Gunman shot dead by police as authorities look for a second suspect following shooting in annual California food event.

The final hours of Santino Legan's life were filled with anger and hatred.

On July 28, 2019, the 19-year-old stormed the Gilroy Garlic Festival near San Jose, California, killing three people and injuring 19.

As he drove to the festival, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and six high capacity magazines, he made a series of Instagram posts lashing out at the world around him.

The last thing he ever posted on the internet was a book recommendation: "Read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard."

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He wasn't alone.

Those words have been uttered countless times in the darkest corners of the internet.

On 4chan, 8chan, and Stormfront, angry young men push it onto other angry young men, claiming it will change their lives and open their eyes.

The only known photograph of Arthur Desmond.

The book reads pretty much how you would expect given its fanbase: furious rants about how white people are superior and women should be subservient, encouraging violence and rebellion.

Might is Right never had any mainstream publishing success, but for 130 years it has survived and thrived in the shadows.

It has been cited by terrorists, screamed at Klan rallies, and become the bible for an entire religion.

The book's author, Ragnar Redbeard, has always had an air of mystery around his identity. That's just the way his biggest fans like it. The intrigue adds to his allure, helping to grow his legend.

But it's not true. Historians know who Ragnar Redbeard was.

His real name was Arthur Desmond, a failed politician from Napier. And until recently it was still available to buy here.

This is the story of what may be New Zealand's most notorious book.

190 votes in the Hawke's Bay

Arthur Desmond lived his life on the run. He constantly got himself in legal trouble, forcing him to flee to new cities and countries and adopt new identities.

It began with humble beginnings. He first appears in the annals of history as a farm labourer in the Hawke's Bay.

"He came from a very modest background," says Mark Derby, a historian who wrote Desmond's biography.

"He had no education, no personal assets, no skills at anything in particular, and yet he dreamed of himself becoming an all powerful leader."

NOAH BERGER/AP Investigators examine an area by an inflatable slide at Christmas Hill Park, the scene of a deadly mass shooting in Gilroy, California.

Desmond ran for parliament twice in Hawke's Bay, in 1884 and 1887.

He got 190 votes on his first attempt, and three years later built that up into 562 - enough for a respectable third place.

His rhetoric was extreme, but his politics were fairly normal. He was a democratic socialist who advocated for the poor and attacked rich and powerful land barons as corrupt and unfair.

Things went wrong for Desmond when he came out in support of Te Kooti, the Māori rebel who had orchestrated an attack on Matawhero, on the outskirts of Gisborne, which killed 54 people.

Other Pākehā beat him in the streets for his views.

It's not clear exactly why Desmond admired Te Kooti so much. Derby thinks it was because of the fear he inspired.

"Desmond wanted to be that person himself. He didn't want to compromise, be beaten, he wanted to grab what he wanted and take it by force," Derby says.

Despised and rejected in Hawke's Bay, he ran away to Auckland,

He gained some prominence in the union movement, but got himself in legal trouble after forging letters by a local politician.

He then scuttled away to Sydney. He became heavily involved in socialist circles and the Labor Party, where he was almost selected as a candidate for Parliament.

But once again, he was forced to flee. He had been publishing a newspaper called Hard Cash which spread false rumours about Sydney banks.

Two of his co-publishers were jailed for their work, but Desmond apparently received an early tip-off that the police were after him. He left the country immediately.

PapersPast A newspaper cartoon from 1880 showing Arthur Desmond being fired from his position at socialist newspaper The Tribune.

An extreme philosophy

Thousands of kilometres away, in Chicago, Desmond stepped ashore and set on once again rebuilding his life. He brought with him the manuscript for the first edition of Might is Right, published in 1896 by Auditorium Press.

An advertisement for the book called it "the only book of its kind ever printed".

It's not an inaccurate claim.

Might is Right doesn't argue for a particular political ideology or morality. It argues against the entire concept of morality itself.

The book claims that morals don't exist except in our own minds, that there is no inherent benefit in being a good person or doing the right thing.

Because Desmond believed there was no such thing as 'good', the only people he respected were those who were physically strong and powerful and could make everyone else do what they wanted.

His ideas got confusingly contradictory as he claimed that non-white people were inferior and women should be considered the property of men, but also that it shouldn't matter what race or gender someone was, as long as they were powerful and strong.

"To me, it's a completely incoherent, completely irrational, completely contradictory world view and I cannot make head nor tail of it really," writer Mark Derby says.

"A lot of it reads as if it were dictated at speed from the bottom of a whisky bottle.

"The fact is, that he was a total loser, frankly. As far as I'm concerned he's an embarrassment to this country."

A growing myth

The first audience to adopt Might is Right were egoist anarchists, a movement on the political fringe which was growing in popularity at the time thanks to the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Desmond sent a copy of Might is Right to Leo Tolstoy, probably the most highly-regarded writer of the day.

"He believed that he was one of the great writers of the age and he desperately wanted to be seen that way. He assumed that Tolstoy would regard him as an equal," Derby says

"Tolstoy was horrified by it, he was disgusted by it, he didn't speak well of him at all."

To Tolstoy, it represented everything that was wrong with the self-centred upper class of society.

That didn't seem to matter to Desmond, just being mentioned by Tolstoy was enough to boost his stature.

He went around telling people he was a close friend of Tolstoy. He made the same claim about New Zealand governor Sir George Grey. At one point, he claimed to have a Doctorate of Laws from the University of Chicago, a degree which wasn't even offered at the time.

He spread enough rumours about himself for his book to go through at least seven print runs in his lifetime.

The 1927 edition, produced by the Dil Pickle Club, seems to be the last edition published in Desmond's lifetime, though the exact date, location, or cause of death is unknown.

The rise of Satanism

The book lay dormant for several decades after that, old copies being passed around outsiders and radical thinkers, until it made its way into the hands of Anton LaVey, a popular musician and self-proclaimed psychic living in San Francisco.

LaVey first encountered the book in 1957, when he found an old copy in a second hand bookstore. He was immediately obsessed.

In 1966, LaVey founded the Church of Satan, declaring himself high priest. He would became known as 'The Black Pope'.

The Satanic Bible, which he wrote in 1969, contained entire chapters plagiarised from the pages of Might is Right.

Satanism took off quickly, thanks to LaVey's talent for turning Satanic rituals into media stunts.

Anton Lavey called himself the 'Black Pope' of the Church of Satan.

The Satanic Bible has gone through more than 30 print editions and claims to have sold more than one million copies.

That triggered a resurgence for Might is Right. In 1972, the New York-based Revisionist Press gave the book its first full print run since Desmond's death.

The book was picked up again in 1984 by Loompanics Unlimited, a Washington-based publisher which specialised in controversial topics.

In the 100th anniversary of Might is Right, LaVey put forward a different theory of authorship: Jack London, the American novelist best known for White Fang and The Call of the Wild.

The theory doesn't hold up at all; London would have been 14 when the first edition was printed.

In his research, Derby uncovered passages and extracts from Might is Right from some of Arthur Desmond's early political writing, still held in the Turnbull Library. It proves that Desmond was undoubtedly the author.

In the shadow of white supremacists

The history and influence of Might is Right took a sharp turn into darkness when it came to the attention of David Lane.

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lane was heavily involved in the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations.

In 1983, he founded The Order, a white supremacist terrorist group set on overthrowing the US government.

Southern Poverty Law Centre David Lane, the white supremacist leader who died in 2007.

Over the next year and a half, they carried out a series of armed robberies, bombed a synagogue, and were responsible for the murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg.

Lane was sentenced to 190 years in prison, but he maintained power and influence from the inside which made him arguably the most influential figure of the modern white supremacist movement.

While he was in prison, his wife Katja created a publishing house. She used it to distribute his writing and other white supremacist manifestos, including Might is Right.

The internet era

When Mark Derby set out to write Arthur Desmond's biography, he was just aiming to piece together the threads of history and tell the life story of a unique individual.

"I wasn't aware that there were real white supremacists advocating reading this book, and I certainly wasn't aware that they were picking up automatic weapons and going berserk killing people. That to me is a horrifying realisation," he said.

"It makes me think that maybe it's better not to let people know it exists."

But after the Gilroy shooting, it seems it is too late for that. The book has entered the ether, and it is killing people.

Ultimately, Derby believes in shining a harsh critical light on Desmond and his work.

"I still stand by the argument that people are going to get their hands on [Might is Right]. The thing has its weird life of its own, it's like some sort of hideous virus."

"All I can do is continue to try and disentangle the myths and deliberate misinformation, to try to show something of the reality of what the man did with his life.

The rise of the internet has launched Might is Right, to a bigger and more dangerous audience than ever before. There are PDF versions and homemade audiobooks. One heavy metal band even turned put the book to music.

At least 12 different companies have printed editions of the book in the new millennium.

Until recently, seven different editions of Might is Right were available on MightyApe.co.nz.

After being approached for comment for this story, MightyApe said they would remove the book from their product catalogue and would destroy the stock they hold.