LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: The Eternal Value And Purpose Of the Courage, Dignity, and Integrity Of Colin Kaepernick And Why It (and He) Continues To Matter Greatly No Matter What His Reactionary Enemies, Detractors, and Haters Say. Colin Has Always Deeply Understood and Appreciated the FACT That In Order To Confront and Defeat Fascism One Must Always Be Fully Prepared To Take On Its Pathological Lies and Tawdry Propaganda Via An Ongoing Struggle For Freedom, Justice, Equality, and Self Determination Both Publicly and Privately. We Love You Colin (and Nessa) For Everything You Do And Try To Do In Your and Our Collective FIGHT To Engage And SLAY This Massive Malevolent Force Known As White Supremacy--PART 7

Colin Kaepernick Addresses Jay-Z, NFL, Workout, & Aftermath Of Protest | Part 3/3



HOT 97

VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NsxslSRqt8

September 29, 2026

#HOT97 #colinkaepernick #nessa

In part 3 of 3 of Colin Kaepernick and Nessa’s first interview, Colin gives his account of Jay-Z’s partnership with the NFL and what he says happened privately before the deal was announced. He discusses his conversations with Jay-Z, the NFL’s social-justice initiatives and why he and Eric Reid declined an opportunity connected to them. Colin also breaks down how the controversial NFL workout came together, Jay-Z’s reported role, why he refused to sign the NFL’s waiver and what happened afterward. He addresses whether he still wants to play football and why he would return to the NFL despite everything that happened. 

The conversation then gets personal as Colin opens up about The Perilous Fight, fatherhood, what he wants his daughter to learn from his story and what he believes people misunderstand about him. He reflects on the impact the last decade has had on Nessa, Eric Reid and other players who protested, how he has maintained joy and peace through it all, and the emotional toll his journey has had on the people closest to him. Colin Kaepernick’s memoir The Perilous Fight is out now. 

 

The Perilous Fight
by Colin Kaepernicke
Legacy Lit, 2026

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#HOT97 #colinkaepernick #nessa #nessaonair

FASCIST AMERICA: “What’s Past is Prologue…” (November 26, 2014)

“What’s Past is Prologue…” 

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/11/re-michael-brown-darren-wilson-robewrt.html 

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on November 26, 2014):

 
Wednesday, November 26, 2014

MICHAEL BROWN, the St. Louis Grand Jury, and the rest of us--“Remember, everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal” (see original source of this quote below):

“We are a nation of laws so we must accept the Grand Jury’s decision (in the Michael Brown case).” 

--President Barack Obama

“The black man has no rights that the white man need respect.”
—Judge Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (on behalf of the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857)

“Remember: everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal” --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  ('Letter From a Birmingham Jail', April 16, 1963)

 
“Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, become as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.”

—Ella Baker

“Slavery was legal, Jim Crow apartheid was legal, denying black people the right to vote was legal, denying women in general the right to vote was legal, banning and/or destroying labor unions was legal, child labor was legal, putting the indigenous population (i.e. “Indians”) in concentration camps…er, I mean “reservations” was legal, lynching was legal, residential segregation was legal, denying black people access to housing, restaurants, schools, theaters, department stores and public transportation was legal, denying black people the right to read and write was legal, raping black women and then forcing them to have children by white men was legal, killing, torturing, arresting, and imprisoning black men for pursuing romantic or sexual liaisons with white women was legal, assaulting and even murdering black people in general—especially if those assaults and murders were committed by white males—was legal, and excluding immigrants of color from entering this country was legal. So my question is this: Given these indisputable facts established by legal statue and custom in the United States what exactly does President Obama mean when he robotically keeps uttering the patently absurd, demonstrably false, and cowardly phrase “we are a nation of laws”?…” 

—Kofi Natambu

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: "What's Past is Prologue..."

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-heritage-and-legacy-of-dylann-roof.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on June 17, 2015):   

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

The Heritage and Legacy Of Dylann Roof: Ten years after the Charleston, South Carolina massacre of June 17, 2015

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/charleston-massacre-anniversary-dylann-roof/

Society

The Heritage of Dylann Roof

Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.

by Elizabeth Robeson
June 17, 2025
The Nation 

PHOTO: The Confederate flag is seen waving behind the monument of the victims of the Confederation Army during the American Civil War in front of the State Congress building in Columbia, South Carolina, on June 19, 2015.(Mladen Antonov / AFP via Getty Images)

At 4:44 pm on June 17, 2015, a young white man living in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, put the final touches on a manifesto uploaded to a homemade website with the suggestive name, “The Last Rhodesian.”

A doodled coat of arms identified him with contemporary fascists, its centered othala surrounded by a swastika, a Lebensrune, and a Celtic cross. The signifying numerals 14 and 88 sat on either side; the initials “DSR” were centered below.

Within hours, Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year-old lone wolf, would reignite the kind of terror carried out by Norwegian Anders Breivik and inspire copycat mass murder in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, Halle, and El Paso.

The manifesto traced Roof’s journey to a state of “racial awareness” and his conviction that only a race war could avert a genocide of Caucasians. His grievances were many but focused on Black Americans, whom he disparaged with the worn tropes of ignorance, criminality, and sexual deviance. It was time, he asserted, “to take drastic action.”

A photo gallery depicted him standing sullenly in iconic Carolina landscapes—a moss-strewn cypress swamp, a plantation’s slave quarters—bedecked in the iconography of white nationalism: the Confederate flag and the crests of dismantled apartheid African states. He brandished a Glock .45 pistol—bought with birthday money from his father—the equivalent of the old regimes’ rifles and shotguns.

“I have been blessed with a significant amount of German blood,” he wrote,” and a German surname.”

July/August 2025 Issue

Later described as “so frail you could snap him like a twig,” Roof consciously crafted the persona of a fierce soldier in a war he meant to spark that very night.

By 9 pm, Roof had driven 115 miles to the coastal city of Charleston, been welcomed into a Bible study at the South’s most historic Black church, and squeezed his Glock’s trigger 77 times, leaving the shredded bodies of nine African Americans, including its pastor and an 87-year-old woman, on the floor of their fellowship hall.

In the aftermath of Roof’s nightmarish rampage, South Carolina governor and future presidential aspirant Nikki Haley teamed with US Senator Lindsey Graham to speak for the state’s Republicans, the ardent defenders of the Confederate battle flag, itself the creation of a South Carolinian. To contain the unfolding crisis and its threat to the state’s lucrative draw as an idyllic tourist and retirement mecca, Haley and Graham moved quickly to frame Roof as an outlier.

Appearing on The View the morning after the carnage, Graham stated emphatically: “Let’s talk about one thing it’s not. It’s not a window into the soul of South Carolina. It’s not who we are. It’s about this guy [who] has got tons of problems.” He described Roof as “sick and twisted.”

Haley called a press conference to say that she would ask the legislature to remove the Confederate banner from a 30-foot flagpole in front of the Capitol next to the Confederate monument, a soaring obelisk with a soldier standing aloft. Republicans had placed it there in 2000 as a cynical response to the NAACP’s demand that it be removed from the capitol dome, where it had flown since 1961 as a derisive reminder of slavery.

State Republicans had marketed their resistance to the “Take it Down” crusade with their own branded slogan of “Heritage Not Hate,” a retort that fueled even more agitation. As white supremacists predictably do, the “Heritage” crowd waged an ideological campaign grounded in revisionist fantasy. By attempting to sever the flag from the savage racism that birthed it, they risibly argued that it represented a benign tradition of ancestor veneration.

By the time Haley’s press conference began, photographs of Roof, the Rebel flag, and his Glock had circled the globe, cementing the (accurate) association of the “Stars and Bars” with deadly white terrorism. But another recurring image played to the governor’s advantage—that of Joey Meek, Roof’s friend and sometimes bunkmate, outside a faded yellow mobile home set in tangled brush. The subliminal projection of Roof as a “poor white” made it easier for Haley to deflect attention away from her more refined embrace of white supremacy and onto a contemptible scapegoat.

Astonishingly, Haley denounced Roof’s “sick and twisted” co-option of the flag, which she called “a symbol of respect, integrity, and duty.” In a flourished crescendo, she declared, “That is not hate, nor is it racism.”

A full week had not elapsed since the Charleston bloodletting and in the middle of Black Carolina’s raw grief, Nikki Haley—a first-generation American of Indian Sikh parentage—had the gall to praise the treasonous banner of white supremacy as a flag of honor.

Which brings us to the heritage of Dylann Roof.

Far from rootless, he is a 10th-generation South Carolinian descended from Johann Sebastian Rueff, a Lutheran Hessian. In the 1740s, Johann and two brothers sailed from Rotterdam to Philadelphia before settling on Cherokee land in the “Dutch Fork” of central South Carolina, where Dylann was born and raised. Enticed by land bounties, the Rueffs joined thousands of Germans to seed a buffer between the aggrieved Cherokee and the oligarchs ensconced in Charleston.

Family historian Michael K. Roof links the Rueffs to Teutonic nobility. The name, he writes, denotes “one versed in the Old Testament and teachings of Christ.” Dylann’s ancestor John Melchior Rueff chose the spelling “Roof,” to align more closely with its German pronunciation, but also to signify a lineage of piety: “My people come from the first caste of Europe; they reared their sons to become Ministers of the Gospel, and Teachers of the young. They shall continue in the top profession of mankind, that of Servant of God. My name shall be spelled, ‘Roof,’ like the housetop.”

In an ironic prophecy, he continued, “For my people shall be as a cover of a building and shall protect and instruct those within, that they will continue to be worthy of ‘the inheritance of the Lord.’”

The divination largely held true. Melchior’s father had built Zion, the Dutch Fork’s first, still-thriving Lutheran church. Across generations, Roofs have filled the ranks of ordained Lutheran ministers. They fought the British during the American Revolution. When the Civil War commenced, they formed a family regiment and fought for the war’s duration. (They were not slaveholders.) Others were elected sheriff. An obituary praised Dylann’s great-great grandfather as “a prominent businessmen interested in progress.” His late grandfather once presided over the Richland County bar.

The grave of Dylann Roof’s great-great-great grandfather.(Elizabeth Robeson)

Dylann Roof has a legitimate claim to the heritage that Nikki Haley upholds for its devotion to family and tradition, traits visibly entwined throughout his patrimony.

He is no outlier.

Cracks appeared immediately in Haley’s homage. Following her press conference, she quietly dispatched an armed detail to the statehouse grounds to guard the bronze statue of Benjamin Ryan “Pitchfork” Tillman, the vicious white supremacist politician whose glowering one-eyed visageseemed to intensify as July 9, the day of the flag’s final lowering, drew near.

The monument lauds Tillman as a “statesman,” a “patriot,” and his “life of service and achievement.” The monument reifies everything repugnant about South Carolina’s true heritage, built on a vicious “Negrophobia” and an insatiable appetite for inflicting human suffering. Tillman towers over all of South Carolina’s detestable 20th-century pols, experts in the proselytization of a virulent white supremacy. He modeled, incited, encouraged, and praised the basest behavior in his acolytes and protégés, which they performed without shame. His influence has yet to subside.

Tillman strode to power on his boasts of massacring Black Republicans during Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1918, he ruled South Carolina with an iron fist as governor and US senator. His legacy is enshrined in the 1895 Jim Crow Constitution, a document that consigned South Carolina’s Black majority and poor white people to a grueling fate captured in the title of Franz Fanon’s classic work, The Wretched of the Earth.

Tillman delighted in shocking his Senate colleagues with crude rants about Black people, whom he depicted as lascivious, lazy, and innately criminal. His obsessive diatribes warned of mongrelization, “race suicide,” and the threat of a Black rapist around every corner. The Congressional Record has preserved his bile for the ages, which no heritage spin can mitigate—pronouncements like “We must hunt these creatures down. If all of them were shot as ruthlessly as we shoot wild beasts, the country would be better off,” and “The Negro must remain subordinate or be exterminated.”

Tillman called lynching a “higher law” than the US Constitution; he took perverse pleasure in both the shudders of Senate patricians and roars on the Carolina stump to his bellowed signature line, “I would lead a mob to lynch the negro who ravishes a white woman!”

Dylann Roof’s manifesto echoed these themes.

Even more chilling: At the center of Roof’s plotted atrocity is an eerie reenactment of Tillman’s experience as a young accessory to the assassination of Simon Coker, a Black state senator, during the calamitous terror of September 1876 that brought down “Negro rule.”

A roving band of paramilitary Red Shirts kidnapped Coker from an Aiken County train depot as he traveled the state, exhorting Black men to remain vigilant for the fall election despite engulfing violence. Realizing that a death squad held him, Coker asked if he might pray. While he was on his knees, bullets from Tillman’s gun cut through his head. The last words Coker heard were the churlish rebukes of white men saying that he’d prayed long enough.

Tillman loved to taunt Senate Republicans who had abandoned the freedmen for Gilded Age gluttony. Rubbing their faces in the audacity of white supremacy, Tillman gleefully admitted what had long been denied: “We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.” If necessary, he swore, “we will do it again.”

Some 140 years later, Dylann Roof assassinated another Black state senator, Clementa C. Pinckney, who also served as Mother Emanuel’s pastor. Roof sat next to Pinckney, 41, for nearly an hour, then shot him first and repeatedly after the small Bible study stood for closing prayer. Roof shriekedracial epithets as he lacerated his victims, “You’re raping our women and taking over our country. Ya’ll want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about!”

And yet, Lindsey Graham would surely huff if asked to distinguish between Ben Tillman and Dylann Roof as two “sick and twisted” men, just as most white Carolinians would agree with a reportedopinion that Roof’s crime “isn’t connected to anything to do with our heritage.”

Illustrating this willful denial, the state senate has refused repeatedly to adopt a hate crimes statute, despite a white supremacist’s murder of their colleague a decade ago. South Carolina joins Wyoming, where Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man, was lynched in 1998, as the only other state without one.

A federal judge sentenced Roof to death in January 2017; several appeals of his sentence have been denied, the latest in April.

Roof has never wavered from a defiant unrepentance, a callousness he also displayed toward the agony of his family. (His mother suffered a heart attack while attending his murder trial. His father and grandfather have both since died.) When captured in the North Carolina mountains by the FBI, Roof readily confessed, saying, “What I did was so minuscule [compared] to what [Black people] are doing to white people everyday.”

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Throughout the tortuous court proceedings, Roof battled and eventually fired David I. Bruck, the renowned capital defense attorney, for insisting that he undergo psychiatric evaluation. In two closed-door hearings, Roof told the presiding judge, “I don’t want anybody to think that I did it because I have some kind of mental problem. I wanted to increase racial tension.”

In fact, expert examination of Roof did not yield evidence of insanity but a high IQ and diagnosis of mild-to-moderate autism, “debilitating social anxiety, and precursor symptoms of psychosis.” The report concluded, “Dylann pursued his preoccupation with racism with an autistic intensity. It pervaded all aspects of his life.”

To Kevin Sack, the New York Times reporter who covered the murder trial (and has just written a magisterial book about Mother Emanuel), Roof wrote in the spring of 2020, “I’m not the bad guy. I’d like to think I’m not even a bad person,” before returning to his obsession: “I am a member of a group targeted for genocide. What complicates things is that many of the people doing the targeting are also part of this group.”

By that logic, white anti-racists are the naïve and willing collaborators in their own destruction. But through ingesting the noxious brew of his twin legacies, it is Dylann Roof who is slated to die.

On today’s 10th anniversary of what Black Charlestonians refer to as “the tragedy,” South Carolina’s neo-Confederate leaders will don their best pained faces and utter words of condolence before returning to their cravenly cultish work of heritage promotion—work that has proceeded intensely since 2015. Their actions underscore how deeply impervious they remain to the full spectrum of trauma and degradation endured by Black Carolinians for 355 years.

In January, Governor Henry McMaster, whose great-great-grandfather defended the murderous outrages of the Reconstruction Klan in federal court, issued this clarion call: “We must protect and preserve our history and heritage. It is why we are who we are and why we are here. It is why we stay here and why others come here. It informs our strengths, purpose and duty.”

The heritage obsession fosters derangement. Lodged today in the state House Judiciary Committee is a bill to construct a monument to the state’s “African American Confederate Veterans.” The brainchild of Greenville Republican Bill Chumley, the legislation conjures kepi-headed Black soldiers riding into battle whooping the Rebel yell. No such group ever existed. Even more absurdly, the legislation decries the excision of these fantasy characters from school curricula, lamenting it as “completely unacceptable” and a “manipulation of facts” that redound to a “distorted perspective of our State and national history.”

Whether on a wartime plantation, digging trenches for the Confederate Army, or keeping the body and clothing of their soldier-slaveholder clean, “African American Confederate veterans” lived under the deadly coercion of oligarchic rule: They were slaves. To propose a monument to a bonded people that celebrates their purported efforts to remain enslaved is purely hateful.

Meanwhile, courses in AP African American history have been so curtailed in South Carolina as to be effectively banned.

In March, a group of 100 Sons of Confederate Veterans attended an annual fete at the Capitol. House Speaker Murrell Smith of Sumter rallied the gathering, urging them to remain steadfast to “the way we were raised.” South Carolinians, he said, are duty-bound to “preserve our heritage and to celebrate our heritage.”

The event featured state Representative Bill Taylor of Aiken, where Simon Coker and more than a hundred other Black men were massacred in 1876, and Senator Danny Verdin of Greenville, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a white nationalist. They assured the Sons that their legislation to strengthen the Heritage Act would become law.

The controversial statute governs the disposition of monuments and the names of structures on public land. The Taylor-Verdin bill would extend its reach to private land, withhold funding from local governments that violate its provisions, and forbid the posting of contextual information as an educational tool.

The fortified provisions strike some as a subterfuge to restore the John C. Calhoun monument to Charleston’s Marion Square, a short walk from Mother Emanuel. The city council circumvented the Heritage Act when it removed the looming 115-foot structure in June 2020 from privately owned ground. Speculation is rife that additional language will be added to make its provisions retroactive, thus paving the way to overturn the city’s decision.

At a press conference to discuss the proposal, Representative Taylor decried “the war against all these monuments,” noting that a “small minority of the offended” has waged it, a remark that appeared intended for the legislature’s dwindling number of Democrats, most of whom are Black.

One of those is Wendell Gilliard, the senator from Charleston. He has described the Taylor-Verdin bill as “dangerous.” “We’re trying to correct the past,” he told a reporter with the Post and Courier. “We’re not trying to relive it or go back to it. What are you going to ask for next, for the Confederate flag to be put back on the state Capitol?”

Gilliard’s is not simply a rhetorical question, but a shrewd reading of the heritage of Dylann Roof, who personifies the still-beating heart of South Carolina’s intolerance for expressions of Black dignity and self-determination. It is unclear what Roof knew about Mother Emanuel—how, in 1817, a free man of color, boldly led his people, slave and free, out of the slaveholders’ congregations and into their own “African church.”

“At some level,” writes Kevin Sack, “[Roof’s] purpose had not been simply to assail whichever Black people he happened to find inside. Rather, he took aim at the audacity of Black resistance to white supremacy, and the still-unrealized promise that 50 million African Americans might live without fear that their skin tone could cost them their lives.”

Ten years later, that fear has not been quelled.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Elizabeth Robeson

Elizabeth Robeson is an independent historian with expertise in South Carolina's vigilante and state-sponsored violence.




Posted by Kofi Natambu at 6:50 AM

FASCIST AMERICA: "What's Past is Prologue..." (2015-2019)

"What's Past is Prologue..."

June 17, 2019

All,

FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY (June 17, 2015) a 21 year old white supremacist and mass murderer by the name of Dylann Roof walked into a legendary black church in Charleston, South Carolina and viciously murdered nine black people via gunfire who were attending a weekly bible reading class at the church, and who had actually innocently allowed the murderer to join them in study and prayer for an entire hour before he unleashed his carnage.

What follows is a series of articles and commentary about this heinous incident and its horrific aftermath from the pages of the Panopticon Review and many other media sources from the date of the assault until today. Don't ever forget what happened here and what it means for all of us whether we want to properly recognize it or not. It is this terrifying country and society and its actual values, actual policies, and actual history that is 100% responsible for the creation, maintenance, support, defense, andand mass production of the millions of Dylann Roofs who actually inhabit this nation (and have ALWAYS inhabited this nation) whether they are well armed as Roof was or not. THINK about that and what it really means as you reflect on the meaning(s) of the events of June 17, 2015 and everything that has transpired in this ruthlessly pathological society SINCE that date...IN THE MEANTIME: Stay tuned...and PASS THE WORD...

Kofi

IN ETERNAL HONOR AND LOVING MEMORY OF THE NINE BEAUTIFUL HUMAN BEINGS WHO WERE SLAUGHTERED ON JUNE 17, 2015

PLEASE REMEMBER AND HOLD DEEP IN YOUR HEARTS AND SOULS WHAT THESE WONDROUS SOULS MEANT AND CONTINUE TO MEAN NOT ONLY TO THEIR BELOVED FAMILY, FRIENDS AND COMMUNITY BUT TO THE REST OF US WHO STILL CHERISH LOVE, DIGNITY, GRACE AND HUMAN DECENCY WHEREVER IT RESIDES

AND PLEASE DON'T FORGET WHO AND MOST IMPORTANTLY WHAT WAS AND IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR UNTIMELY DEATHS IN A NATION AND SOCIETY THAT FAR TOO OFTEN EMBODIES AND REPRESENTS THE POLAR OPPOSITE OF THE PEOPLE THEY RUTHLESSLY ASSAULT AND VICTIMIZE. THESE MALEVOLENT FORCES MUST BE CONFRONTED AND DEFEATED IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY EVERYWHERE…

Kofi

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/church-shooting-victims/16/

U.S.

South Carolina church shooting victims
by Christina Capatides
June 18, 2015 
CBS News

 

The Nine Shooting Victims of Dylann Roof. 
CBS NEWS

Six women and three men were killed in the shooting the night of June 17, 2015 at historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

On the evening of June 17, 2015, authorities say Dylann Roof, 21, joined a prayer meeting inside the historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina then opened fire fatally shooting nine people.

An eyewitness told authorities that Roof stood up in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and said he was there to shoot black people. He then made a series of derogatory remarks, CBS News senior investigative producer Pat Milton reports.

 
Rev. Clementa Pinckney
Facebook

Six women and three men were killed in the church rampage, including Rev. Clementa Pinckney (seen here). Pinckney, 41, served as pastor for Emanuel AME, in addition to his role as a state senator for District 45.

In 1999, Ebony Magazine named Pinckney one of the 30 African-American leaders of the future.

Pinckney, a magna cum laude graduate of Allen University, was a married father of two. In 1997, he was elected to the State House of Representatives at age 23, making him the youngest African-American legislator in South Carolina history.

 
Rev. Clementa Pinckney
Randall Hill/Reuters

Rev. Clementa Pinckney (R) hugs a congregation member during the Watch Night service at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on December 31, 2012.

South Carolina Rep. Alan D. Clemmons, who worked with Pincknet over the past 13 years, expressed his shock and grief over his friend's death. "His loss shakes me and I'm confused and angered and upset that we've lost a true son of South Carolina," he said.

 
Rev. Clementa Pinckney
Randall Hill/Reuters

Rev. Clementa Pinckney speaks during the Watch Night service at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on December 31, 2012.

"He never had anything bad to say about anybody, even when I thought he should," State House Minority leader Todd Rutherford told the Associated Press. "He was always out doing work either for his parishioners or his constituents. He touched everybody."

 
Cynthia Hurd 

 

Family

Officials with the Charleston County Public Library announced that the library manager at their facility was also killed in the shooting. CCPL identified her as 54-year-old Cynthia Hurd and released the following statement:

"Cynthia worked with Charleston County Public Library 31 years, serving as branch manager of the John L. Dart Branch from 1990-2011 before becoming manager of the St. Andrews Regional Library. Her loss is incomprehensible, and we ask for prayers for her family, her co-workers, her church and this entire community as we come together to face this tragic loss.

"To honor our co-worker and all those lost, Charleston County Public Library's 16 locations are closed today, Thursday, June 18, 2015."

Cynthia Hurd

 

Charleston County Public Library

Cynthia Hurd was the sister of former North Carolina Sen. Malcolm Graham. He released the following statement on his sisters death:

"My sister, Ms. Cynthia Marie Graham-Hurd, was a victim of the senseless hate crime at Emanuel AME Church. It is unimaginable that she would walk into church and not return. But that's who she was - a woman of faith. This is a very difficult time for our family, and Cynthia will be sorely missed. Our family is close-knit, and our faith will see us through. I also extend condolences to the other families of Emanuel AME Church and the city of Charleston who have been affected by this inconceivable tragedy.

"My family and I appreciate the thoughts and prayers from people across North Carolina and South Carolina."

Tywanza Sanders

Facebook

Tywanza Sanders, 26, has been reported as the third victim. Sanders worked at Smitty's Super Seven Barber in Charleston.

"I've been up all night," Michele Gray said of learning her best friend, Tywanza Sanders, was killed in the deadly rampage. "My brother called me and it was shock, disbelief. I was like 'you're lying. This cannot happen to us, cannot happen to his family'. I'm at a loss for words to even explain how I feel."

 
Tywanza Sanders

 

Michele Gray

Church shooting victim Tywanza Sanders is seen here in a photograph, provided by his best friend Michele Gray.

Sanders was also an alum of Allen University. In a statement to CBS News, the school's president, Lady June Cole, said that 26-year-old, a 2014 graduate in business administration, was also killed.

"He was a quiet, well-known student who was committed to his education," Cole said. "He presented a warm and helpful spirit as he interacted with his colleagues. Mr. Sanders was participating in the Bible Study session at Mother Emanuel church at the time of the shooting."

On his Instagram account Sanders described himself as a businessman, college grad, poet, artist and barber. He added in his profile that he is living life where God takes him.

 
Sharonda Singleton

 
CBS News

The fourth reported victim, Sharonda Singleton, 45, was the head coach of the girls' track and field at Goose Creek High School.

She also worked as a speech and language pathologist at the school.

"Mrs. Singleton was a true professional at Goose Creek High School," said Principal Jimmy Huskey. "She cared about her students and was an advocate for them, always willing to listen to and talk with them. She was always there with a smile and ready to help. Mrs. Singleton will be deeply missed by the 'Gator Nation' and we can never replace her as a member of our team."

Sharonda Singleton

 
CBS News

The Berkeley County School District released a statement on Singleton's death, which reads in part:

"Sharonda Singleton, a speech/language pathologist and the head girls' track coach at Goose Creek High School, who touched the lives of students and colleagues alike, leaves a void that is impossible to fill."

Goose Creek Principal Jimmy Huskey said she was so dedicated she was at work before 8 a.m. and typically didn't leave until 8 p.m.

"She had a big smile," Huskey said. "Her No. 1 concern was always the students. She made a difference in the lives of children. She cannot be replaced here at this school.

 
Sharonda Singleton

Goose Creek Gazette

Sharonda Singleton was the mother of three and had run track herself as a student at South Carolina State University, helping lead her team to a conference championship.

According to the Post and Courier, her oldest son, Chris Singleton, is a Charleston Southern sophomore baseball player.

"She loved baseball and loved Chris," Goose Creek baseball coach Chris Pond said. "She loved everyone and always had a positive attitude about everything."

On Thursday Chris Singleton stood in front of cameras at the Charleston Southern baseball field to speak about his mother.

"We are mourning right now, but I know we will get through it," he said. "My mom was a God fearing woman. She loved everybody with all her heart."

"Love is always stronger than hate," he added.
Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor

LinkedIn

Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, worked as the admissions coordinator at Southern Wesleyan University's Charleston learning center. The University's President Todd Voss issued a statement about Middleton-Doctor upon news of her death:

"Always a warm and enthusiastic leader, DePayne truly believed in the mission of SWU to help students achieve their potential by connecting faith with learning... Our prayers go out to family and friends. This is a great loss for our students and the Charleston region."

Middleton-Doctor began work at SWU's Charleston learning center in December 2014. She received her BA in biology and life sciences from Columbia College and was a SWU alumna, having received her masters degree in management from SWU in 1994. She is an experienced grant writer, having worked with local school districts as a consultant.

She also worked for local and state agencies in various roles and as data manager/analyst for the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).

Rev. Daniel Simmons

 

Twitter

Rev. Daniel Simmons, 74, who was also shot in the historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, succumbed to his wounds at a nearby hospital.

He was a retired pastor of several Charleston churches. A parishioner at the Greater Zion AME Church in Awendaw, where Simmons served as pastor from 2004-2009, remembered him as a talented teacher and compassionate leader.

"He was a by-the-book person," said church officer and financial secretary Patricia Brown. "He said the only way you really stay out of trouble is if you go by the rules."

At Greater Zion, Brown said the 74-year-old grandfather led weekly bible studies and helped the church establish a housing ministry and a hot meal program for those in need.

She said her church is planning a memorial service for Simmons on Sunday.

"I think the whole state's in shock, and we're in shock here as well," Brown said. "It's just a very sad thing."

Susan Jackson

 

Michael Skolnik via Twitter

Susan Jackson, 87, was also among the nine victims shot to death at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, June 17, 2015. She was a longtime church member and sang in the choir.

Her grandson Tim Jackson, who she recently visited, told Cleveland television station WEWS that his grandmother was a loving, giving woman with a great smile.

"It's just hard to process that my grandmother had to leave Earth this way," he said. "It's real, real hard. It's challenging because I don't believe she deserved to go this way."

Jackson, who was fond of playing slot machines, was scheduled to go on a church-sponsored bus trip to Chicago on Sunday and was looking forward to going to the top of the Willis Tower, said Jean Jackson, an associate member of the church.

 
Ethel Lance
Michael Skolnik via Facebook

Ethel Lance, 70, was a Charleston native who had been a member of the church for most of her life. She and Susan Jackson were cousins. She retired after working for more than 30 years on the housekeeping staff at the city's Gaillard Auditorium.

She had served as a sexton at the church for the last five years, helping to keep the historic building clean. She was also a lover of gospel music. "She was a God-fearing woman," said granddaughter Najee Washington, 23, who lived with Lance. "She was the heart of the family, and she still is. She is a very caring, giving and loving woman. She was beautiful inside and out." Lance had five children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Myra Thompson

 
WSPA

Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten said Thursday the other victim was Myra Thompson, 59.

In a Facebook postThursday, Archbishop Foley Beach of the Anglican Church in North America wrote, "Please join me in praying for the Rev. Anthony Thompson, Vicar of Holy Trinity REC (ACNA) Church in Charleston, his family, and their congregation, with the killing of his wife, Myra, in the Charleston shootings last night."

Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., released a statementexpressing their condolences, stating Thompson was a member of the 102-year-old organization. According to the press release, she was a member of the Charleston Alumnae Chapter and was initiated into the Sorority through the Gamma Upsilon Chapter at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C. in 1977. She was a Diamond Life Member. The statement said her daughter, Denise Quarles, and sister, Eunice Coakley-Gupton, are also members.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: How the Gradual Rise of Fascism in the United States Over the Past Four Decades Has Now Metastasized into a A Monstrous Nation State Where the Imposed Unity Of the Political Economy of Global Capitalism and the Hegemonic Ideological, Social, and Cultural Force of White Supremacy Has Congealed Into a Massive Domestic and International/Imperialist Engine of Oppression, Exploitation, and Corruption

https://zeteo.com/p/fascism-doesnt-always-arrive-by-force?publication_id=2325511&post_id=217396019&isFreemail=false&r=2x7g74&triedRedirect=true



Fascism Doesn’t Always Arrive by Force. Sometimes It Comes as Law

 
A visit to the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam showed me how changes in the law were used by the Nazis to push their agenda. It’s a warning from history we must heed before it’s too late.

by Kim Wehle
September 27, 2026
ZETEO


Trump signs executive orders on his first day back in office on Jan. 20, 2025. Photo by Jabin Botsford /The Washington Post via Getty Images

The word “fascism” is a frightening one, bringing to mind images of Nazi-controlled Europe during World War II. One dictionary definition describes it as “a populist political philosophy … that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”

In Poland and many other countries, the Nazis infamously cordoned off sections of cities, known as “ghettos” or “Jewish residential quarters,” where Jews were held in horrific conditions, food was rationed, and forced labor was compulsory. In Warsaw alone, almost 500,000 Jews and Romanis were crammed into a confined space and subjected to German police and SS (i.e., the Nazi paramilitary, or “Schutzstaffel”) control before their deportation to concentration and extermination camps.

Although the U.S. federal government now has upwards of 65,000 people in detention camps – over 70% of whom, including children, have no criminal record, and thousands of whose names have been wiped from federal databases – the notion that the Trump administration could one day round up, confine to concentration camps, and even kill disfavored citizens remains unfathomable. Fascist? America? Not possible.

But the Nazis did not just use ghettos to impose fascist control. In places like occupied Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands, they also did it by operation of law.

In the United States, Trump has already signed at least 285 executive orders and 184 presidential proclamations during his second term, plus numerous additional presidential memoranda and other directives, including ones that attempted to end birthright citizenship and take over nationwide elections (both efforts stalled in the Supreme Court); targeted law firms, agency personnel and private individuals for their supposed “weaponization” of government under the Biden administration and other “harmful activity”; and, perhaps most chillingly, directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces and other federal agencies to disrupt and investigate individuals and organizations purportedly involved in “domestic” terrorism, including any exhibiting “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” unacceptable views on immigration, race and gender, and hostility toward “American values.”

The National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, which I toured last year while on a Fulbright grant in the Netherlands, poignantly tells the story of how changes in the law quietly operated to justify mass murder. It is housed in the former Hervormde Kweekschool – a site from which hundreds of Jewish children were secretly passed to the resistance from an adjacent daycare building where they were awaiting transfer to the Nazi death camps (many more were ultimately murdered). The school sat between the daycare center and the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater used by the Nazis as a processing center from which tens of thousands of adult victims were sent to killing sites.

A photograph taken at the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam on March 5, 2024, shows box files containing the names and other details of Jewish people in the Netherlands that were delivered to Dutch bureaucracy and to the Nazis. Photo by Nick Gammon/AFP via Getty Images

One of the museum’s rooms is covered with a bespoke wallpaper consisting of the text of hundreds of laws that the Nazi-occupied country imposed from May 10, 1940 – the date Hitler invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Luxembourg – to January of 1945, when the final evacuation of surviving prisoners from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp began. The exhibit coldly displays how Dutch Jews were surgically and methodically stripped of their legal rights and freedoms, and ultimately their lives, over time.

 
The Parallels to Today

Some of the parallels with contemporary America are, of course, necessarily imperfect – limited, approximate, and in some respects quite inexact. The circumstances are in no way equivalent, and the historical comparisons hardly establish that the United States today is repeating the horrific history of Nazi-occupied Europe. But certain features of the rhetoric and sequence of events graphically pasted across the museum’s walls were sufficiently striking to warrant serious pause and reflection today. Consider, for example, the following:

 
Trump’s DC Invasion

When he announced on Aug. 11, 2025, that he was temporarily taking control of the Washington, DC, police department and deploying 800 National Guard troops to engage civilians, Trump justified his actions by claiming that the city was overrun by “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth.”

According to historians, in February 1941, “[p]rotected by the German authorities and with a show of violence, Dutch Nazi paramilitary groups paraded through Amsterdam, provoking resistance from gangs of Jewish youths and communists.” The Reich commissioner for the occupied Netherlands reportedly used the incident as a “pretext for sealing off the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam on February 12, 1941, at 6 a.m—not even doctors were allowed to leave.”

 
Crackdown on Free Speech and Free Press

Trump has taken an unprecedented number of steps to clamp down on free speech and the media, including threatening Democrats in Congress with investigations, punishing law firms that represent his perceived political enemies, arresting student protesters for Palestinian-related speech, stripping funding for public broadcasting, censoring government websites, banning CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House, and suing the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, the New York Times, CNN, BBC, the Washington Post, and Paramount/CBS News for “defamation.”

On the first day of the Nazi occupation, Jewish journalists in the Netherlands and members of the national press corps were fired, followed by bans on the employment of Jews in government service and a general ban on Jewish newspapers.

As early as June 6, 2025, Trump cracked down on protesters gathered outside a federal building in downtown Los Angeles demanding an end to immigration raids. According to ABC News, “[v]ideo footage shows protesters vandalizing the building, heckling police and throwing bottles in and other objects at officers who used shields to protect themselves. Police in riot gear are seen confronting protesters with batons and what appeared to be tear gas launchers.” The next day, Trump signed a presidential memorandum authorizing deployment of roughly 4,200 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines to “address the lawlessness.” The city’s mayor and state’s governor objected.

On Feb. 22 and 23 of 1941, Dutch historian Frank Van Vree writes, “German police troops picked up 427 Jewish men from their homes and the streets around the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, in the heart of the Jewish quarter. The men who had been arrested were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; it did not take long for the first reports of their deaths to reach Amsterdam.” Two days later, a mass strike was held in protest. “The Germans broke the strikes with violence and intimidation, in the course of which nine people were killed and dozens wounded. Many of the strikers were arrested and the towns where protests had taken place were subjected to heavy fines. Later, this was followed by the execution of several strike leaders, most of them communists, and other resistance fighters.”

 
Mass Deportation

On March 15, 2025, Trump sent 238 Venezuelan nationals to a mega-prison in El Salvador, claiming they were gang members and terrorists who now fell outside the jurisdiction of the United States and the U.S. Constitution. They were later returned to Venezuela on July 18, reporting that they experienced torture during their months-long imprisonment in a third country at the behest of the United States.

In January of 1942, a decision was made by the Nazis that “it was time for the next step: the total extraction of the Jewish population from Dutch authority, their estrangement from the national community and, subsequently, their deportation as ‘non-citizens,’ first to transit camps in the Netherlands, beyond the sight of non-Jewish citizens, and subsequently to the recently conquered regions in Eastern Europe.” In March, the most senior SS officer in the Netherlands “announced that the Jews no longer fell under the authority of the Dutch government, meaning that they were de facto stripped of all their civil rights.”

Van Vree explains that “[a]ll subsequent measures were seamlessly linked to this strategy, such as the comprehensive travel ban for Jews (5 June), the ban on shopping outside certain hours (12 June), the introduction of a curfew (12 June), and the ban on telephones and the ban on visiting non-Jews (6 July).”

Trump stated at a press briefing alongside Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele: “The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places.”

Within a year of declaring Jews outside the protections of Dutch civil rights laws, “93,000 citizens from the Netherlands whom the Nazis had identified as ‘Jews’ were transported to the extermination camps; 20,000 of them had been taken away from labor camps, hospitals, institutions, and other social organizations.” That number eventually climbed to 107,000.

 
Crackdown on Education

On April 23, 2025, Trump issued an executive order titled “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education,” which is ostensibly designed to “hold accountable” any “institutions seeking accreditation” that engage in unlawful discrimination in accreditation-related activity under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. The order focuses on any diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements by accreditors and threatens to suspend or terminate the accreditors’ status if they continue to utilize DEI policies.

On Sept. 15, 1942, Jewish professors and students were barred from schools and universities. When Professor Rudolph Cleveringa, Dean of the Faculty of Law at Leiden University, made a speech denouncing the dismissal of Jewish colleagues on Nov. 26, 1940, he was arrested and imprisoned.

On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” It directs federal agencies to identify all federal funding streams – grants, contracts, and other funding – that directly or indirectly support or subsidize instruction on “gender ideology” and “critical race theory” in K-12 curricula, teacher training, certification, licensing, and employment. Schools or education agencies found to be supporting that instruction could have federal funding pulled.

In September 1940, a commission was established and tasked with “‘cleansing’ (i.e., censoring) school textbooks of anti-German passages or passages that could be understood as potentially detrimental to the occupation authority, such as those praising the House of Orange [the Dutch royal family] or those written by Jewish authors.”

 
Crackdown on Immigration

On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” as part of his effort to crack down on what he described as a “flood of illegal immigration.” The same day, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded a Biden-era policy protecting churches, schools, and hospitals from immigration enforcement, giving ICE agents authority to take action in any of these spaces using “common sense” – a “common sense” that apparently means masked plainclothes agents abducting, killing, and injuring both immigrants and U.S. citizens. (It’s worth noting what Polish writer Cezary Jan Strusiewicz wrote last year: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement is nothing like the Sturmabteilung, a.k.a. Hitler’s Brownshirts.” The Brownshirts “wore brown shirts,” after all. “ICE? Not so much. No official uniform, no clear identification, nothing that says, ‘I am a recognized member of a government agency, and what I am doing is legal.’”)

In addition to domestically imprisoning tens of thousands, the Trump administration has deported more than 25,000 people to at least 29 “third” countries unknown to them — including El Salvador, South Sudan, Uganda and Eswatini (an absolute monarchy) — that human rights groups and lawyers have flagged as unusually dangerous due to conflict, notoriously harsh prisons, or poor human rights records.

On Sept. 15, 1941, an order was issued in the Netherlands banning Jews from public pools, parks, libraries, and museums, and confining Jewish artists to performing only for Jewish audiences on “Jewish premises.” The authorized venues included Hollandsche Schouwburg – the theatre later used to traffic tens of thousands to their deaths. The Nazis renamed it the “Jewish Schouwburg” in October.

 
Will We Learn From History?

It is easy to wonder how this could possibly happen under the noses of so many well-meaning – but relatively safe and secure – Dutch citizens. Van Vree writes of those early stages of the Dutch occupation:

[T]he dominant theme was one of “magnanimity”; there seemed to be no reason to panic. Dutch officials clung to statements made by individual German authorities, who said that they could see no “Jewish question” in the Netherlands. All the same, those who were sensitive to them could not fail to notice the signs: the seemingly limited administrative measures that nevertheless revealed the true nature and intentions of the occupying regime.

In 1905, Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Years later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an axiomatic expert in U.S. law and the Constitution, penned the following in a private letter: “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

It’s time to pay heed to history.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kimberly Wehle, Zeteo’s legal contributor and author of ‘Constitution in Crisis,’ is a constitutional law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Follow her on Bluesky.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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