Dylann Roof, a 10th grade dropout, penned a 2500 word "Manifesto" and published it on his website that's so ignorant of history and rife with hate that the effort to try and hold him up as some kind of example of white racism becomes ridiculous.

The Daily Beast published some choice quotes from the screed that's almost laughable - would be funny if the end result of his writing didn't cost 9 innocent people their lives:

His most virulent hatred was reserved for black people.

“N**gers are stupid and violent. At the same time they have the capacity to be very slick,” he wrote. “Black people view everything through a racial lense [sic].”

Roof added, “I wish with a passion that n**gers were treated terribly throughout history by Whites, that every White person had an ancestor who owned slaves, that segregation was an evil an oppressive institution, and so on,” he wrote, adding that it would make it easier for him to understand what is now happening. “But it isnt true. None of it is.”

Roof, who dropped out of high school before finishing the 10th grade, apparently never took a course on American history. He wrote that America’s history of slavery was based on myths and lies, using the fact that not all Southern whites owned slaves to downplay the malevolence of the institution. He also claims to have read slave narratives that were overwhelmingly positive towards the slaveowners, without naming the texts or pausing to consider whether they had been coerced.

Roof’s manifesto claims segregation “existed to protect us from them”—both in terms of violence and supposed cultural purity. “Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to level of brute animals,” he wrote. “The best example of this is obviously our school system.”

“Anyone who thinks that White and black people look as different as we do on the outside, but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional,” he wrote. “How could our faces, skin, hair, and body structure all be different, but our brains be exactly the same?”

This is not the writing of a mentally ill person. Dylann Roof is just plain dumb. And you don't have to live in the south to run across the occassional Dylann Roof, nor does the kind of hate expressed by Roof exist only among whites. Try talking to some blacks about race and you get conspiracy theories about the CIA inventing AIDS to kill black people, or cabals of white supremecists wanting to murder all blacks.

Sista Solove expresses a theory that several African Americans in Charleston told us: that Roof “was sent” by white supremacists to do the shooting and to push black people out of town.

“He (alleged killer Roof) was sent. He was sent. The KKK ain’t nothing but the police with badges now. That’s all they are. They took their hoods off and they’re police. It was an inside job.”

The man with sign agrees, saying, “C’mon, man, he was sane. He knew what he was doing. He tried to free home.”

Sista Solove continued, “Everyone says it was a hate crime. No, he was a terrorist. The white man is a terrorist to black people. Period, point blank.”

Paranoia and hate know no one color. And rather than holding Dylann Roof up as a "typical" southern white to score political points, we should examine the question of race hate from all sides. Anything less is dishonest and unproductive.