt anybody or anything.
Like, it's just like weird, like techno fetishist billionaire worship.
And that's about where I had to like, I need to stop.
I need to do other things with my life than to keep reading this book.
He's a very Bond villain as well, you know.
Oh yeah, I know.
Very, very.
Yeah, I know.
But it's all like, again, he doesn't ever mention Neil Stevenson.
In fact, I only kind of thought about Neil Stevenson talking about it, but it is this very kind of like de-rape Stevenson, because Stevenson would also, you know, Cryptonomicon is full of like, and then I ran into my billionaire friend and like he had his like collection of old planes that he had rescued.
And it's all presented even in this sort of like techno fetishist way, at least in this sort of winking, like it understands the irony here of, you know, what would it be like to have $10 billion in where, you know, an old coding t-shirt from college, you know, when you're 45, it at least sort of recognizes some of that.
And then it brings a like ironic detachment to some degree to it.
Roman McLean or Linda McLeod or whatever we're going to call him, there is no humor anywhere in this book that I can tell.
There's no anything that reeks of like an actual human perspective.
In a way that's, I think, probably quite appropriate.
Let me say, I am Jack's total lack of surprise.
Yes, very much so.
We need to actually get, we need to actually finish this episode.
So we do.
Yes.
Yeah.
All right.
This is the cloud from this primal philosophy podcast, which I, um, we started playing and then I, we had an extended break, but, um, it's worth, again, it's worth getting it from his own.
We took a little trip.
Now we're back.
Much like a Neil Stevenson novel or David Foster Wallace footnote.
Yeah.
Erica and culture.
Well, my bias is to say, yes.
Now I will issue this caveat every time.
This is an opinion, and I'm probably wrong, but having said that, I do think genes play a much bigger role in personality and personality a much bigger role in culture than we are likely to accept at first blush.
I think it takes a little bit of work to get people to realize that our culture, our politics, our interpersonal dynamics are largely ruled by our genetic coding.
Again, that's what I believe.
But I offer the caveat that I could be and probably am wrong, but I think there's a lot of data that suggests that I'm not completely insane for thinking that.
Right.
I think there's two schools of thought there, where one is it's the conditions and harsh environments that predispose us to be more aggressive or macho or the opposite.
Or is it just the fact that these environmental conditions throughout evolution program our genetics?
Yeah, exactly.
It's a feedback loop, right?
And so if you... Sorry, just to pause once again.
So there are two options here.
Either the harsh environments make the bed or the genetics make the bed.
And the idea that maybe this is all just completely oversimplified And maybe you don't have to be a raging lunatic and a violent prick just because you grew up in a harsh environment.
Maybe there's a third option here, which is not considered in any of these conversations, by the way.
My genetics are Scottish on both sides.
And so my people come from the Highlands, which are harsh, harsh environments.
And my personality is pretty rough.
I think you could make the case, and other people have, I mean, there's tons of literature on this from all kinds of social scientists and geneticists, but basically here's the upshot.
If you take the type of cultures that existed in harsh, austere environments, mountainous regions with no ability to have agriculture, you know, just terrible weather, These kinds of, you know, high predator count, whatever, right?
High parasitic load.
When you have these kinds of phenomenon making in the environment, very tough.
It turns out that the culture of the people and of those regions are very tough.
He gets on to talk about how there was an anecdote of like a Viking saga that described coming to Scotland and describing the Scottish people.
I thought we'd be, I thought we'd be onto Vikings.
Yeah.
Your thoughts, Jack?
I don't even know where to start.
I mean, okay, firstly, what does it mean to say, this is my belief, but I'm probably wrong?
I mean, that is such bad faith bullshit.
If you think you're probably wrong, then it's not your belief.
You can't do that.
You can't say, this is... I mean, firstly, when it comes to scientific questions, what you believe or don't believe is irrelevant and meaningless anyway.
And secondly, what can it possibly mean to say that you believe something that you think is probably wrong?
That's just gibberish.
You also wrote a million words, like, described, like, based on this.
You put months of your life, at least, into demonstrating this thesis.
Own it a little bit, you know?
Just own it!
Yeah.
And then we get into, as we've been saying, hardcore genetic determinism.
I was talking before about Jefferson Davis describing the American Civil War as stemming from a difference in character between the North and the South.
Because the Yankees are just fundamentally, you know, a troublesome race.
I mean, that's what this is.
This is the same shit.
It's just exactly the same shit.
Just recoded for modern times.
We've been making the McLeod joke.
He actually says he's a fucking Highlander.
I couldn't believe that when that started.
And not a Jamie McCrimmon kind of Highlander.
No, no, not the good kind.
He's talking about his, you know, he has a rough personality because he's descended from Highlanders.
Nobody thinks it works that way.
Like, I've been reading this book recently called The Darker Angels of Our Nature, and it's a compilation of essays by historians criticizing and refuting aspects of Steven Pinker's two books, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, where Steven Pinker puts out his thesis, you know, whereby, you know, the world is getting better and better and less and less violent, and it's all thanks to, you know, more democratic and more scientific and more rational And basically, when you dig down into it, it's all because of neoliberal capitalism, you know.
And it's pretty good so far.
But one of the things in the first, like in the introductory essay by one of the editors of this collection, he says, you know, he makes an interesting point.
Not even the people who I would still personally consider pretty hardcore genetic determinists or genetic reductionists.
You know, like Pinker, like Dawkins, etc.
These people, even today, they don't make these sorts of strong claims anymore.
Evo-psych.
I don't have any time for it anymore myself.
But Evo Psych now, as a scientific discourse, as a scientific discipline, has retreated from the kind of stuff that it was talking about in the early 2000s, because it has bumped into the fact that that stuff has been devastatingly critiqued, the empirical evidence isn't there, etc, etc.
They've moved to fallback positions.
Where they say, well, you know, there are predispositions and there are propensities, but it's complex and it meets, you know, independent spheres such as culture and politics.
This is what the people who I, as I say, would still consider genetic determinists.
This is what they say now.
This sort of thing where I have a rough personality because I'm descended from Highlanders.
This is so childish.
This is the kind of stuff that has been...
And it's motivated.
It's 15th century nonsense about, you know, it's in the blood.
It's motivated, of course, by the feeling of, I have certain feelings inside of me of violence.
I have certain ideas about how I, as a man, should be responding in situations in which I am You know, someone, you know, gets in my face or someone has aggrieved me.
And I have feelings about how I should be able to respond to that.
And of course, the society around me is, you know, you know, apologies for the gender is pussifying me, you know, it's emasculating me, I'm not allowed to do that, because people who are my natural urges.
My genetic inferiors, my people who are not as good a man as I am, are telling me that I'm not allowed to do this.
And if I act in my natural way, I will be a I will be put in prison, I'll be killed, et cetera, et cetera, by ultimately this kind of weaker genetic stock.
And that's sort of the impulse here.
And again, they waver a bit as to whether, well, is it sort of this like cultural influence of like the cultures sort of create the man.
And so because I come from this, you know, Highland culture and this Otter culture, and I'm now embedded in this kind of other kind of culture that, you know, is that the source of it?
Or is it does it come kind of directly from genetics?
And there is some waffling once you sort of listen to these people kind of talk about it.
But again, they're not looking at like real data, they're not looking at the real complexities here.
I mean, even again, the genetic determinists are not making these kinds of straightforward arguments.
No, it's very much like James Lindsay.
James Lindsay reads Adorno and takes like, you know, the bullet point list.
He takes the, the, you know, the spark notes, you know, the, he takes the, the, the, the gloss and reads that onto, you know, what's currently happening.
And it says, because Adorno said this, and I saw this, uh, you know, corporate diversity training, therefore, and they use a similar language, they are one in the same thing.
And not connecting, every bit of nuance gets removed from that, right?
Because it's reasoning by, it's reasoning from false principles, but it's also reasoning from aesthetic similarities.
Right.
And reasoning from, there are these certain things that I want to be true because it tells me the feelings that I'm having are actually okay and healthy and good.
But as always with genetic determinism, it's incoherent because, you know, You know, if culture is the product of genes, then how do you get to the point where you have a culture that is clashing with people's genes?
I mean, okay, I'm sure there are ways to hand wave that away, but how do you end up with a culture?
No, no, no, this is essential.
This is actually an essential point.
The idea is that, and this is what I was going to get to, I was going to highlight this.
A series of, there's actually a book called Albion Seed.
It was published in 1989.
And it sort of identifies like these four basic migrations from Europe into the North American continent.
And it analyzes sort of socio-political dynamics that come from, okay, the English settled here, the Scottish settled here.
And, you know, it kind of identifies certain kinds of Connections between the culture of the Scottish Highlands and like Appalachia, right?
And it says like there's this kind of cultural force that does this and that ultimately many of our political divisions in the United States.
Because we view them as state-level conversations, like Virginia wants one thing and Massachusetts wants another, we're missing that larger sociocultural impact.
There are a couple of other books that have been written that riff on this same idea.
One that I see referenced occasionally is one called American Nations from 2011.
Yeah, I've read that.
I've skimmed it anyway.
Right.
I got the e-book today, so I'm going to, you know, skim it as well, I'm sure.
And it makes a, you know, quote unquote, sophisticated argument that there are sort of 11 natural American tribes.
Of course, the more recent immigrants and the natives who are here and the African slaves don't get considered as being part of the American nations, you understand.
It's just kind of various you know, sort of subcultures here.
But like, that's the, the argument is that many of the divisions in American society and like the fact, you know, and the, you know, that even like the sort of the abolitionist, you know, slaveholding debate, quote unquote debate of the 1860s, slaveholding debate, quote unquote debate of the 1860s, you know, very rational, rational and reasonable debate around these topics, ultimately derives not from some highfalutin idea about, you know, the nature of freedom
ultimately derives not from some highfalutin idea about the nature of freedom or the nature of economics or whatever, but from guttural impulses that are fundamentally driven by genetics and our culture.
And that the Scots are going to do one thing and English are going to do another thing.
And this kind of argument, again, leads directly to arguments for ethnostates.
The English should be in one place, the Scots should be in another place, and that way you all get to live the way you want to live, because ultimately the individual dynamics of a population can be driven back to what mix of genetic purity you have given Where your ancestors lived two or three hundred years ago.
But as always with these sorts of genetic explanations for cultural and social and political phenomena, what you have is just so stories and they are empirically impoverished.
And they are ultimately circular because they are deduced from the first principles.
You deduce the existence of the genetic variations that supposedly create these varying cultures from the existence of what you take to be varying cultures.
And because you're operating from the first principle that culture is a product of genetics, you therefore deduce the existence of the differing genetics from the different culture.
It's always the same way.
Whenever you look into this stuff, it always goes in the same circle.
Absolutely.
And I want to be clear that these are heavily academic books that I'm referencing here that presumably are not... There is a sort of simplified version of them that is being fed into these kind of right-wing chetospheres, right?
That was kind of the point I was making, which is that, you know, this, this, what we're getting from this guy isn't even at the level that you get now from people who I would, you know, consider quite actually quite crude genetic determinists, but who are still nonetheless operating within academic discourses of things like Evo Saik and stuff like that.
This is very, very crude, childish, simplistic 19th century.
Oh, well, you know, gypsy steel things because it's in the blood, you know, pardon me for the pejorative term there.
But you know what I'm saying?
That's what we're talking about here.
We're talking about colloquial racism from the 19th century that's persisting on YouTube and podcasts because these people haven't moved on.
And much of the racism that we see that I've been seeing in the You Are Here podcast that comes from the alt-right is ultimately just this sort of like digitized version of stuff that you could have found in the 1840s talking about slave rebellions and such.
Like it's, you know, the problems of the black community.
I mean, what's wrong with these blacks, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, you know, and they just come out and talk about it, right?
Like it's just straight up the thing. - And it's, yeah, passed on through, you know, the pull up your pants stuff, et cetera, et cetera.
Absolutely.
But it's, you know, as you said, it's, you know, the utility of genetic explanations, or just more broadly, reductionist and determinist explanations of any kind, even if you disavow genetic explanations and talk about culture in this very sort of crude, circular way that they do.
The appeal is that it appeals to an authoritarian mindset, because what these people ultimately want, the fascist mindset is ultimately authoritarian, as several writers have pointed out, And what these sorts of determinist arguments ultimately provide is a kind of auto-authoritarianism that does it for you.
It kind of says, well, you know, it's not, yeah, there needs to be an authoritarian clampdown on what can be done, what can be tried, what is allowed, etc, etc.
But when you when you when you when you comport it into the realm of genetics, which you kind of you're eliciting nature as your accomplice to do the authoritarianism for you, you're saying, well, you know, it's not me clamping down.
It's just genetic reality that's doing it.
I can't help it.
It's just the way it is.
People are just like this, and fighting it is never going to work, and so ultimately we just have to do the thing that seems uncomfortable to us now, because ultimately it prevents a greater tragedy in the future.
And I am very sorry that we have to do this, but ultimately it is a necessity for our future survival.
And again, not to You know, not to draw too straight a line here, but that's literally the argument that the NSDAP was making with respect to the Jews.
It wasn't, you know, we hate every Jew because they are, you know, personally terrible to us.
It is like, look, there is a logic to we have to have a state for the German people.
We need space for the German people to have agriculture and ultimately We have an infection in our midst, and it's a genetic infection, and it is a cultural infection, and ultimately that must be removed by one process or another.
And then you go through a few iterations and you find, like, solution A didn't work, solution B didn't work, solution C didn't work.
Well, there's this final solution that we're just going to arrive at that will definitely work to rid us of all the Jews.
And that's, you know, like, that's the end point of this kind of logic, right?
There's no epistemic break between normal reactionary thinking and fascism.
That's the lie that they tell you.
They tell you that, you know, you have sort of, you have normal politics, which is, you know, left and right and centre.
And then you have, you know, and when, you know, it's like there's this epistemic gulf sort of between them where, you know, you have normal politics and then you have fascism.
No.
You know, when they're not telling you that fascism is actually a phenomenon of the left, you know, where they collapse it down into just authoritarianism.
So if it's anybody telling you that you shouldn't say a certain word, that's fascism.
When they're not telling you that gross, idiotic lie, what they tell you is there's this gigantic sort of chasm between us and fascism.
And the truth is that fascism is just, it Just.
But it is ultimately the same reactionary politics that you see practiced in the quote-unquote mainstream, taken to its, I would say, its logical endpoint, married to a populist anti-left mass movement and state power.
That is what fascism is.
So when they try to paint this sort of big gulf between them, you know, normal reactionaries and fascism, that's a lie.
That is a lie.
That's, you know, fascism is not this alien The thing that squats outside political discourse.
It is a phenomenon of the right.
It is where right-wing politics always tends.
I mean, we talked about this in a recent episode, which is that this is kind of what we're trying to get across.
That this, I mean, particularly in recent years, the divisions are breaking down and fascist politics is becoming increasingly mainstream.
And this is how that can happen, I would say.
Yeah.
And what I said at the beginning of 2021, you know, was like with the Biden election, all this is just getting a lot more like fuzzy and complicated and messy.
And that these groups are all sort of You know, getting in each other's finger paints a bit.
They're just kind of all spreading their, you know, and so there's a little bit of an ethno-nationalism, a little bit of an anti-Semitism, a little bit of a Manosphere stuff.
But then like also kind of anti-Trump or whatever, like, like they all sort of, they're picking from the same, they're picking from the same menus, but they're sort of like picking, you know, it's like a tapas restaurant or whatever.
It's a tapas restaurant of awfulness.
Where they're all picking certain things and, you know, like kind of choosing the, but they're kind of sharing between each other as well.
And it's a, yeah, it's, it's, it's weird.
You know, things were going to get weird.
That's what I said at the beginning of 2021.
And what I have to report to you at the beginning of 2022, all those episodes later is things have gotten weird.
Things got weird.
Yeah.
Yeah, and looking at carry on getting weird and they're going to carry on getting weird.
And so I had a clip actually live.
So let's just play this real quick just to again put a button on the conversation.
We just had this is only like 40 seconds.
So this was going to be my cold open and then I decided let's not actually play the voice of this band as the cold open.
Let's give people the warning first.
So yeah, I just thought you would be amused by this one.
Yeah, yeah, because the English just, back in the day and still today, think of the Scottish as barbarians.
I mean, they just see them as the most uncouth, unwashed, out-of-control barbarian tribe ever invented by God or Satan, you know?
I mean, they just are... The English hate the Scottish, and the feeling obviously goes the other way, too, but... And I basically see America as just a...
The English versus the Scots version 2.0 because the English settled the north and the Scots settled the south and we all know what happened in 1861.
I mean it just went at it again.
It was just a replay of 1745.
Holy shit!
1745. Holy shit.
I mean, when I bring up Albion and the American nation's books and the ethno-nationalism and like, that's just plain text.
And this guy's talking about this.
By the way, the other voice on that line, that's from Jack Donovan's podcast.
And oh, by the way, the audio distortion that you heard in that, that's in the original.
Nothing I can do about that.
They were, I know about when they recorded that and they were very obviously on a Skype call because I know what trying to record a podcast over Skype was like in 2019 anyway.
Yeah, to that extent at least, you know, we can relate, yeah.
I was talking, wasn't I, about how, you know, it's like what Jefferson Davis said about the American Civil War.
I mean, this is a different genetic theory about, you know, the ethnic roots of the war, but it's the same basic framework.
The American Civil War happened for the same reason that the Jacobite Rebellion and Culloden happened.
Because it's just a ethnic conflict between these two groups who just can't ever get along because genetics and culture.
And you listen to this guy long enough, he starts talking about honor cultures.
And there are certain things that I and That I need to live in an honor culture, but I can't deal with a slight to me in the way that, you know, an Englishman can, because an Englishman is used to taking slights, etc, etc, etc, etc.
It's all so, so boring, ultimately, because it's just the same idea over and over again.
Right.
It is the same idea over and over again.
And, you know, at the risk of doing the same thing, it's so pathetic.
It's stand-up comedy stuff.
It's, you know, It's, you know, an Englishman and an Irishman and a Scotsman walking to a bar.
It's just the same kind of thinking turned into ostensibly a theory of politics, but with all material, social complexity just stripped away so that it becomes just this fairy tale about different blood, you know, and how people are just fated to... Oh, it's so impoverished.
It's so childish.
It's It's embarrassing to hear adults talking in this way.
It really is.
And this man is like 45, 46 years old at this point.
I mean, he was 47 when he committed the atrocity.
So, I mean, this is a couple of years ago.
So, you know, he's he's in his mid 40s.
He's like our age at this point.
Yeah.
And talking like a 13 year old.
Clearly, that's going to be fine.
And I'll just say this, there is anti-Scottish prejudice in England, yeah, because basically the English are guilty of prejudice against pretty much everybody, I'm afraid.
I don't think that sort of sweeping generalisation that the English as a group consider the Scottish to be the lowest of the low sort of ravening savages.
I don't think that's true.
I don't want to sound like I'm, you know, banging the drum for my fellow Englishmen, but I don't think it's true to say that there is a widespread feeling in England that the Scots are the lowest of the low.
I think that's a ridiculous caricature of how the two societies feel about each other.
I don't know my exact family history, but I was born in North Alabama.
My last name was Harper.
I'm pretty sure there's just a bunch of Scots-Irish in me, you know?
I'm sure there's some English in there as well.
My surname's Graham.
I'm probably descended from border reavers, you know?
So if you and I can get along, I mean, I do the like barefoot barbarian from Alabama thing on here from time to time, because, you know, I'm usually recording barefoot and I think it's funny, but, you know, it's, you know, you and I can get along.
I think maybe he thinks a little highly of this, you know, kind of cultural divide, especially if it's supposed to be genetic.
The English part of me is talking to the English part of you, apparently.
And we can be reasonable together.
Also, we don't have to, you know, live in the same house.
So maybe that's the problem.
We can do a podcast, you know, like have breakfast together.
You can tell if you listen carefully that this podcast is really just a conversation between distributed English genes, I think.
That's the whole thing.
Subtextually, this is all about tea.
Because, of course, it's genetic liking tea, which is, of course, English.
Which is English.
Yeah.
Which is not not was not imported.
It was not imported at all.
It's grown in India.
Yeah.
There's no material history behind that particular cultural.
I think I've made my point.
I have so many things I could say about this right now, but we have to end this podcast eventually.
So I want to come back to our to our cold open here, which was Part of a news article, a news piece in the Denver News, a local Denver station, about the circumstances of one of the survivors of Roman McClay's or Lyndon McCloud's attack.
Lyndon McClay, Lyndon McCloud, I knew I was going to do that, named two of his victims.
And these were, the attack that he did was, Personal.
This was not going to a Walmart in El Paso and killing every brown person he found.
That's not what he did.
This was not the Christchurch massacre of having a specific political objective in mind and going to create a kind of political chaos.
Everything that we've seen from this point Was this was a personal vendetta against particular people that he felt had wronged him, right?
And it is very easy.
And in fact, the ADL put out, the ADL put out a piece that was definitely leaning into the, well, the killer had no real ideological motive.
And then it went on to kind of describe like the Manusphere connections and all that sort of thing.
I want to kind of both give it the credit of admitting that, but also sort of the headline thing that people are going to read is there's no clear ideological motive.
And that's sort of the way it got retweeted a little bit.
And, um, that's really, really, really uncomfortable because there is a clear ideology here.
The guy, the ideology is misogyny.
The ideology is this genetic determinism and McLeod believed he was justified in Doing this.
I mean, pretty obviously from what I've seen, and I could be corrected on this in the future if we find out more things later on, but he felt he was justified by this, by doing this thing was justified in his mind because I had to do this in order to be a real man.
In order to be the person that I'm supposed to be, I had to go and kill these people.
And One of these people was like a beloved indigenous tattoo artist in Denver.
And just this outpouring of support that I saw and like that kind of first day, I mean, it was just, it was just heartbreaking, right?
Like these are people You know, there's a tattoo artist.
They're going about their life.
They're building their little small businesses.
They're building their tattoo shops.
They're building their name for themselves.
This guy, McLeod comes into their lives is a complete fucking dipshit by like all indications of anybody who ever met him.
And, um, They kick him out of their lives or, you know, kind of however the things go sour.
He runs off into the wilderness for a few years, writes this completely batshit series of books in which he describes killing two of these people.
Two of these people are killed by name in these books.
Fantasizes directly about getting this.
Squalid, vicious, petty revenge on these completely innocent people.
That the fictional McLeod was this violent criminal who killed 46 people.
Among two of the people who were named in the book as being killed were the people he actually killed.
And the circumstances are very similar.
There's been a lot of reporting about that, so I'm not going to get into it.
But, you know, the circumstances were like, McLeod literally posted a photo of the tattoo shop owned by the guy whose voice you heard at the beginning of this podcast on his Instagram with a link to the book.
Yeah.
Let me rephrase.
The person he went on to kill in real life, who is named in the book.
Actually, that person wasn't named in the book.
I think the tattoo shop might have been, but that person was not named in the book.
He, this was a planned attack.
He was planning to go and murder these people.
Yeah.
And that's a death threat.
I mean, yes, absolutely.
I mean, okay.
It's in an attenuated form, but it's a death threat.
It's an announcement of intent.
If I wrote a book saying Daniel Harper with two E's, Is going to go kill Jack Graham, you know, but with an E at the end.
And then I post a photo of your house.
Exactly.
And then I post that.
You have a right to consider that a death threat.
I have considered things done to me that are less obvious than that.
Death threats.
It's a complete thing.
Look, I've made jokes about politicians on Twitter that apparently were considered death threats, you know, by the police.
Well, by the way, apparently the FBI had this guy on their radar.
They had investigated him at least twice in 2020 and 2021.
But no charges were ever filed, obviously, because the FBI is a stellar organization with a great history.
That's the logic we get there.
Everybody in this guy's life knew about this toxicity and knew about this guy was a walking time bomb.
And This is going to have to be its own episode, because I started digging into this, and it's just batshit crazy.
But I started exploring the modern masculinity movement, and there were some people sort of chortling about this.
And one of those people is Rolo Tomasi.
Do you recall who Rolo Tomasi is?
Well, see, the problem is that Rolo Tomasi primarily, to me, means it's not actually a character, but a name that pops up in the movie.
It's not, the character is not in the novel.
Interestingly enough, they invented Rolo Tomasi and the whole thing with Rolo Tomasi for the film to make the simplified plot of the film work.
So, it's a bit, I mean, I know That Rolo Tomasi is somebody in our context, and I'm trying desperately to remember specifically who.
But the movie, you know, it's just getting in the way.
Kevin Spacey's voice and face saying the name is getting in the way.
I'm sorry.
No, no, no.
For me, it's Guy Pearce saying the name is the one that, you know.
I actually love the movie L.A.
Confidential.
I love too many movies that star Kevin Spacey.
It's a real problem these days.
Kevin Spacey, piece of shit rapist, good actor.
It's one of those things.
And he was in a lot of good things in the 90s, and that's where my heart will always be.
Future bonus episode, L.A.
Confidential, I suspect.
Oh no, I would love to do that.
In my fucking sleep, man.
Anyway, so Romo Tomasi is one of these old-school Manosphere guys who still, he's still going, he still has a YouTube channel.
I started archiving it last week.
With my copious free space.
I'm going to have to buy another drive soon.
Please support me on Patreon.
I'm going to have to buy some food soon.
Please support me on Patreon.
Yeah, no, no.
I also have to do that.
I'm just saying, like, you know, I actually incur significant expenses to do some of this work.
Anyway, so Rolo Tomasi and his buddy, Ryan Stone, started talking about this because apparently there's this deep history of this.
So McLeod was kind of invited, like his sanctions sort of being a thing.
He was invited to speak at this 21 conference, which is this Manosphere thing.
And all the guys involved with that had to really pull a bunch of shit down because apparently there were photos of them standing next to him.
And I don't think he had actually spoken at anything, but he was sort of in some videos and he was very clearly kind of referenced some things.
Rolo Tomasi, fucking misogynist, asshole, Manosphere guy from what he said.
He calls himself the godfather of the manosphere.
It's coming back to me.
I'm sure I've read about him extensively on Weekend at the Mammoth.
Right.
I mean, he's kind of one of these guys.
He has a YouTube channel called The Rational Male, which tells you everything you need to know.
Complete dipshit.
Well, here's a bit of him and his buddy Ryan Stone talking about this.
And they, as like every other like kind of masculinity Manosphere show, did kind of what I did and like connecting the Jack Murphy story and the McLeod story into sort of one thing because it was all, of course, in their context.
Jack Murphy's always been a bit of a dick.
We kind of don't like that guy because, you know, and he's cucking out and all this sort of thing, and he's not being a real man.
And so it's all about like that and not like, oh, there's a real toxicity in our movement that's just kind of built into the DNA of it that we really need to be rooting out if we're going to be like proper men who are going to teach other men how to be men and have like solid relationships with women.
For them it was, ha ha, his girlfriend fucked another man.
That's that problem.
Also, Rahul Tamasi was on the You Are Here podcast, because apparently this podcast will never leave my attention for more than a day.
Yeah, it's here to stay now.
He co-hosted with Ariel Scarcella.
Daniel, you are there!
I am.
He co-hosted with Ariel Scarcella, who is a TERF.
This lesbian turf who has a YouTube channel and literally did an episode of her YouTube show defending Whitaker's mantra.
Everything is coming up, I don't speak German.
That's kind of what I'm saying.
We have continued relevance.
Anyway.
It appears so, yeah.
I think it's worth getting away from the big intellectual stuff we've been talking about, about the nature of culture and genetics.
Just listen to these guys talk for about 45 seconds.
We will do future episodes about this, because I did not have time to really dig into all of the details of whatever this personal drama that was happening in 2019.
I spent a couple of hours on it this afternoon.
It's all like whenever you get into like old internet drama, it's just these guys are all assholes.
They're arguing about some personal slights and they're turning it into a thing.
But what I want to demonstrate here is the claim is that we knew this guy in McLeod was a problem even back then.
And even like people recognized it.
And that's kind of what I want to put a button on here is that even these guys recognized what a toxic piece of shit this guy was.
Can I ask you a question before I get started with you?
Okay.
How does it feel to be 100% vindicated?
And everybody, not one person, not some people, but everybody who's been talking shit about you or me or Rich or all of us for the last three years in one fell swoop.
The chickens finally all came home to roost.
I know, man.
It's almost like a Christmas present.
Right now, it's a Christmas present.
Now, I hate to make light of this because I'm going to... I know, yeah, people die.
That part's horrible.
Yeah, that part's horrible.
So let's... The part that worked out well for you was great.
...throw that one out there really quickly.
Again, you know, the murdering of multiple people.
Well, that's just, you know, that's unfortunate.
That didn't work out so well.
And I'm not, I'm not laughing about that.
I'm laughing about the stuff that looks good to me, which is my internal enemies within this movement have a lot of egg on their face because they promoted this guy in 2019.
But again, it demonstrates, at least in their telling and from everything that I've seen, it looks like it's this connection to this guy, Anthony, the Dream Johnson, who calls himself the President of the Manosphere.
And I started looking into this guy and he's like, my God, like the most robotic looking fucking dick you've ever seen in your life.
Like, it's just, I mean, These guys have production value.
They have money behind them.
These aren't like the Nazis who are doing this in their parents' basements.
There's some money flowing into this because it's a bunch of 40-year-old software engineers who just got divorced and just want to feel better about themselves, so they'll pay $500 to attend the conference or whatever.
In this world, These guys were recognized as being toxic, is kind of where I think we can land on this.
And everything indicates that.
It's funny how they always recognize the toxicity in the other guy, but don't recognize the internal dynamics that are at play.
And maybe there's a moat and a beam here, and maybe you need to look in your own fucking eyes sometime as well, Rolo Tomasi.
Anyway, as I said, expect more Manosphere content in the future because there's an itch I have to scratch here now.
With my deepest apologies, expect more Rollo Tomasi in the future.
I didn't think I was going to have to do this, but apparently somebody has to.
And Kevin Logan has done a Dissent and Mana Sphere video in years at this point.
So yeah, time to pick up the mantle there.
Apparently it will be 2015 for the rest of time.
I've long thought we're just existing in the long 2016.
2016.
Like, you know, like time stopped on like us election day in 2016.
And we've just been living that same day ever since.
Really, you know, 2016, it's the Halcyon days now, isn't it?
You know, if only, if only.
Right.
If I knew, if I knew then what I know now, you know, what could we have done, you know?
Okay.
Well, that was a strange one.
But yeah, as Daniel says, there's going to be more of this.
So if you want to listen to Daniel repeatedly scratch that itch he was just talking about, this is the place to do it.
We get really productive things done by me scratching the weird itches.
We're finding weird internet communities.
That's true.
Yeah, please.
Thank you for all your support.
And thank you, Jack, as always, for being a part of this weird project that we're now involved in.
Yeah, no, I can't.
I mean, I want to say it was a pleasure because it is always a pleasure talking to you.
And it's been fascinating.
But of course, ultimately, you know, we are talking about just horrifying people.
And we are talking about a guy that murdered people.
And you know, they are They are dead.
And that is just a tragedy and it should not have happened.
And that is ultimately why we do this, you know?
So, yeah, if you want to help us do this editorially independent and at very high production values that certainly don't involve the audio cutting out the way they do on certain people's podcasts, you can help us out.
That would be very much appreciated.
But it's also very much appreciated if you just tune in and listen and Spread the word and share us, etc, etc.
Just thank you for being you, basically.
I know I started saying very harsh things to you, but really, I love you very much.
And I don't think Daniel does, really.
I think he just pretends, but I really mean it.
I'm a secret Nazi, don't you know?
There's actually a rumor in certain sections that I'm a secret Nazi.
Well, I have seen things that made me wonder.
It's those jeans.
It's those Scottish jeans of yours.
Yep, yep.
As an Englishman, I naturally suspect your Scottish jeans of making you a bad person.
Yep, yep.
Just look at this beard.
Nobody can have this beard and be a decent human being.
It's just not possible.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
If you want to help us make the show and stay 100% editorially independent, we both have Patreons.
I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
