According to a new analysis by Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal and advocacy organization that tracks hate groups, the man accused in the Charleston church shooting, Dylann Roof, 21, was active in an online white supremacist community.
Roof has been charged with nine counts of murder in the killing of church-goers at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.
According to the SPLC, the Daily Stormer is a “neo-Nazi website” that “both generates original content and aggregates articles from other white supremacist sites across the Internet.”
Using the plagiarism detection software Grammarly, SPLC was able to find examples of cases where parts of Roof’s manifesto was rewritten, nearly word for word, on the forum.
Here are the examples:
1. White Culture
Roof wrote in his manifesto:
“The reason for this is that White culture is world culture. I dont mean that our culture is made up of other cultures, I mean that our culture has been adopted by everyone in the world. This makes us feel as though our culture isnt special or unique.”
And a comment on Daily Stormer, contained strikingly similar language:
2. The Council of Conservative Citizens
In a second post on the Daily Stormer Web site about the Council of Conservative Citizens, a commenter using the same AryanBlood1488 handle notes in a January 2015 message:
“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. 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.”
That language echoes what Roof wrote in his online manifesto about the events that led him to seek out supremacist communities online:
“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.”
3. European and American Jews
In a third post, according to SPLC, a commenter using the AryanBlood1488 handle notes:
“The vast majority of European and American Jews are white. I really get sick and tired of reading these absolutely stupid idiotic comments on here saying how Jews have a biological drive to destroy or are a biological parasite, so on and so forth. It’s just so stupid. The Jewish Identity is the problem. If you could destroy their identity and raise them as white, there would be no issue. The problem is that they identify as something ‘other’ but are actually white, and therefore able to infiltrate and subvert. Obviously not all Jews are white, especially many of the Israeli ones, but the majority of European and American ones are white.”
Similarly, in Roof’s manifesto, he writes:
“I am of the opinion that the majority of American and European jews are White. In my opinion the issues with jews is not their blood, but their identity.”
4. White self-defense
In a post dated Sept. 2014, a commenter with the handle Aryan Blood 1488, notes that “These days White people are not allowed to defend themselves.”
The comments don’t appear to have any other obvious ties to the manifesto, but SPLC notes that the comment might be a “disturbing moment of foreshadowing.”
“If you do defend yourselves, then you are automatically the agressor, and may get charged with a hate crime yourself, even though you were defending yourself from a hate crime. Its pretty sick stuff,” Aryan Blood 1488 wrote.