The white 21-year-old man reportedly identified as the suspect in a Wednesday night mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina that left nine people dead appears to have white supremacist leanings, according to an expert on domestic extremism.
Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League, told TPM on Thursday that two patches Dylann Storm Roof wore on his jacket in a photo from what appears to be his Facebook page are symbols of the white supremacist movement.
Pitcavage said a patch with orange, white and blue stripes on the upper right side of Roof’s jacket is the flag of South Africa’s Apartheid government. The patch below it is the flag of the former white-controlled country of Rhodesia, which later became Zimbabwe, he added.
“People don’t randomly have those symbols on a jacket,” Pitcavage told TPM. “You have to have a certain point of view, a certain world view.”
TPM associate editor Nick R. Martin contributed reporting.
Yeah, clearly needed to wait for an expert to break that story. Not that a startling number of adults today would actually have any clue that there was ever such a thing as racist white minority regimes in post-colonial southern Africa, of course.
That’s not casual racism, that’s hard core. Someone should ask his uncle where all of Dylann’s hate came from.
His father gave him the gun for his 21st birthday. His dad is morally, if not legally, an accomplice to this massacre.
Give this man all the guns he wants, because anything else is tyranny
Yeah, he definitely looks like the nice quiet boy next door that nobody could have EVER imagined doing something like this. I mean, just look at that charming smile.