Dylann Roof is not an original thinker. Based on a manifesto on the lastrhodesian.com, apparently written by the alleged Charleston killer, Roof has a shallow mind that credulously absorbed whatever he read on racist websites. But one particular strand of his thinking has roots beyond white supremacy proper, in mainstream conservatism: Roof repeatedly links his racial separatism with support for colonial regimes that once ruled large swaths of Africa. In one photo, he’s shown wearing patches bearing the flags of apartheid South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia. The manifesto upholds apartheid as a model for how a minority of whites could dominate a black majority: “Look at South Africa, and how such a small minority held the black in apartheid for years and years.”

The idea that whites in America have a natural affinity with white colonialists in Africa did not spring from the neo-Nazi far-right, but rather the conservative movement that coalesced around National Review in the 1950s. If Roof saw himself as “the last Rhodesian,” then the magazine's conservatives of were the first American Rhodesians.

In 1957, National Review published an infamous editorial supporting Jim Crow segregation. What’s rarely remembered is the editorial explicitly justified white supremacy in the American South with a defense of British colonial rule in Africa, both allegedly being cases where the “superior” race has a right to dominate. It is worth quoting at length:

The central question that emerges–and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal–is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own.

Of course, these colonial regimes were being challenged no less than Jim Crow segregation. South Africa codified apartheid law in 1948, and immediately faced international criticism and a fierce resistance movement. In 1965, in order to insure continued rule by the white minority, the colonial government in Rhodesia issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and set up a state where whites had overwhelming political power. The white supremacist regime in Rhodesia was almost immediately subject to sanctions and isolation, led by Britain but including the larger international community.

Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia had very few allies abroad, so they found themselves turning to National Review, which was emerging as a major voice of the American right. The magazine's justification of white rule in Africa is often defense as an outgrowth of the Cold War, with South Africa and Rhodesia being bulwarks against Soviet expansion in Africa. But this explanation ignores the true emotional depth of the magazine’s ties with white minority rule.