the violence.
After the elections of 2010, when the Republicans seized control of Congress, Republicans in both houses began demanding hearings on the threat of domestic terrorism—but when the House committee chairman overseeing the discussion, Congressman Peter King of New York, opened hearings in March 2011, he announced that they would not be bothering to consider anything other than Islamist terrorism:
This Committee cannot live in denial, which is what some would have us do when they suggest that this hearing dilute its focus by investigating threats unrelated to Al Qaeda. The Department of Homeland Security and this committee were formed in response to the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11. There is no equivalency of threat between al Qaeda and neo-Nazis, environmental extremists or other isolated madmen. Only Al Qaeda and its Islamist affiliates in this country are part of an international threat to our nation. Indeed by the Justice Department’s own record not one terror related case in the last two years involved neo-Nazis, environmental extremists, militias or anti-war groups.
As it happened, an attempted bombing of the MLK Day parade in Spokane by a white supremacist had happened just the day before. King was abysmally misinformed about the overall number of terrorist acts and plots emerging from the sectors he claimed were inactive. He was reminded of this by his Democratic colleague, Congressman Bennie Thompson, who pleaded, “I urge you, Mr. Chairman, to hold a hearing examining the Homeland Security threat posed by anti-government and white supremacist groups. As a committee on Homeland Security, our mission is to examine threats to this nation’s security. A narrow focus that excludes known threats lacks clarity and may be myopic.”
King ignored this plea and did not permit any deviation from the hearings’ announced focus. However, the next year the Senate did hold hearings on the subject of right-wing extremist violence in the wake of neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page’s murderous rampage at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in which six worshippers died. At that hearing senators heard from Daryl Johnson, a veteran domestic-terrorism analyst. Johnson was unequivocal:
The threat of domestic terrorism motivated by extremist ideologies is often dismissed and overlooked in the national media and within the US government. Yet we are currently seeing an upsurge in domestic non-Islamic extremist activity, specifically from violent right-wing extremists. While violent left-wing attacks were more prevalent in the 1970s, today the bulk of violent domestic activity emanates from the right wing.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups and Patriot and other extremist organizations and monitors and reports on their activities, continued to track this right-wing violence. In conjunction with an upswing in domestic terrorism and hate crimes that began in 2008, the SPLC saw dramatic increases in the number of hate groups and extremist organizations that got their start in those years; the number steadily increased in each of the following years. In 2012–13, the SPLC counted 1,360 active Patriot groups and 873 other hate groups of various stripes, such as the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, antigay groups, anti-Muslims groups, and so forth.
But then along came a sharp decline between 2013 and 2015, of Patriot groups in particular; the new total was 874. At first it looked like an aberration, but eventually the reason became clear: radicals were taking their acts out of organizations and going online. In March 2015, Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the SPLC, explained what the data was showing them: the advent of social media and other more dispersed means of sharing information had created a shift in how extremists shared their ideologies and how they recruited, too.
The evidence, he said, indicated “that large numbers of extremists have left organized groups because of the high social cost of being known to affiliate with them. Many of those people apparently now belong to no group, but operate instead mainly on the Internet, where they can offer their opinions anonymously and easily find others who agree with them—and where they can be heard by huge numbers of people without the hassles, dues, and poor leadership associated with membership in most groups.” He continued, “In any event, as the movement to the Internet suggests, the importance of organized radical groups is declining for a number of reasons. In an age when ever more people are congregating on the web and in social media, the radical right is doing the same. With almost no charismatic leaders on the scene, there is little to attract radicals to join groups when they can broadcast their opinions across the world via the Internet and at the same time remain anonymous if they wish.”
With these observations on the force of attraction of the Internet, he could have been describing Dylann Roof.
Dylann Roof hardly seemed to live in the real world, because before that day in Charleston he had made so little impact on it. The son of a carpenter and a barmaid, by the age of twenty-one he had never had an occupation other than landscaper, a job he only held for a few weeks. He couldn’t be called a student, since he had dropped out after ninth grade. He had been married and divorced. Mostly he hung out in his room and played video games, taking drugs and getting drunk.
At some point in his late teens, though, a political bug kicked in, and he began posting online: mostly white-nationalist material, including memes promoting the “14 Words”—a white-supremacist creed about “ensuring the future of the white race”—and the symbol “88,” which is a cipher for “Heil Hitler” (h is the eighth letter of the alphabet). Photos of Roof posing with guns, with a Confederate flag, with a Rhodesian flag deck, posing at plantations and at cemeteries in historic slavery sites decked the walls of his bedroom.
One of his favorite websites was a neo-Nazi forum called the Daily Stormer, which he seems to have first encountered after his discovery of the Council of Conservative Citizens website. Roof posted at the Stormer under the handle “AryanBlood1488,” perhaps as early as September 2014, and his hatred of black people was already pronounced then. “White culture is World Culture,” he wrote, “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.” A nearly identical passage appears in his manifesto.
He began making preparations for his big day. He bought a Glock 41 .45-caliber handgun, even though he had been busted for narcotics possession in February and, under normal circumstances, should have been prevented from buying any guns at all, but the FBI’s background-check system failed to catch him.
He also began telling his friends that soon he was going to start shooting people. Two of his friends tried to hide his gun from him. Another old friend, Dalton Tyler, ran into him just a week before he took his fateful trip to Charleston. “He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”
But no one took him seriously. No one called the police.
When he set out for Charleston the morning of June 17, Roof probably intended to carry out his shooting spree primarily at the College of Charleston, an elegant old-line Southern school in the older part of the city. That was what he had been telling his friends. But at some point he changed his mind, apparently because of the high levels of security at the college campus, and headed for Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the city’s oldest churches and a historic center of civil-rights activism in South Carolina. Its pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, was a state senator and well-regarded spokesperson for the black community.
When Roof walked into the church at 8:20 p.m., a prayer service was under way with a large congregation in attendance. Roof sat down in a pew. Shortly afterward, the gathering broke up into smaller Bible study groups. Roof, the only white person in the church, joined the group that was being led by Rev. Pinckney. He sought out a seat next to Pinckney. There were eleven others in the group.
All were longtime members of the congregation and their family members. Daniel Simmons, seventy-four, the
