Minnesota lawmaker retweeted Denver shooter’s promotion of neo-fascist book

Minnesota state Sen. Roger Chamberlain, R-Lino Lakes, once retweeted a tweet promoting a violent neofascist book.

The Twitter posting was by the man who killed five people and injured two more in a shooting spree across the Denver metro area last Monday.

The gunman, Lyndon McLeod, followed Chamberlain on Twitter, one of fewer than 200 people he followed on the social media platform.

The connection between Chamberlain and the shooter is tenuous. They shared a fascination with a neo-fascist manifesto called Bronze Age Mindset, which espouses racist and misogynistic ideas including that white men are the proper rulers of the world.

One passage claims, “Life appears at its peak not in the grass hut village ruled by nutso mammies” — using a racial slur to refer to Black women — “but in the military state.”

A Fan of Bronze Age Pervert

Chamberlain, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, has previously tweeted at the manifesto’s anonymous author, who self-published the book under the pen name Bronze Age Pervert.

Chamberlain thanked him for an introduction to Bach’s “Fugue in G-minor;” likely a reference to Pervert’s podcast, which uses classical compositions as bumper music.

A common tactic fans use to promote Bronze Age Mindset on Twitter is to photograph the book in an interesting place: tucked in a snowbank, standing on a shelf, sitting on a beach. Chamberlain has “liked” several of these promotional tweets, including one from McLeod.

Chamberlain declined to comment on this story through a spokesperson.

Asked by a TV reporter about a previous Reformer story highlighting his fascination with the book, Chamberlain erroneously claimed the story had been retracted and said that just because he reads a book doesn’t mean he endorses it.

Denver Gunman’s Novels

The 47-year-old gunman, McLeod, self-published three novels under his pen name with racist and misogynistic themes that detail attacks similar to those he carried out two days after Christmas, which began in a tattoo parlor in Denver and ended with McLeod dying in a confrontation with police.

At a press conference last Tuesday, a spokesperson for the Denver Police Department said they were still investigating McLeod’s motives.

McCleod became a minor celebrity in online reactionary circles after he self-published a novel in 2019. In a podcast appearance that year, McCleod (who wrote and tweeted as “Roman McClay”) called his book a “eulogy.”

“I always knew that if I was going to go out, I at least wanted to have my novel written first,” he told the host.

The book has been pulled from the Amazon marketplace.

The final chapters of Bronze Age Mindset encourage readers to prepare for a reactionary, neo-fascist revolution by taking positions in government, national intelligence and military agencies, and by working out to prepare themselves for physical violence.

The book overtly condemns the kind of violence McLeod embraced at the end of his life, but is laden with parables of suicide and violence.

In the tweet that Chamberlain retweeted, McLeod quotes the Greek philosopher Empedocles: “The artist has a right to kill himself.” The prologue of Bronze Age Pervert is centered around the story of Empedocles jumping into a volcano “because he knew he would be reborn as a god.”

It is unclear whether Chamberlain promotes extremism online. He has made his Twitter profile private and has rarely addressed his online activity in public.

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