• It appears Charleston church killer Dylann Roof was highly influenced by racist group Council of Conservative Citizens, who just happened to donate to the campaigns of Sen. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum.
• Let’s take one more look back at last night’s fantastic 25th Annual Broadway Bares – “Top Bottoms Of Burlesque” – which raised over $1.5 million benefiting Broadway Cares.
Terrible misstep by Chuck Todd of Meet The Press this morning as the panel discussed the deaths of nine black church-goers at the hands of a young white racist this week.
Instead of focusing on the race issue, Todd swung right and aired a clip of only black men currently in prison for using guns to kill.
“The circumstances you are about to see are very different from the racist violence in Charleston,” Todd explained. “In this case, in the inmates are African-American that you’re going to hear from. But their lessons remain important.”
“And we simply ask you to look at this as a color-blind issue that’s about just simply gun violence,” he added.
Following the video clip of several tearful black men who said that they never intended to kill anyone when they picked up a gun, Todd returned to his panel of guests for comments.
“Passing a law isn’t going to change the culture,” Todd opined.
“But passing the right law — passing a law that frankly we’re not going to pass would take a lot of guns out of circulation, would make the gun not the normal thing one reaches for when one wants to aggrandize ones self-esteem,” columnist Eugene Robinson argued.
Robinson agreed that the video of the black men had been “powerful,” but he said that it did not fit the circumstances.
“There wasn’t a terribly diverse set of people who were talking,” the columnist observed. “Right now, we’re talking about a horrific crime committed by a white man, we’re talking about the search for two escaped murderers who are white men.”
“So we should point out that this is not just an African-American problem.”
“No, no, no, no,” Todd replied. “And it wasn’t intended to be that way.”
Painfully disconnected. Good on Eugene Robinson for bringing proper perspective to the “discussion.”
A website that appears to belong to the accused Charleston church shooter, Dylann Roof, is being investigated by authorities and the media for it’s disturbing contents.
A manifesto of over 2,000 words and almost 60 photos of Roof seem to reveal a racist motivation for the shooting.
Throughout, Roof refers to Black people as “negroes,” and capitalizes the word “whites” but not the word “Blacks.”
In addition, there are photos of Roof posing with the Confederate flag, and burning/spitting on the American flag.
Here’s just some of Roof’s statements at the website:
“Niggers are stupid and violent. At the same time they have the capacity to be very slick.”
[snip]
“I have no choice,” he writes. “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.”
“Segregation was not a bad thing. It was a defensive measure. Segregation did not exist to hold back negroes. It existed to protect us from them. And I mean that in multiple ways. Not only did it protect us from having to interact with them, and from being physically harmed by them, but it protected us from being brought down to their level. Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to level of brute animals.”
“A horse and a donkey can breed and make a mule, but they are still two completely different animals. Just because we can breed with the other races doesnt make us the same.”
Roof also maintains that blacks were not treated terribly during the slavery era and that “it is all based on historical lies, exaggerations and myths.”
