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Monday, June 22, 2015

Poor white people still invisible in " The Other America "

Dylann Roof Manifesto ?    Americans have a lot of questions about the racist killer Dylann Storm Roof ( the very name sounds like that of a comic book Neo Nazi ).
I question if a drug crazed, mentally disturbed, high school drop out could have written that published racist " manifesto ". Roof is the perfect choice of central casting for " The Manchurian Candidate ". Was he a patsy or pawn for some nefarious conspiracy ?
All the moral effluvia about the evil of HATE is good for futile Sunday sermons but does not go to the root of that evil which has very deep social roots. People don't hate in a cultural and economic vacuum.
Only Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont among the Democrats has directed attention at the plight of poor white people who have been invisible to the capitalist news media for decades now. At least the socialist writer Michael Harrington included them in his influential ( in the 60s War on Poverty )book " The Other America ".
But what will come out of this tragedy ? I can picture President Obama appointing Al Sharpton as Hate Control Czar..

                             

Skepticism on Dylann Roof's "manifesto" and website

    

  " I've taught college undergraduates. If there are no misspellings in this text -- and on a quick scan, I found none -- then Roof, a high-school dropout, didn't write it.
The manifesto is also very well-written, for what it is; I'd want to see a writing sample from Roof, possibly from his high school English teacher, before I concluded Roof wrote it.
So I wonder then, if not Roof, who? Could he simply have appropriate some other racist's work? Well, I Google for phrases from the Manifesto, and I don't find any hits other than this. So who wrote it?
The Times is right to be skeptical:
It is not clear who wrote the words and who took the pictures, but the manifesto appears to trace the evolution of the author’s racist worldview and concludes with a section labeled “An Explanation.
If there's one thing we've learned over the past few years, it's that "Internet evidence is not evidence," because it's too easy to alter or even manufacture it. Provenance is key. So while the site may be authentic, and the pictures may be authentic, there's one big piece of the site that doesn't look authentic at all.
NOTE We might also ask if Roof (high school dropout) had site-building skills. "

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