If you don’t believe that racism and misogyny can do actual physical harm, consider the case of New York lawyer Roy den Hollander.
Hollander is suspected of murdering the son of Barack Obama-appointed federal judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed and husband severely wounded when a man believed to be den Hollander appeared on their doorstep Sunday and started shooting. The elder Salas has had two surgeries and needs another. den Hollander was later found dead of what was apparently a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Chillingly, the photo of another female Hispanic judge was found in the car with his body.
Den Hollander’s website advertises him as an “anti-feminist attorney,” and he previously had a case before Salas, although he withdrew before she actually heard it because he was diagnosed with cancer.
Be sure you take a look at his website, http://www.roydenhollander.com/main/index.htm , as long as you can commit to a shower afterwards. He was staggeringly misogynistic, as evidenced by a number of diatribes against women.
He had also expressed special contempt for Latina judges, including Salas, saying they were overly aggressive.
Here’s the thing, people: This guy wasn’t a nobody. He was a Trump supporter who railed often against Obama, but he wasn’t one of those screaming, armed-to-the-teeth lunatics you see on the nightly news at anti-mask protests.
He graduated from George Washington Law School in 1985, After that, he got an MBA from Columbia University, he argued cases before the New York State Supreme Court, and he worked as a lawyer for the Internal Revenue Service. Big-time schools, and pretty big-time jobs.
It might be only anecdotal proof, but here is a guy with multiple degrees and a major-league jobs whose actions identify him as a bigot in several ways. It is frightening and disheartening to think there are other people like him out there stirring their cauldrons of hate.
Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I think people like den Hollander are a little like what my Grandpa used to say about rats.
“If you see one,” he’d say, “you missed a thousand of them.”
