Church bells tolled Sunday and hundreds filled the church’s pews of the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, for the first service since Dylann Roof’s attack on a Bible session in its basement last Wednesday. An estimated 20,000 people formed a Bridge to Peace unity chain on the Ravenel Bridge to show solidarity with his victims. A website discovered Saturday called “The Last Rhodesian” shows photographs of Roof at Confederate heritage sites and hosts a 2,500-word manifesto he is believed to have written that explains why he chose to carry out his mass murder spree.
Richard Cohen talking:
he may have been a high school dropout, but he was a good student, it seems, of the white supremacist world. His entry point was the Council of Conservative Citizens website. That’s a site that, you know, rails again and again about black-on-white crime, calls for white—it talks about white genocide. And, you know, Roof had adopted all of the symbols of the white supremacist world and was able to articulate them. So, to me, he seems like—to us, he seems like a classic example of someone who’s been radicalized not by going to hate group meetings, but by trolling the net and being involved in that echo chamber that is really quite so disturbing.
The manifesto believed to belong to Dylann Roof—and I’d like you to explain how it was registered and what it means—in it, he writes, “Anyone who thinks that White and black people look as different as we do on the outside, but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional. How could our faces, skin, hair, and body structure all be different, but our brains be exactly the same? This is the nonsense we are led to believe. Negroes have lower IQs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior.”
this is classic white supremacist garbage. The world knows that race is only skin deep. But for the white supremacist world, particularly something like the Council of Conservative Citizens, you know, race is destiny. And that’s a theme that one hears not just in this country, but in Europe, in South Africa. You know, right now, Amy, some of my colleagues are in an international conference in Budapest really to talk about the international character of the—of white ethnic nationalism. So, you know, what Dylann said, what Roof said, is really quite par from the course.
the Council of Conservative Citizens was built on the mailing list of the White Citizens’ Council, the notorious groups that tried to oppose integration. You mentioned earlier, Amy, in your headline roundup, that Earl Holt, the head of the White Citizens’—the head of the Council of Conservative Citizens, had donated money to political candidates. What’s much worse, in my view, has been the fact that the political figures, people in public office, have lent support to the Council of Conservative Citizens. Trent Lott, Bob Barr, Haley Barbour, the treasurer of the—the former treasurer in South Carolina, Mr. Patterson—they’ve all appeared at Council of Conservative Citizens events in the late ’90s and early 2000s. So, you know, we like to think of something like the Council of Conservative Citizens existing only on the margins of society; unfortunately, a group like that, particularly in the South, particularly among Republican candidates or officeholders, it also has a foothold in mainstream society.
this young man was not stupid. He may have been a high school dropout, but, you know, it’s a fairly well-put-together diatribe. He is a lunatic, a psychopath, but he’s not an idiot. Secondly, you know, kind of at the end, he talks about “my life might not be worth more than a speck of dust, but I’m going to do something for the good of society. I’m the brave one.” And so what you see is someone who’s existing on the margins of life, not successful in the real world, so he retreats to the world of the web and decides, instead of being a down-and-out kid with no future, he is going to do something heroic for the white race. I mean, I think that’s the main takeaway.
RICHARD COHEN: Well, you know, I’m not 100 percent sure. He talks about how the Trayvon Martin case—you know, he became aware of it and then began to search on Google for black-on-white crime and came to the Council of Conservative Citizens website, which gave him an explanation for his own failures in life, right? You know, it’s black people are trying to take over the world; black-on-white crime is the real problem; look at South Africa, you know, it’s—there’s the white genocide going on there. And that fit into—you know, Roof adopted those views, became more and more radical, and eventually decided to strike out. We’ve seen this kind of pattern before of people going to the echo chamber of the web, getting angrier and angrier and angrier, and eventually striking out. Earlier this year, we put out a report about lone wolves. And, you know, it’s a very familiar pattern that we’ve seen many times.
you go back to The Birth of a Nation, right? the film in the early part of last century, where that bugaboo was one of the animating features of the film. You know, hundreds, if not thousands, of black men over—historically, have been lynched on allegations such as that. And, of course, if you go to the Council of Conservative Citizens website, again and again it’s this, you know, black men are raping white women, black men are committing crimes against white people. So it’s a trope that has been a constant for more than a century in the white supremacist world.
— source democracynow.org
Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. He is co-author of an editorial published today in The New York Times titled “White Supremacists Without Borders.”