June 22, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:46
3003 The Truth About Dylann Roof | Charleston Church Shooting
Nine people are dead after a shooting that occurred on Wednesday at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The congregation, established in 1816, is one of the oldest African American churches in the United States.Gunman Dylann Roof told the worshipers, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go."One woman was specifically spared as Roof said, “I'm not going to shoot you because I want you to tell everyone what happened.” Authorities believe that Roof acted alone – but as we’ll soon discuss, no mass murderer truly acts alone. Roof has now been charged with nine counts of murder and has reportedly confessed to carrying out the shootings. In discussions with investigators, he said: “I wanted to start a race war, but almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice.”On Saturday, Dylann Roof’s personal website “The Last Rhodesian” was discovered. The website featured additional photographs and a 2,500-word manifesto which explained his motivations.What is the truth about Dylann Roof?
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
We have spent the last day or two researching as much information as possible about the horrifying church shooting in Charleston, and we have given you, or we are giving you, the truth about Dylann Roof, at least as so far, has been estrattained.
As you know, I'm sure nine people are dead.
After a shooting that occurred on Wednesday at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, this congregation, which was established in 1816, is one of the oldest African-American churches in the United States.
The gunman, Dylan Roof, attended a Bible study meeting at the church, sat there for an hour and told the worshippers, I have to do it.
You rape our women and you're taking over our country.
And you have to go.
One woman was specifically spared as Roof said, I'm not going to shoot you because I want you to tell everyone what happened.
A report of a suspicious vehicle led to Roof's arrest.
On Thursday, Roof cooperated with the officer who stopped him, according to police.
Authorities believe that Roof acted alone, but as we'll soon discuss, no mass murderer truly acts alone.
Roof has now been charged with nine counts of murder and has reportedly confessed to carrying out the shootings.
In discussions with investigators, he said, I wanted to start a race war, but almost didn't go through with it, because everyone was so nice.
On Saturday, Dylann Roof's personal website, The Last Rhodesian, was discovered.
The Last Rhodesian refers to a white-dominated country in Africa, which has since become Zimbabwe.
The website featured additional photographs and a 2,500 word manifesto which explained his motivations.
How to create a monster.
Let's look back at the childhood of Dylann Roof.
So court documents and photos from Page Man, the ex-wife of Dylann Roof's biological father, Ben Roof, 52, give us a deeper glimpse into his history and the furnace in which this kind of hatred and evil was created.
In November 1998, Ben Roof, 35, and Page Man, 24, married in Florida.
They had been previously living together in Columbia, South Carolina.
At the time of the marriage, Dylan was only four, and his half-sister Amber was eleven.
This means that at the age of 35, Ben, his father, had already fathered two children with two different women, Which he was no longer involved with.
That is not, of course, a very good launching pad for a successful life.
In the year 2000, Ben Rue fathered a daughter named Morgan, the third known child, with yet another woman, Page Mann.
So now we have three children by three different women.
In court documents, Page wrote that she, quote, raised Ben's kids from a very young age, took them to all of their activities, and Ben's kids have spent almost every weekend with me.
Not much is known.
About Dylan's biological mother, Amelia Roof, but Page's mother, Patricia Hastings, reported that Dylan stayed with Page and Ben far more than his own biological mother, who was supposed to have him every other weekend, but evidently that didn't happen very often.
Hastings also claimed that her daughter, quote, loved Ben Roof's other children, Amber and Dylan, unconditionally as her own, and that her, quote, love for these children clouded Paige's judgment in getting involved with Bennett Roof.
You see, so she just loved these children so much, and that's why she got involved with this man, whose character will be revealed as we move through this conversation.
Now, Ben wanted Paige to be a stay-at-home mom, so she left her job at a department store.
Ben travels a great deal, usually four days a week, so I would always care for and raise his kids, Paige noted.
Regardless of Paige's supposed great reluctance, the family moved to the Florida Keys, where the, quote, marriage really began to deteriorate.
With Paige separated from her family, friends, and support network, it's alleged that That Franklin became incredibly controlling, and that fighting and arguing became worse, with the verbal abuse against Page greatly intensifying.
Friends later submitted letters to the court describing Ben's supposed controlling behavior, noting that he'd often call Page many times a day, asking about her whereabouts, asking what tasks she had accomplished, and where or why money was being spent.
They also noted many instances of verbal abuse and physical intimidation.
Page commented, he controlled my whereabouts, the checkbook, and everything about my life.
A friend reported, once he showed up at school and was borderline physical with Page.
He was trying to pull Morgan's backpack off Page's shoulders and was violent about it.
He was harassing her all the way to the car in his own daughter's school zone.
According to Page, quote, On September 20, 2008, my whole world fell apart when Ben and I got into an argument.
Ben violently pushed me to the ground and hit me in the back of my head.
Court photographs, as you see, show some nasty bruises supposedly related to the incident.
It is also alleged that following the incident, Ben took Page's credit card, which used to pay for any family purchases, told her he was taking her car, cutting off the electricity, and offered to relinquish his rights to their daughter if any child support obligations would be waived.
So we would not confuse this with an overly bonded father.
Paige noted that she was, quote, so scared of him that I knew I had to get out of this violent situation.
And so she moved out with her biological daughter Morgan, leaving Dylan and Amber with their supposedly violent and abusive father.
So, of course, the story was she just loved these children so much that she ended up getting involved with this brute But then, when it was unpleasant for her, she left leaving Dylan and Amber, the children who apparently drew her into the relationship, alone, under the care of this man who she describes as violent.
In January 2009, several months after the reported physical abuse, Ben hired a private investigator to investigate Paige and discovered that she had a boyfriend whom she was observably involved with sexually.
So after a 10-year relationship with an abusive man, Paige was already in another relationship, and according to Ben, even admitted to previously having had an affair.
Upon the divorce's finalization in 2009, Paige got custody of Morgan, and Ben was required to pay $570 a month in child support.
From all appearances, page man was the closest thing Dylan ever had to a mother, and given that his father was continually away from home and traveling for his construction company, all illusions of family stability vanished from the young man's life.
the point to understand about young men and young women is that whatever is sexually successful in the older generation is generally emulated by the younger generation.
And so if a woman rewards a violent man with sex and devotion and children and allegiance and love, then that is generally the behavior that the young man will want to emulate.
This sort of makes sense.
In our tribal evolution, we did not have a wide variety of social options to choose from.
And generally, we would mirror our behavior after the most sexually successful males around us.
And if women are rewarding violent men with sex and children, that is going to imprint upon the young men.
Violence is what you do.
To procreate, biologically and genetically, that is a huge driver.
School records also show that between 4th and 9th grade, Roof attended 6th He also ended up repeating the ninth grade.
Roof attended high school, but at 15 years old, he began to skip classes and eventually dropped after his freshman year.
And this begins the downward spiral.
Unemployed, without parental guidance or support, Dylan turned to drugs and spent much of his time playing video games.
He reportedly lived, quote, on and off with his biological father during this time.
We know he later lived with roommates, and based on other family statements, we can also assume that he spent some time with his biological mother.
High school classmate John Mullins commented that Roof, quote, used drugs heavily a lot and added, it was obviously harder than marijuana.
He was like a pill popper from what I understood, like Xanax and stuff like that.
The state and county records show that Roof had no adult criminal history in South Carolina until February.
We don't know, of course, about his younger years.
In February, he was arrested on felony drug possession charges, which are still pending.
What happened was, February 28th, Roof went to a bath and bodywork store wearing all black and asked out-of-the-ordinary questions, according to staff, including how many associates were working there, when they closed, what time they leave.
More employees complained, and when an officer approached him, Roof said his parents were pressuring him to get a job.
The officer noted that Roof was becoming increasingly nervous.
He searched Roof and found orange strips that Roof said were Suboxone, a Schedule 3 narcotic.
According to the police report, he had acquired the Suboxone from a friend and did not have a prescription.
Suboxone is a habit-forming drug used to treat narcotic or opiate addiction that has been connected with sudden outbursts of aggression.
According to a Courier-Journal report, Suboxone, quote, is increasingly being abused, sold on the streets, and inappropriately prescribed by doctors.
For users, it is even more addictive than the drugs it's supposed to help them quit.
Now, drug abuse in general is termed by many doctors, including Gabor Matei, who's been on this show a number of times, It is a form of self-medication for the emotional horrors of child abuse, instability, witnessing violence, experiencing violence, neglect, lack of access to quality resources in terms of health care and food.
And so if you have a miserable childhood, you will be very tempted to use drugs to self-medicate that pain.
And so, as childhoods get worse, drug abuse tends to increase.
You can look at bombinthebrain.com for more research on this that I've put together.
Police also found Roof to be in possession of cocaine, methamphetamine, and LSD, because really, what job interview wouldn't be complete without those?
He was banned from them all for one year.
On March 16th, Roof visited Sullivan's Island, which was the point of entry for an estimated 40% of the North American slave population and the largest port of its kind on the entire continent.
That same day, he photographed himself scrolling 1488 into the sand on the beach.
The 14 stands for the number of words in the phrase, quote, We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children, while 88 stands for H, the eighth letter of the alphabet, translating into Heil Hitler.
March 25th, Roof visited and photographed himself at Elmwood Cemetery in Columbia, South Carolina, specifically the area dedicated to Confederate soldiers who died during the Civil War.
Of course, this is for white separatists and white supremacists.
This is, of course, called the War of Northern Aggression and was considered to be an unjust invasion of the South by the North.
On April 3rd, Dylann Roof celebrated his 21st birthday, and only one month after his arrest for felony drug possession, Roof's father gave him a.45 caliber gun as a birthday present.
Dylann Roof's felony drug charges would disqualify him from legal carry and purchase of a firearm in South Carolina.
And he would have failed a background check if he attempted to purchase a firearm.
If his father purchased a gun for his birthday, it is called a straw purchase, which is a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.
It has also been reported that Ruth's father only gave him money and didn't know he had purchased the weapon.
So that point remains in dispute, but may carry some serious legal consequences.
On April 13th, Ruth visited the Boone Hall Plantation, Which is one of America's oldest running plantations, taking photographs outside the previous slave living quarters and posing with African-American mannequins dressed as slaves.
On April 17th, Roof took a photo of his.45 caliber birthday gift along with seven bullets resting beside it and posted it on his blog.
Several days later, Roof posted a photo of him shirtless holding the gun and pointing it at the camera.
My understanding is that in the church in Charleston, the shell casings, the bullet casings that have been found are those from A45. On April 23rd, Roof visited the McLeod Plantation in James Island, South Carolina, which was occupied by Confederate forces during the Civil War the following day.
Roof visited the Museum and Library of Confederate History in Greenville, which aims to provide an accurate portrayal of the war for Southern independence.
On April 26, he returned to the mall and was arrested for trespassing, banned from the mall for an additional three years, and his car was turned over to his biological mother.
He was found guilty in order to pay a fine of $262.50 for trespassing, which he elected to pay off in installments.
His roommate, Dalton Tyler, who has known Roof for between seven months to one year, said he saw the 21-year-old suspect the week before the shooting and that Roof had been planning something like that for six months.
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.
An apparent former classmate of Ruth's wrote on Twitter, Dylan used to be a super emo with long blonde hair, and he was pretty quiet, and I always said he looked like the cry type to blow someish up.
He didn't get along with either of his parents, said a former classmate, but sometimes they'd both call him.
Last Wednesday, during a drinking session, exactly one week before the Charleston church shooting, Roof told friends Kristen Scriven and Joey Meek that, quote, he was looking to kill a bunch of people on Wednesday at the College of Charleston.
Scriven asked him, What did you say?
Why do you want to hurt those people in Charleston?
Roof responded, In seven days.
They all got seven days.
Scriven later said he didn't believe Roof would actually participate in a mass shooting, but was concerned that he could turn violent, so he hid Roof's gun in an air vent, only to give it back to him when they all sobered up, which I guess proves the saying that in wine there is truth or in vino veritas.
He flat out told us he was going to do this stuff, said Scriven.
He's weird.
You don't know when to take him seriously and when not to.
Yeah, that's kind of the point.
Scriven also mentioned a previous situation where Roof's biological mother had taken away his gun.
His mom had taken the gun from him and somehow he went back and took it from her.
That's when we saw the gun for the first time,.45 with a high-point laser beam.
Scriven also noted that during their friendship Roof confessed that he was unhappy, often bouncing between the homes of his divorced parents.
Roof would reportedly stay for days at the mobile home park smoking cigarettes and drinking before going home to get money and clothes.
This is the thing, people.
If you give people's money, get involved in their lives.
Don't let them get lost into the poltergeist static of internet extremism with no feedback, no love, no support.
Just don't hand people money and just have them go away.
That is not healthy for anyone.
If you pay for people, you have to get involved in their lives, otherwise you're enabling some dangerous behavior.
Scriven could tell that Roof was depressed, complaining that he wasn't getting the love and emotional support that he needed from his parents.
When Roof would get upset, counter to all conceivable stereotypes, he would return to his car and blast opera music.
Interestingly enough, Scriven, Roof's friend is black.
When being interviewed by reporter, Scriven also noted, My opinion about Dylan doesn't change.
My feelings about him doesn't change.
I still love him as a friend no matter what, because, you know, he was my friend.
I don't think his parents liked his decisions, the choices that he made to have black friends, Scribham recounted.
I don't think he hated blacks.
I think he hated humans.
Yeah, Holmes, the guy who shot up.
The movie theater didn't exactly hate moviegoers, he just hated carbon-based lifeforms, it would seem.
In an interview after the shooting, Page Man...
Stepmother defended ex-husband Ben Roof as a good guy, and that the court documents were just us slinging mud at each other.
She added, That's just stuff, and noted that Ben and her get along fine now.
Ben is a good dad.
His daughters love him to death.
He's not a bad person, and he still goes to church on Wednesdays and Sundays.
And what day, my friends?
What day?
Did Dylann Roof decide to go to a church and shoot people the same day that his father goes to church on a Wednesday?
In the unconscious, there are no coincidences.
Page admitted that Ben spoils Dylann too much, but that it didn't mean he was a bad father.
She also noted that Dylan had become a recluse in the past few years, whilst he was mostly living with his biological mother.
This is a pretty much game of crazy guy hot potato.
A woman who answered the cell phone of the suspect's biological mother, Amelia Roof, also known as Amy, declined to comment on the shooting, stating, We will be doing no interviews ever before hanging up.
When asked about the shooting, Page insisted that Dylan wasn't raised like that.
Well, I don't imagine he was.
Directly.
The pictures I have of him, in the pictures I have of him, he's happy.
But the Dylan was a germaphobe for a while.
She said he was always a loner.
He was bored in advanced class.
He was really smart, too smart.
He loved animals.
He was generally a quiet person.
He stood in the background.
He never wanted attention.
He never wanted to be in pictures.
He turned down family vacations.
Nobody knew this was coming.
We just thought that he was a lazy this-generation kind of kid.
Yeah, lazy.
Not traumatized, not self-medicating for childhood horrors.
Just lazy.
You get to dismiss people like that.
So easy.
Roof's uncle, Carson Cowles, noted that nobody in my family had seen anything like this coming.
Several years ago, he told his sister, Roof's biological mother, that Dylan was too introverted.
I said he was like 19 years old.
He still didn't have a job, a driver's license, or anything like that, and he just stayed in his room a lot of the time.
My family is not like this, said Cowles.
He did this, and he's going to pay for it.
I'd be the executioner myself if they would allow it.
He left us with something we'll never be able to escape.
You see, nothing spells empathy like self-pity.
Look what he did to us.
Well, there are seven bodies he might say otherwise.
More than seven.
Page said, he was lost.
He was locked up in his room looking at bad stuff on his computer.
It was internet evil.
Yeah, internet evil.
That's a great explanation.
So, many, many people seem to have seen this coming.
Nobody did anything about it.
It's always shocking to me the degree to which crazy people who do evil things announce over and over and over and over again what they're going to do.
Where would he learn that you use violence to solve problems?
It seems, based upon the divorce papers, from his father, who resolved conflicts with his stepmother through violence.
Were the big problems in Dylann Roof's life the blacks or the whites?
Along the Tutorial study, the 442 boys born in 1972 found that one out of every three boys, those who have a specific variation of a gene, who were maltreated during childhood will be almost certain to exhibit antisocial or criminal behavior as a child.
Because people go kind of crazy because they say, well, yes, this guy probably had a really wretched childhood, but lots of people have wretched childhoods and don't end up becoming violent.
Well, I mean, there is choice, there is free will, and who knows to what degree someone Might just end up dipping into someone's lives, giving them a vision of something better, giving them an escape hatch from this white trash underworld of hell itself.
Who knows?
But some people smoke their whole lives.
George Byrne lived to be over 100, smoked cigars his whole life.
Freud, not so lucky.
So, it is a combination of choice, environment, and genetics, but you don't know when you start abusing a child, particularly a boy, you don't know if they carry this gene that makes them more susceptible to turning abuse into violence.
Now, if you just have the version of the gene, it doesn't mean that a boy grows up to be a criminal.
Terry Moffat, a researcher, said, Its relation to aggression only emerged when we considered whether the children had been maltreated.
This suggests that the best strategy for preventing violence is to prevent child abuse.
And I will say this, look, everyone knows that, oh, this guy, men are violent, they beat up people, they beat up kids and so on, but women are choosing to be with these men.
Women are choosing to be with these men, to give them children, and in this case, to flee this violent man and leave two children under his tender mercy and care.
So, I'm very interested, of course, in the unseen.
The study of economics is not to look at visible gains, but invisible costs.
The aggression of men is very clearly delineated and understood within society, but the enabling of that aggression through the sexual allegiance of women is underreported.
Underreported.
Adverse childhood experiences are strongly related to whether you ever drink alcohol, to alcohol initiation in early to mid-adolescence.
And the adverse childhood experience score has a graded or dose-dependent or dose-response relationship to these alcohol use behaviors.
So adverse childhood experiences, there's a study, we'll link to it below.
It's a questionnaire, really.
You can ask these questions of yourself and get your adverse childhood experience score.
For a very wide variety of dysfunctions, the more you are abused, the worse your life is.
You know, we hear so much about, I don't know, BPA and baby bottles and ALAR and apples and don't get too much sun and global warming and so on.
But on average, a very harsh and difficult childhood takes about 20 years off someone's lifespan.
And raises significantly their risks of cancer, ischemic heart disease, smoking, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, promiscuity.
Almost all forms of social dysfunctions can be traced back in a very linear step-to-dose-dependent way to the maltreatment And if we want a peaceful world, we simply must start improving the way that we treat our children.
They are not silent, disposable vessels for society to retch all of its pathological dysfunction into.
Initiating alcohol use by age 14 was increased two to threefold by each individual adverse childhood experience.
Adverse childhood experiences also accounted for a 20-70% increased likelihood of alcohol use initiated during mid-adolescence, 15-17 years.
Compared to people with zero adverse childhood experiences, people with five or more adverse childhood experiences were seven to ten times more likely to report illicit drug use problems, addiction to illicit drugs, and parental drug use, drug use as parents.
So a 7 to 10 fold increase is massively significant when it comes to social dysfunction and we can deal with this when it comes to child abuse.
Treat your children well.
Reason with them.
Do not hit them.
We need a smarter world desperately.
And child abuse shaves three, four, five, six IQ points off an individual.
Those are crucial building blocks for a peaceful society.
Breastfeed your babies for a year to 18 months, as the World Health Organization recommends.
Have a parent stay home.
Put your toddlers in daycare, and if they're in daycare for more than 20 hours a week, They experience and exhibit exactly the same symptoms as toddlers who are literally abandoned by their mothers.
Toddlers experience time in a very different way than you and I. A day to a toddler is like a month for us.
I would imagine something like that.
We need to start taking seriously what we say We need to start taking seriously.
How many people say, oh, I don't care much about my kids.
I sacrifice them for my own particular preferences.
You know, I feel like working, so I go work.
I get angry at them.
I hit them.
I yell at them.
I don't really care.
No, we say children are the future, children are everything.
We would do anything for our kids.
Well, of course, except government spending, national debt, unfunded liabilities, giant...
Financial sinkhole swallowing up the futures of the young, but we at least say that we would do anything for our children.
Well, what about we start living like that?
What about we start living like that?
Women, stop having sex with violent guys and then complain about the patriarchy.
Stop enabling and giving the ultimate reward of sexuality and reproduction, which from a genetic standpoint is all that the genes care about.
Stop giving the ultimate reward to violent guys and then complaining about a violent world.
And women, you need to enforce that.
I can't go around nagging, love to, can't do it.
Women, you need to enforce this with each other.
This guy's violent.
Stop doing it because we're going to have to live in our old age, in a world populated, By the children produced by these women's addiction to violent men.
Stop breeding with violent men and complaining that the world is violent.
There is some genetic elements to violence.
Genetics plus child abuse often equals violence.
We can't control the genetics, but we sure as hell can control who we have sex with.
Right, ladies?
We can do that at least.
Which is why I focus on female responsibility in this...
In this show so much.
Not because I don't think males are responsible.
It's just that nobody ever talks about female responsibility.
Look at the way that this woman characterizes it.
Well, he wanted this, so I just did that.
He wanted me to stay home, so I just stayed home.
He wanted to move us to the Florida Keys, so we moved to the Florida Keys.
It's like, you have a choice.
You have a choice.
Don't yell in front of your kids.
Don't hit your kids.
Spanking, also related to significant reductions in IQ. Talk to your children.
Reason with your children.
Be benevolent with your children.
Have fun with your children.
They are the most dependent, most precious, most vulnerable members of society, and they need our protection.
We cannot put them into this mind-blending situation Mash-up, frappe machine of chaos and instability and violence and insecurity, and we can't just let them rot in front of a computer screen for years, not knowing what is going on in their minds.
Say when they get arrested and charged with multiple drug possessions and you actually have to pick up their car because they can't drive, you can't claim to not know about it, then get off your ass and do something about it.
The people who died in Charleston did not have the opportunity to fix this problem.
All they took was the hot lead that came out of everybody else's unwillingness to fix this problem.
These people are out there.
These people are growing like mushrooms.
They need the sunlight of care and good attention.
They need people to take an interest.
They need people to listen to them.
If you raise children in an environment where violence works, we cannot then be shocked.
When they turn to violence to solve even the imaginary problems they find on the web.
