Before Dylann Roof set out to commit the shooting at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, he set up a very simple web-site called Last Rhodesian and posted there a manifesto that referred to his intended actions. I think that it is worthwhile to examine Roof’s manifesto for some clues about how he ended up doing what he did.
Roof says that he grew up in the South, having “a small amount of racial awareness, simply because of the numbers of Negroes in this part of the country.” Southerners in general probably do have a better sense, compared to White people from other places, about how Blacks behave. This was not a clear White racial consciousness however; rather it was the kind of dissimulating defensiveness promoted by the likes of Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck, with its rhetoric of deflective counter-accusation characterized by Roof as: “Blacks are the real racists.”
Roof was shocked out of this weak orientation based on fear of being called “racist” by the drumbeat of anti-White propaganda that began with the absurdly biased reporting on the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin in 2012 and 2013:
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?
Although Roof’s main theme was biased media-coverage of Black-on-White crime, this was not mentioned in an article on Roof’s manifesto by one of the leading culprits, the New York Times.
There is no question that the biased publicity over the alleged murder of Trayvon Martin caused an increase of violence by Blacks against Whites. Two months after the original incident in the case, Darryl Owens called attention to some of the ramifications of the media-coverage in the Orlando Sentinel:
Let’s call it Trayvon Piñata.
How’s it played?
Simple. Gather at least two or up to 30 players (usually black, but not always). Target some unsuspecting, blameless white person. Confront. Spout some racial pap. Stomp the stuffing out of him in Trayvon’s name.
Rip-roaring fun!
It’s all the rage — these outrageous acts of vengeance born out of misplaced rage.
Gainesville was the scene earlier this month of two rounds of Trayvon Piñata.
In the first attack, five to eight black people allegedly pounded a 27-year-old white guy as he walked home, according to the Gainesville Sun. The goons shouted “Trayvon!” before laying into him.
In the second assault, a crowd reportedly pounced on a white guy who’d chased down a black purse-snatcher and pinned him. Unaware of the circumstances, some began shouting “Trayvon,” egging on several group members who stomped the good Samaritan’s hands to free his quarry. [Darryl Owens, Orlando Sentinel, 27 April 2012 ]
The game was not limited to Florida. In Chicago 18-year-old Alton L. Hayes III and a minor accomplice robbed a 19-year-old White man, then gratuitously beat him, telling police later that they did it because of Trayvon Martin and because the man was White (Huffington Post, 26 April 2012).
In Mobile, Alabama, Matthew Owens was beaten nearly to death by a mob of 20 or more Blacks in front of his home. After the attack, one of the Black attackers declared, “Now that’s justice for Trayvon!” (New York Daily News, 25 April 2012).
The mood of vengefulness generated by mass-media during the period following the death of Trayvon Martin was pervasive and palpable, and some influence thereof could be reasonably presumed as a contributing factor in any Black-on-White violence during that period, whether explicitly stated or not.
In March 2012 in Kansas City, Missouri, one month after the publicity about Trayvon Martin began, a 13-year-old boy returning home from school was doused in gasoline and set on fire by two older Black boys who said: “This is what you deserve. You get what you deserve, White boy.” (Daily Mail, 4 March 2012).
John McWhorter, writing in Time about the shooting-death of an Australian college student by a Black male in Oklahoma, says that racially motivated Black-on-White violence like the Kansas City incident is “hardly uncommon”:
So, it’s just fake to pretend that the association of young black men with violence comes out of thin air. Young black men murder 14 times more than young white men. If the kinds of things I just mentioned were regularly done by whites, it’d be trumpeted as justification for being scared to death of them. [John McWhorter, “Don’t Ignore Race in Christopher Lane’s Murder,” Time, 22 August 2013]
Time of course is about as mainstream and respectable as any monthly news-periodical could be, yet it plainly states that there is an anti-White and pro-Black racial bias in the reporting of violent crime. The real question is not how Dylann Roof came to the same conclusion in the wake of the Martin-Zimmerman case; rather the question is how anyone could have failed to understand it by now.
In 2014 and 2015 the mass-media seem to have been obsessed with publicizing any possible case of misconduct toward Blacks by police, beginning with the accusations against policeman Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. It was predictable that there would be retaliatory violence generated by that propaganda as well. The first such incident was the murder of two New York City policemen, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu (neither of them White, but then neither was George Zimmerman), as they sat in their police-vehicle. The fact that the young Black male suspect, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, was motivated by media-hoopla against the police was apparent in his posts on Instagram before the crime:
Brinsley allegedly posted a photo of a gun with the caption, “I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours, let’s take 2 of theirs,” officials said. He used the hashtags ‘Shootthepolice’ ‘RIPErivGardner (sic)‘ and ‘RIPMikeBrown.’ [CBS New York, 20 December 2014]
That was only the first of a number of such scattered incidents of anti-police violence induced by mass-media. The alleged murder of Trayvon Martin, in the accusation’s original form, was also supposed to have been a conspiracy of the police.
For many who become racially conscious, it began with noticing absurd anti-White bias in the news. Dr. William Pierce, in an essay about the evolution of his thinking (“The Radicalizing of an American,” 1978) mentions that an important moment for him was when he saw bias in news-coverage about the Civil Rights Movement; he saw that television news always showed the least credible and least attractive representatives of the pro-White side, for example screeching overweight housewives in hair-curlers, rather than someone like the one-time C.E.O. of Delta Airlines, Carleton Putnam, who wrote two books defending segregation.
What Dr. Pierce did next, and what Dylann Roof did after observing anti-White media-bias, was to look for sources of truth. Dr. Pierce read books and eventually learned about Jewish control of mass-media as the explanation for anti-White media-bias. Roof on the other hand found a trove of documentation about Black-on-White violent crime on the Internet, and this made a great impression on him.
In his radio broadcasts in the 1990s, Dr. Pierce would sometimes begin a discussion by referring to an instance of Black-on-White crime, as a way to catch the interest of White listeners, but the ultimate focus was never on Blacks. It was on the real powers — especially Jewish control of mass-media — that made Blacks into the problem that they had become.
A defining factor in Dylann Roof’s course of action is that he retained the commonplace but mistaken idea about where the real problem was. Because unruly Blacks were obvious, and because mainstream conservative media and even much of White-advocacy media never mentions Jewish activism as contributing to the Black problem, Dylann Roof mistakenly regarded the Black problem as primary, writing 1484 of the 2444 words in his manifesto under the heading “Blacks.” Roof describes Blacks as “the group I have the most real life experience with, and the group that is the biggest problem for Americans.”
What Roof writes about Blacks is generally true, as far as it goes. As we all know, relative to Whites, Blacks have a low IQ and poor self-control, and commit a grossly disproportionate amount of violent crime. Roof also correctly states that Blacks act with much more racial solidarity than Whites.
Roof offers two theories as to why Black misbehavior is tolerated. One is that Blacks are held to a lower standard because, whether we admit it or not, we regard them as inferior and expect less of them: therefore they get indulgence. The other theory is White guilt, particularly on account of Black sufferings under slavery and segregation. Roof thinks that Black suffering under slavery and segregation have been exaggerated:
We are told to accept what is happening to us because of ancestors wrong doing, but it is all based on historical lies, exaggerations and myths. I have tried endlessly to think of reasons we deserve this, and I have only came back more irritated because there are no reasons.
The indulgence given to Blacks because of this spurious guilt, he says, causes suffering to the principal victims to date of the anti-White revolution — poor and working class Whites who do not have the means to get away from Blacks:
But what about the White people that are left behind? What about the White children who, because of school zoning laws, are forced to go to a school that is 90 percent black? Do we really think that that White kid will be able to go one day without being picked on for being White, or called a “white boy”? And who is fighting for him? Who is fighting for these White people forced by economic circumstances to live among Negroes? No one, but someone has to.
Dylann Roof looks around himself and finds again and again that in racial matters, what is done in the name of justice is usually gross injustice. Once upon a time a minority of Whites owned Negro slaves. Now poor Whites whose ancestors probably never owned slaves must bear guilt and other sufferings for it. There is no justice in that.
Roof also sees no justice in what has been happening in Europe, where the same racially destructive processes are being imposed without the justifications that are offered in the United States, which suggests that those justifications are really only excuses:
I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race.
Roof mentions “the Jewish problem” and “Jewish agitation of the Black race” but treats it as less important than what he seems to regard as an inherent tendency in Blacks to take offense when no offense is intended. Roof seems to have no inkling that Blacks were not always as unruly and dangerous as they have become in recent times. He is unaware of the origin of the current troubles between Blacks and Whites in the “Black-Jewish alliance” that E. Michael Jones discusses here:
Obviously, the Council of Conservative Citizens, by publicizing factual information about Black-on-White crime, is not responsible for Dylann Roof’s action. If CCC could be held responsible for that, then it would certainly be reasonable to hold television-networks liable for the killings of police that resulted from their biased reporting of the Darren Wilson case, etc.
Nonetheless, I do not believe that the conflict between Black and White is really where the focus of pro-White media (like CCC’s publications) ought to be. Pro-White media should be making White people aware of the less obvious but much more important problem.
Roof says that he “found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race,” but he does not treat the Jewish problem as primary. He knows that Jews agitate Blacks but he does not seem to consider it a key cause of the trouble between Whites and Blacks. Under the heading of “Jews” in his manifesto Roof wrote only 138 words. He says that “unlike many White Nationalists” he regards Jews as White, and concludes with:
I don’t pretend to understand why Jews do what they do. They are [an] enigma.
It is evident that Dylann Roof never spent much time reading The Occidental Observer. If he had, he’d have had some idea about why Jews do what they do.
Another reason for Roof’s course of action seems to be that he underestimated the importance of ideas (as Americans often do). I have occasionally encountered people who take the attitude that educating people is a useless activity, apparently because its effects are not immediately visible. In some cases they tried to tell somebody something once, and because that person was not immediately convinced, the effort was abandoned. They didn’t have the patience to keep trying. Affecting people’s attitudes and thinking is a slow process that requires perseverance. Then after thinking has been changed, the new thinking still requires opportunities to be implemented. Anybody who thinks that educating people is pointless or futile probably is expecting tangible results much too quickly. From this impatient perspective, educating people is just talking, and talking equates to doing nothing. That seems to be Roof’s attitude:
To take a saying from a film, “I see all this stuff going on, and I don’t see anyone doing anything about it. And it pisses me off.” To take a saying from my favorite film, “Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society.” … We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.
Note the wording. Roof dismisses talking; he wants to “see” somebody “doing” something, and he makes it clear that this means violence. Shooting people of course produces an immediate visible result, but the net result to any such premature illegal action is almost always counterproductive.
One point that I believe Dylann Roof has right is his point about the ability of quality to prevail over quantity. He rejects the view that a non-White majority means that Whites will be unable to master the situation:
To this I say look at history. The South had a higher ratio of blacks when we were holding them as slaves. Look at South Africa, and how such a small minority held the black in apartheid for years and years. … 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.
The most famous example from history of the supremacy of quality over quantity consists of the various conflicts between the ancient Greeks and the diverse, multicultural army of the Persian Empire. Grossly outnumbered by the motley Persian assemblage, the Greeks beat them again and again.
That observation, that all is not lost even when we are a minority, would seem to be a note of optimism, and an indication that patient and well-grounded approaches to the problem are to be preferred over hasty and desperate actions. I agree with that. Yet in his next sentence Roof says:
But by no means should we wait any longer to take drastic action.
Non sequitur. It seems to reflect Roof’s own impulsiveness rather than the foregoing argument. At best, one might suppose that he feels an obligation toward the White children in Charleston who must attend schools with Blacks, and hoped that a general race war would ensue from his initiative. It is hard to imagine how he thought his actions could have a significant effect on the Black population of Charleston. It is also not credible that there would be enough White copycat shooters to have any significant effect, except perhaps in terms of gratifying the craving of anti-White media for White-on-Black killings to report. The illegal action that Dylann Roof undertook is utterly ineffectual for whatever pro-White goal he may have had in mind — certainly, even counterproductive.
Roof, I believe, was onto something when he said that Whites could prevail even against much more numerous non-White enemies. It is unfortunate that he did not follow through with the implications of that thought.
If White people are to prevail, the main prerequisite is to change their thinking. Just as Jewish activists in the media and academic world initiated a decades-long educational project to change White attitudes on race that were dominant in the 1920s, we must do the same. Whites must learn to think and feel differently about race, and about issues affecting racial solidarity. They must learn to be less impressed with quantity and more concerned with quality. This is a long-term educational project that must contend with the fact that at present all of the media high ground is occupied by the enemies of Whites, their interests, and their culture.
Dylann Roof’s impatience, his emphasis on immediate physical action rather than the battle for the mind, and his belief that Blacks rather than Jews are the main problem, all contributed to his action, and in fact they all seem to be interrelated. If Roof had recognized the paramount importance of ideas, he could not have imagined that it was Blacks telling us what to think; the possibility for a tiny minority of Jews to wield enormous power, however, would have been obvious. The answer to false information and bad ideas does not have to be violence: it can be true information and good ideas. But if the whole problem is seen as irrational violence and nothing more, then the choice becomes simply whether to fight or to retreat, which is how Roof framed his choice.
This implies something about what the focus of pro-White media ought to be. The focus should be not on the bright and noisy spectacle, but on the man behind the curtain who makes it all happen. This is something that must be emphasized.
Ideally, Blacks and Whites should be able to recognize some common interests and cooperate on those interests. There are very clear common interests in curtailing Black crime — since, according to the FBI, 90% of murders of Blacks are committed by other Blacks — and in stopping immigration.
All of the agitation of Black hostility toward Whites by the mass media, mostly on false premises, which has generated not only anti-White and anti-police violence by Blacks but also Dylann Roof’s response, certainly doesn’t make such cooperation any easier.