He did so, and the editor showed interest. I wanted to remain anonymous and to use a pen name but the editor wanted to know who I was. He decided not to publish the article. My correspondence with him was brief and unsatisfactory, and he never explicitly said that the piece could have published if it had been written by someone else. In any case, it will not appear in that prestigious magazine.
Our country will eventually have to come to grips with what drove Dylann Roof to murder. The sooner our rulers think seriously about these questions the better. My attempt to speed that process failed, and I am grateful to The Unz Review for accepting this article for publication.
Jared Taylor on Dylann Roof:
The press routinely describes Roof and others like him as “white supremacists,” but this is not a useful term. It implies a desire to rule over or dominate other races, and there is no evidence Roof wanted that. Roof, and the many people I know who think to some degree as he does, are profoundly disaffected from American society. The ones I know are unlike Roof in that they are educated, sophisticated, attractive professionals, but like Roof, they reject and even despise conventional attitudes about race.
To understand Dylann Roof, we must set aside much of the framework that shapes the way we think about race. One difficult concept to grasp is that although everyone, beginning with Barack Obama, has agonized over the “hatred” that led to the church killings, Roof did not hate black people in any conventional sense.
Roof reportedly told racist jokes, but someone who hates black people does not have a lot of black friends on Facebook, or choose a black man, Christon Scriven, as his favorite drinking companion. Scriven may have been Roof’s closest friend; the two often got falling-down drunk together. Even after the shootings Scriven told an interviewer, “My opinion about Dylann doesn’t change. . . . I still love him as a friend.” A black school mate, Antonio Metze, also confirmed that Roof had black friends. (…)
Well publicized incidents such as these would have reinforced Dylann Roof’s view that the media are so determined to hunt down white racism that they find it where it may not exist. This is an increasingly common view, and not just among the disaffected whites I know. One need only glance through the comments sections of any on-line newspaper to sense a rising frustration with media that appear overhasty in accusing whites of racism.
Taylor describes the “Knoxville horror” and other under-reported black-on-white, racially motivated crimes that have received relatively scant media (and political) coverage, then continues:
It should now be clear that there really is a lot of black-on-white violence, some of it motivated by racial animus, but neither the media nor politicians pay much attention to it. The contrast with even ambiguous violence that goes the other way could not be more striking. President Obama spoke out in the Martin/Zimmerman case, famously saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” He took a similar position on the Ferguson shooting, saying it cast light on an unfair justice system that “stains the heart of black children” and judges people like Michael Brown “guilty of walking while black.”
This kind of sympathy and even identification with blacks who attacked people is deeply embittering to disaffected whites, and nudges other whites towards disaffection.