The man who allegedly killed nine people in an African-American church last week may have been a frequent commenter on an online neo-Nazi website.
The Southern Poverty Law Center on Monday compared the text of Dylann Roof’s apparent 2,000-word white supremacist manifesto with online writings, and found a connection with comments on a website called the Daily Stormer that seeks to “preserve Western Civilization.”
{mosads}In multiple comments over the course of the past year, the anonymous account “Aryan Blood 1488” left notes that appeared to echo the sentiments in Roof’s racist manifesto.
For instance, in one comment from this February, the account claimed 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.”
The words are almost an exact copy of a portion of Roof’s apparent online manifesto: “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.”
Another post refers to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a far-right group with white supremacist leanings, which Roof claimed opened his eyes to “brutal black on white murders” following the killing of Trayvon Martin.
Other comments from Aryan Blood 1488 express a similar white supremacist worldview.
The number 1488 has been used among white supremacists to refer to the American Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler
Roof’s apparent online manifesto was discovered after his arrest last week, following the shooting at the storied Emanuel American Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.