It comes as little surprise that Dylaan Roof, the shooter in Charleston, had posted a racist manifesto and pictures with other racist symbols:
Dylann Roof spat on and burned the American flag, but waved the Confederate.
He posed for pictures wearing a No. 88 T-shirt, had 88 Facebook friends and wrote that number — white supremacist code for “Heil Hitler”— in the South Carolina sand.
A website discovered Saturday appears to offer the first serious look at Mr. Roof’s thinking, including how the case of Trayvon Martin, the black Florida teenager shot to death in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, triggered his racist rage. The site shows a stash of 60 photographs of Mr. Roof, many at Confederate heritage sites or slavery museums, and includes a racist manifesto in which the author criticized blacks as being inferior while lamenting the cowardice of white flight.
“I have no choice,” it reads. “I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. 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.”
This comes as many Republicans, such as Jeb Bush, have been trying to downplay or ignore the racism underlying the shootings.
It has become quite common the last few years to see conservatives write articles denying the racism which is endemic in the GOP, and how Republicans have used racism and xenophobia as a major part of their strategy. While there have been some exceptions with Republicans admitting use of the Southern Strategy, in general conservatives try hard to stay on message. This denial of racism in other contexts now has them reflexively denying racism even in a situation such as this. (Hat top to The Sensible Center for the last link).
Update: Leader of Racist Group Which Radicalized Dylann Roof Contributed To Republicans
