ABSTRACT
The New York Times published evidence online from the Dylann Roof trial, including footage of Roof entering and exiting the church before and after the shooting, a video of him being interviewed for two hours by the Federal Bureau of Investigation after his arrest, and his 26-page journal, manifesto, and hand-gun application. By November 2016, Dylann Roof is facing 33 federal charges including from hate crime laws punishable by death. Concerns about Roof’s self-representation are effectively about his refusal to tell a certain story about the shooting, a story of mental illness. A dynamic intensified within post-9/11 US conditions whereby ‘mass shootings’ need to be differentiated from ‘terrorism’; revealing Roof and other national attackers as politically motivated interferes with representations of Islam as the source of terror, as the enemy against which ‘America’ stands tall.
