The Colorado gunman who killed five people and injured two more in a planned attack last week across several locations in metro Denver participated in extremist circles online and expressed concerning beliefs before killing, according to two extremism experts who’ve been studying his online presence.

The gunman’s writings are blatantly misogynistic and racist and often focus on violence, the extremism experts said. His books and online writing glorify violence, decry an alleged attack on white masculinity and advocate for a return to unequal gender roles.

On Twitter, he wrote that aggressive white men are being made irrelevant and that “war is coming.” In another tweet, he wrote that “a generation of defective men” had been programmed to be passive and gentle — traits he said belonged to women — and that the feminine traits made them “passive eunuch slaves.” He wrote angrily that laws, social norms and law enforcement protected the weak from the strong.

“I’m over it,” he wrote in 2020. “The weak better buckle up… (expletive) is about to get real.”

“While we can’t necessarily pinpoint any extremist ideology or groups he was with, he was in a generally extreme, right-wing space,” said Jessica Reaves, editorial director for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism

The gunman participated in a sector of extremist culture called the “manosphere” — a loosely connected collection of websites and chat forums where men oppose the idea that women are equal and discuss an alleged crisis in masculinity. The gunman’s writings repeat many of the beliefs found in the manosphere and he publicly connected online with men from several well-known white nationalist and hate groups.

“What I see is an individual who carried a lot of concerning indicators,” said Matthew Kriner, a senior research scholar at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies

Denver police Chief Paul Pazen said at a news conference the day after the Dec. 27 shooting that the gunman was on law enforcement’s radar and had been the subject of at least two investigations. Neither of those investigations resulted in arrests, Pazen said. The Denver Police Department and the FBI have refused to release more information about the prior investigations.

Police have said that the gunman knew his victims and interviews with some of those impacted reveal he may have been exacting revenge against them. The Denver Post is limiting the use of the gunman’s name in an effort to minimize the amount of infamy it gains due to his violence.

One former employee said the gunman operated a tattoo business with some of the people he targeted in his shootings and that the gunman blamed everyone else when the business failed. The gunman also named several of those he targeted in his three-volume book he self-published and described killing them. A Lakewood police officer, Ashley Ferris, shot and killed the gunman after confronting him in a busy shopping and restaurant district.

While there’s no evidence that the gunman killed to further an ideological goal, research and history show that extreme beliefs expressed online can translate into real-life violence, Kriner said.

The gunman’s focus on survival skills, physical strength, the need for tribes, European myths and genetic purity also aligns him with a category of hate groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center classify as neo-Völkisch, or Folkish, groups. Groups in this category rely on “imagery and myths of a bygone, romanticized Viking Era” and “seek to transcend nationalism and wield whiteness as it suits their ill-conceived ends,” according to the center.

“While outward-facing violence rarely erupts from the Folkish movement, it is premised on an ethnically or racially charged warrior pathos,” according to the center.

The Denver gunman made several references in his book and online to the Wolves of Vinland, one of the hate groups in the Folkish category, Kriner said. Groups like the Wolves of Vinland practice “bastardized Norse pagan extremism,” Kriner said.

“They are fascists, but they are esoteric fascists,” Kriner said. “They’ll hide this behind this Norse veneer to make it more palatable.”

Kriner and Reaves disagree whether the Denver gunman should be labeled an extremist. Kriner said his misogyny alone qualified him as an extremist. Reaves said the gunman seemed to hold some beliefs that would’ve once been considered extreme — like the belief that white masculinity is under attack — but those beliefs have become common enough that it has become difficult to use such beliefs alone to label a person an extremist.

“That has become so mainstream at this point — you hear it from mainstream politicians — that the line is blurred at this point,” she said.

It’s difficult to tell how many real-world connections the gunman had in the extremist realm, Reaves said.

“What we’ve seen repeatedly is that the men who are committing these crimes are not affiliating themselves in any way, or any real-world way, with any movement,” Reaves said. “They’ve radicalized online for the most part and our operating on their own.”

While some extremists have distanced themselves from the gunman since the killings, others are celebrating the killer and his acts online, Kriner and Reaves said.

“Our concern going forward and what we’ll be looking at for a while is how this plays out in extremist spaces online and whether he is lionized and elevated and praised as a saint,” Reaves said.