We don't need a lot more evidence that Dylann Roof is a racist who killed nine people in a historic black church because of racism—he's reportedly said as much to friends, to his victims, and to the police—but if the identification of the website LastRhodesian.com with Roof holds up, we now have a lot more evidence that, yes, racism is at the root of what he did. The website contains a series of pictures of Roof showing, once again, that he was a Confederate-loving racist. There's also a manifesto which, at this point, can't be conclusively attributed to Roof, but points in it are consistent with
some of his
reported statements.
Several pictures on the site show Roof holding Confederate flags; another shows him burning an American flag. The website's name is LastRhodesian.com—remember that Roof has been photographed wearing a badge of the flag of colonial Rhodesia—and the site was registered in February under Roof's name.
But it's the manifesto, which, if Roof is indeed the author, is the most important. Given the number of pundits and politicians who have suggested motives other than racism in the face of all the evidence ... well, this wouldn't leave any remaining straws for those people to grasp at.
The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored? [...]
Segregation was not a bad thing. It was a defensive measure. Segregation did not exist to hold back negroes. It existed to protect us from them. And I mean that in multiple ways. Not only did it protect us from having to interact with them, and from being physically harmed by them, but it protected us from being brought down to their level. Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to level of brute animals. The best example of this is obviously our school system.
The manifesto repeatedly returns to the idea that white people should not move to avoid black people, whether to the suburbs or to the Northwest Front, a white supremacist attempt to establish a "white homeland" in the Pacific Northwest. Rather, it argues:
It is far from being too late for America or Europe. I believe that even if we made up only 30 percent of the population we could take it back completely. But by no means should we wait any longer to take drastic action.
Thoroughly disgusting reading, in other words, but also thoroughly in line with Roof's reported desire to start a race war.