Responsible for Equality And Liberty (R.E.A.L.) supports our shared universal human rights for all people, and we reject and defy the ideology of white supremacy which has been promoted by so many hate groups and terrorists.

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof committed a terrorist attack against the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, where he murdered 9 African-American men and women during a night time Bible study.  R.E.A.L. has learned that terrorist Dylann Roof was inspired and linked to white supremacist, Nazi, and Confederate websites.

Inspired by white supremacist groups, Dylann Roof left a twisted white supremacist manifesto against African-Americans, “Jewish agitation,” and other identity groups, as a “rationale” for his terrorist attack.  Terrorist Dylann Roof defended Southern slavery of human beings on Confederate plantations, demeaning African-Americans as “stupid and violent,” calling for violence against African-Americans, and claiming he was taking his “fight” to Charleston in what resulted in his terrorist attack on the Emanuel AME Church, since he stated there was “no real KKK” taking violent action.  The terrorist Roof continued his racist attack on Hispanics as “enemies,” and sought to “destroy the Jewish identity.”

The terrorist Dylann Roof stated in his “manifesto” that he was educated to hate African-Americans and other minorities from his contact with the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC aka CCC), which R.E.A.L. has previously reported on. The CofCC’s racist extremist views include the twisted vision that “God is the author of racism. The national CofCC group is based in St.Louis, Missouri, not far from the Ferguson atrocities against African-Americans.  (Missouri leaders allied themselves with the Confederate States of America (CSA) on October 31, 1861.)  The CofCC group’s founder Gordom Baum died in March 2015. The CofCC group has been led by its president Earl Holt, who provided donations to several conservative political campaigns.

Mr. Holt has declined to address the issue of the CofCC’s influence in inspiring terrorist Dylann Roof other than being “deeply saddened,” and asked a former CofCC director to be the public spokesman on this. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported that the CofCC president made statements about taking “a large caliber handgun”… to “help mitigate violent black crime at its source…” days before the Dylann Roof terrorist attack. The SPLC states that the CofCC “has denounced Roof’s actions but stands by their statements, maintaining they mean what they say on their website.”  The CofCC stated the terrorist “Roof outlines other grievances felt by many whites,” and continued “we utterly condemn Roof’s despicable killings, but they do not detract in the slightest from the legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed. Ignoring legitimate grievances is dangerous.”

In R.E.A.L.’s activism to defy white supremacist groups, we learned that the CofCC leaders regularly worked together with their racist allies in the Stormfront organization, including CofCC members appearing on the Stormfront radio program to promote white supremacist events and to recruit for new members to the cause of racial and religious hatred.  The Stormfront organization has combined the Nazi and Confederate extremists of white supremacy into a singular “supermarket of hate,” as described by CBS News.  It’s members have regularly praised and supported other terrorists committing attacks on the United States, as we have documented.

Dylann Roof was also linked to the Nazi website, the Daily Stormer.  This information has been reported by the SPLC, who identifies Roof as poster “AryanBlood1488.”    The SPLC states that: “The Daily Stormer is a neo-Nazi website run by Andrew Anglin that both generates original content and aggregates articles from other white supremacist sites across the Internet. Its comment section is much less moderated than its peer sites and hosts a diverse community of white supremacists from across the extremist spectrum. In his alleged manifesto, Roof writes, ‘I mean that our culture has been adopted by everyone in the world. This makes us feel as though our culture isnt [sic] special or unique.’  In an almost verbatim statement at the Daily Stormer on January 31, 2015, ‘AryanBlood1488’ writes, ‘White culture is World Culture, and by that I don’t mean that our culture is made up of ones from around the world, I mean that our culture has been adopted by everyone in the world. This makes us feel as if it isn’t special, because everyone has adopted it.’  Notably, on another article titled ‘No Longer Posting Council of Conservative Citizens Articles’ published to the Daily Stormer on the same day, ‘AryanBlood1488’ expresses his reverence for the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white nationalist hate group, for ‘waking him up’ to ‘black on white crime.’  ‘I have serious, great respect for the CofCC because they are the ones who woke me up to black on white crime in the beginning,’ writes ‘AryanBlood1488.’ ‘It was the first site I went to the day that changed my life, the day I decided to type in ‘black on white crime’ into Google.’ ”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also reported similar links of Dylann Roof to the Nazi hate site, according to a report from NBC News.   The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post provided similar reports.

Raw Story also reported that “Roof also lived for a time in Lexington, just a few miles away, which is home to onetime Aryan Nation leader and Christian Identity pastor August Kreis – whose activity and influence has waned as a result of severe diabetes and his arrest last year on child sex abuse charges. An analysis of Roof’s writings suggests that he was an active participant in The Daily Stormer white nationalist message board.”