Chuck C. Johnson Has Thoughts On The Charleston Shootings. They Are Strange And Racist Thoughts.

Since Award-Winning Journalist Chuck C. Johnson got bounced off Twitter a while back, seemingly for good, the man seems to be completely losing it. This of course raises the perfectly reasonable question, "How could you tell?" As Exhibit A, let us present his 4000-plus word rant about the Charleston shootings and why Dylann Roof really shot nine black people dead. Even for Chuck C. Johnson, the new Stupidest Man on the Internet, it's a specimen of breathtaking stupidity (and also racism).

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We won't even try to summarize Johnson's "argument," if indeed he even has one in this stream of inanity that he calls an "analysis" -- it's virtually the only thing on his GotNews website whose hed doesn't start with "BREAKING: " -- there's simply too much dumb to catalogue. We hope that future students of rhetoric will study it, as we have a sneaking feeling Johnson may have actually invented one or two completely new logical fallacies. Instead, we'll just grab a few of Johnson's insights, without trying to explain how they fit into a coherent whole; this is perfectly fair, since Crom knows Johnson attempted no such thing himself.

To begin with, Johnson reveals that there's something very fishy about Dylann Roof's Facebook account (partly archived here ), which Roof only created in May of this year, and where nearly half of his 80 friends were black. Also, too, although Roof's privacy settings were set so that no one could comment on his account except friends, the day after the shootings, Christian musician guy Marcus Stanley was able to leave a longish message urging Roof to "Give your heart to Jesus and confess your sins." But how? HOW? Johnson's pretty sure the fix was in, passing on the thoughts of an "anonymous poster" who, like Johnson, found all of this a little too convenient :

I was browsing Dylann Storm Roof’s facebook profile at the moment that Marcus Stanley (forgiving black preacher gospel singing dude) posted that long, loving-tolerant Christian message of forgiveness on Dylann’s page. Which is odd because the account settings had been either set to private or friends-only [...]

But then….lo and behold! Along comes St. Marcus and he’s perfectly able to post a comment -- the ONLY comment allowed on the entire page -- in which he humbly forgives his white hateful oppressor and offers Dylann hope in Christ [...]

Curiously, the only option available was to “share” the post on which Marcus had written his sermon so that the word could spread around and everyone could see how morally superior this ex-ganster black guy is (who is also conveniently an outspoken survivor of gun violence). What a perfect and sweet little image. Isn’t that curious?

Wow! That really is weird! Detective Johnson explains just what's so sinister about all this:

So how was the good Reverend Marcus Stanley able to leave a comment on Dylann Roof’s private Facebook page? Answer: someone wanted him to be able to.

But why? And why would a Roof not have a Facebook account until May 2015? The answer is that this millennial wasn’t very popular. He was a loser but that isn’t going to stop the social justice warriors from turning him into a martyr

Or maybe Buzzfeed has it right, and Stanley was able to post because of a quirk in Facebook's settings; they say, "Stanley was able to write on Roof’s profile because he has a Facebook page for his music, not a personal profile," and we don't know enough about Facebook's electronic guts to know whether that's a plausible explanation, either.

What we do find amusing is that Johnson doesn't choose to mention where that "anonymous poster" actually posted his insights about Marcus Stanley's mysterious Facebook post, and we can see why: it's from "Ironmarch.org," a white-power discussion board, in a thread titled "Heroic Autist Slaughters 'Innocent' Niggers In Their Church! (Charleston Shooting)." Obviously, Johnson left that information out because it might undercut the credibility of the smart analysis -- and who cares if your source approvingly quotes Hitler if he's got some cool thoughts about the social justice warriors who want Dylann Roof to be seen as a martyr for tolerance and diversity? (Yes, we're still trying to figure that one out, too.)

Oh, but there's so much more. Johnson veers off into another point about how Roof was "on prescription pills, the side effects of which are suicide and violent thoughts," and sagely observes that "Increasingly it seems that while not all prescription pill users are mass killers all mass killers are prescription pill users." That's some nice Alex Jones stuff there; even Roof's coldness in acting becomes part of the "he was crazy but not a racist" narrative:

Roof stayed and hung out with the blacks in the church for an hour before he began gunning them down. This isn’t exactly the behavior of someone who is a racist but it is the behavior of someone that’s crazy. If he were really planning to mess with the black community why did he kill them the day before Juneteenth?

Two days before, actually, and maybe he had no idea? Or he did, and thought the symbolic timing would help make blacks angrier, to help move along that race war he thought he'd incite? What is Johnson's rhetorical question about Juneteenth supposed to suggest, even? Never mind, because now it's time to somehow blame feminists for the murders, maybe. We'll give a shiny new donkey to anyone who can parse out the point that Johnson's trying to make in this mess:

 Roof and rape culture 

Roof reportedly said that “you’re raping our women and you’re taking over our country. I have to do it.”

I don’t believe that Roof actually said that simply because it is too convenient for the narrative. Why did he shoot six black women if he was so worried about women? Might he not have thought all black lives matter? Could it have been that he was just plain crazy?

Um. Well, maybe -- and we know this may be a stretch -- Roof was worried about rape not because he was "worried about women," but because he was a racist asshole repeating one of the oldest white supremacist tropes in the book? We'll just toss that out there. And then Johnson goes on to say that the thing he thinks Roof never said actually happens to be true:  

If Roof actually said that blacks are raping our women, he is correct on the facts about interracial rape. (He is less correct about blacks taking over “our country” given the persistent murder of the unborn.)

Backing away slowly from the scary internet man now. In any case, despite the undisputable fact that blacks rape white women like crazy, while the "figures for white men raping black women are so low as to be statistically insignificant," leads Johnson to conclude that "Black women simply aren’t desirable -- even to rapists."

Yes, he actually wrote that. In a nod to the Good Blacks, Johnson generously laments that Roof -- who wasn't a racist but was crazy -- targeted "elderly blacks who are what is left of what’s good about the black community." After impressive stupidity like that, it almost seems like nitpicking to note that of the nine victims, only three were "elderly"; the youngest was 26 and the other five were in their forties and fifties.

Then Johnson is off and running about South Africa and Rhodesia, and how things under black rule in Zimbabwe are so terrible that "black Zimbabweans have been calling for whites to recolonize" the place, and also what really killed the parishioners at Emmanuel AME was the media's sensationalization of the Trayvon Martin shooting, because if a thug like Martin could be portrayed as an innocent victim, then it only stands to reason that Roof would lash out. Roof, Johnson explains, was merely

reacting to a culture that tells him that all lives matter except for white, young ones who can’t get jobs thanks to the illegals that will replace them. The more we are told that Black Lives Matter and that America is going to be brown, brown, brown, a lot of young white people will understandably ask their parents and political officials how they let this happen...

It's almost as if Johnson thinks that Roof's greatest failing was that he did such a bad job of starting a race war.

[ GotNews / IronMarch / Buzzfeed / WCNC ]