My post yesterday got a lot of attention, "
Dylann Roof, Southern Democrat Throwback, is Drug-Addled 'Wannabe Emo Anarchist' with Androgynous Haircut."
Notice the leftists disagreeing angrily in the comments, and of course go on Twitter and notice how the left's murderous lynch mobs have taken the debate hostage from reason.
Roof's thoughts are certainly racist, but the idea that the kid fits some common stereotype of the Southern red-neck Confederate flag-waving cracker --- who for leftists is essentially a racist mass murderer in waiting --- is a joke. The right-wing "racist mass murderer" premise is itself a joke. But then, leftism is a joke. Leftists are not rational people. They don't care for science. From abortion politics to global warming, leftists reject science and adopt faith-based arguments that cannot not be repudiated with empirical evidence. Anyone who attempts to do so is a heretic who must not only be shunned, but destroyed. Professor Mark Regnerus, the Texas sociology professor who published a rigorous study on the life chances of children of same-sex marriages, was attacked as a "hateful bigot," and the leftist
outrage industry fomented an investigation of him for "academic misconduct" by the University of Texas. Deranged leftists wanted him fired. Similar cases have become legion more recently, most immediately on the issue of the so-called "rape culture." It's now so bad that outraged progs have started
eating their own in a kind of Thermidorian Reaction that's just now getting going.
In any case, folks need to read Robert Stacy McCain's essay on the national reaction to the shooting, "
Dylann Roof: A Ninth-Grade Dropout Who Was Playing Too Many Video Games." Robert's a journalist's journalist who uses evidence to reach to conclusions, rather than attempting to pigeonhole the facts into some kind of preexisting narrative.
As I noted yesterday, Roof is not mentally fit. He's a drug abuser whose racist views have been formed quite recently, likely the result of an alienation process developing out an extremely dysfunctional home life. He shuttled around from school to school as his family broke apart due to marital separation. He dropped out of school and became increasingly aimless. He was arrested and charged twice with felonies. His dad had been haranguing him to stop playing so many videos games. Somewhere along the line he glommed onto some white supremacist websites and unconvincingly adorned the paraphernalia of a Southern Klansman.
This is not the basis for an ideological program. It's the basis for involuntary commitment.
But be sure to read
Robert's piece:
Charles Manson was a hippie guru whose cult followers did a lot of drugs, listened to Beatles records and committed mass murder, but most hippies who did drugs and listened to Beatles records were neither cult members nor mass murderers. So what lessons could we, as a society, have derived from the notorious “Helter Skelter” killings? Most people at the time recognized the Tate-Labianca murders as conclusive proof that the whole 1960s peace-and-love tune-in-turn-on-drop-out mythology of hippie culture was a lie. Manson collected his followers from among the broken flotsam and jetsam of castoff kids and runaways who flooded into San Francisco during the late 1960s. It was the Law of Large Numbers, really. When millions of kids climbed aboard that kind of bandwagon — rejecting parental authority to pursue a lifestyle of drugs, sex and rock-and-roll — it was inevitable that very bad things would happen to some of them.
You see that the example of the Charles Manson cult is not one chosen at random in this case, because Manson’s “Helter Skelter” fantasy was to incite an apocalyptic race war in America, and Dylann Roof’s murders had the same motive. Also, Dylann Roof had a drug problem. For that matter, Dylann Roof even had a Beatle haircut. Whether or not he was listening to the White Album backwards, we don’t know.
Please excuse my habitual sarcasm, but if you’re following the liberal media coverage of the Charleston shootings, you keep seeing allegedly intelligent people making a few simple-minded connections that may not actually have much to do with Dylann Roof’s crimes. “It’s the guns! It’s the racism! This happened in South Carolina! OMG! They fly the Confederate flag there!” All of this is obviously true, but exactly how much of this is really relevant? There are about 3 million white people in South Carolina, many of whom are racists and gun owners, but they didn’t kill people in Charleston, nor do they condone hateful violence.
As always, the liberal biases of the media lead them into a hasty pell-mell rush to assign collective political blame for a high-profile crime, a bias that fosters false beliefs which in turn have the effect of psychologically disarming society. We cannot prevent crime if we don’t understand crime, and understanding crime requires us to focus on the individuals who commit crime. Yes, the hippie culture of the 1960s was dangerous. And yes, we may say that South Carolina is a particularly “racist” environment. However, most hippies were not mass murderers, nor are most South Carolinians, and the attempt to defame white people in South Carolina by assigning collective blame to them — which is what the liberal media are so obviously doing — is the exact opposite of what responsible journalism is about. Let’s focus on the criminal:
According to classmates, Roof is a frequent abuser of prescription drugs.
Court records from Lexington, [South] Carolina — where he has been living in a trailer park — reveal he was arrested twice this year on charges of trespassing and drug possession. . . .
Roof used to skateboard in a Lexington suburb in South Carolina when he was younger and had long hair then.
Childhood friend Joey Meek had seen him as recently as Tuesday, said Meek’s mother, Kimberly Konzny. . . .
‘I don’t know what was going through his head,’ Konzny said. ‘He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends.’Joey Meek alerted the FBI after he and his mother instantly recognized Roof in a surveillance camera image that was widely circulated after the shooting.
In the image, Roof had the same stained sweatshirt he wore while playing Xbox video games in their home recently, Konzny said. It was stained because he had worked at a landscaping and pest control business, she said.
Roof attended ninth grade at White Knoll High during the 2008-09 school year and went there for the first half of the following academic year, district spokeswoman Mary Beth Hill said. The school system gave no reason for Roof’s departure and said it had no record of him attending any other schools in the district.
According to CBS News, school records show that between fourth and ninth grade, Roof attended six different schools, and repeated the ninth grade.
He dropped out of school after ninth grade. His parents were divorced, and his father and stepmother also reportedly had divorced. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dylann’s father had been pressuring him to stop playing video games constantly, and to find steady employment. His grandfather is reportedly a lawyer. His father is a contractor. There are some very interesting clues in this Mother Jones story:
Ken Mathews, an attorney who has been representing Roof in an ongoing drug-possession case, was, he says, “very shocked” to hear about what Roof had allegedly done. He tells Mother Jones, “The dealings I had with him, he was just a normal kid.”
Mathews, a Columbia, South Carolina, attorney, notes that so far in the drug case he has had “very limited dealings” with Roof. He says he saw “nothing that would indicate that [Roof] would take this type of action.” . . .
Mathews has known the Roof family for years, dating back to a custody dispute between Dylann’s father Ben and mother Amy over visitation rights concerning Dylann. . . .
So his family life was disrupted, he was shuttled from one school to another from the time he was nine or 10 years old, he dropped out of school as a teenager, became a drug-addicted loser living in a trailer park, constantly playing video games and, also, Dylann Roof was a racist who sewed Rhodesian flag patches on his jacket and had a Confederate flag tag on his car...
Continue reading.
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