More than six weeks after a mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, it’s clear it’s going to take a lawsuit to have the murderer’s manifesto made public. The contents remain secret, despite calls from local, state, and national figures for authorities to allow the public to see what was in the journal the shooter left behind in her car before entering The Covenant School, where she killed three adults and three 9-year-old children. The female shooter had assumed a transgender identity, purporting to be a man, and had attended the school as a child.
The Tennessee Firearms Association and the National Police Association have sued to get access to the journal. They’ve now been joined by America First Legal and argue that both the city of Nashville and Davidson County are violating the state’s Public Records Act by not releasing the manifesto. At the same time, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is suing the FBI to get access to the document.
Corporate media outlets and anti-hate crime advocates, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), usually trumpet the contents of such manifestos and seize on any evidence they can to portray mass killers as part of a network of far-right extremists that pose a threat to democracy. But they have been conspicuous by their silence about the issue of the Nashville manifesto.
The reason for that silence is painfully obvious, and the authorities’ explanations that the manifesto is part of an ongoing investigation are patently disingenuous. The shooter’s journal likely constitutes evidence that her reason for committing the slaughter at The Covenant School was her animus against Christians and their beliefs. That would make plain that what happened at The Covenant School was an anti-Christian hate crime.
Avoiding Scrutiny
But unlike the eagerness to talk about the motives of other mass shooters, doing so in this case would demonstrate that the transgender movement, which has captured the sympathy and loyalty of the media, the gatekeepers of our popular culture, and even the Biden administration, contains a violent and dangerous element that poses a threat to public safety as well as to the nation’s children. For those who have embraced the dubious notion that normalizing gender dysphoria is, in President Joe Biden’s words, “the civil rights issue of our time,” telling the truth about the shooter would expose their cause to the kind of scrutiny they wish to avoid.
Those seeking to keep the shooter’s manifesto sealed are in the business of attempting to impose sexual and transgender indoctrination on school children. That has led to what author Abigail Shrier, in her 2020 book “Irreversible Damage,” exposed as leading to an epidemic of gender dysphoria among young girls.
Revealing Motives in Other Cases
Authorities throughout the country usually allow the public to see what was going on in a killer’s mind if it was directly relevant to crimes like mass shootings. In cases like the May 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting or the October 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue murders, there was little hesitation in revealing the motives for those atrocities even if the former’s talk about the “great replacement theory” or the latter’s antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews were as deranged as they were dangerous.
There is an argument against giving those who commit such atrocities the publicity they crave, which seems to play a role in inspiring other disturbed individuals to commit similar crimes. Yet that is a point of view that rarely if ever prevails when it comes to events that can be seized upon to make a point that the corporate press thinks needs to be highlighted.
But The Covenant School murders have been treated differently than similar crimes elsewhere. In this case, the victims and their families have not been the focus of national sympathy or given invitations to the White House, where they can be used as props in political dog and pony shows aimed at promoting efforts to restrict gun rights or to highlight right-wing extremism.
To the contrary, the immediate reaction from most of the media to the crime was to worry about its effect on other purportedly transgender people, not on the victims or their families. Other Christians who might be similarly targeted for what many in the transgender movement think is their intolerance were of no interest to the chattering classes.
Stark Contrast with Texas Shooting
That provides a stark contrast to their attitudes toward the most recent such crime, the shooting that took place in Allen, Texas, on May 6 when a gunman named Mauricio Garcia opened fire in an outlet mall and killed eight people. Since then, the propaganda press and others have been at pains to portray Garcia, who is obviously Hispanic, as somehow being actually white because of what appear to be neo-Nazi beliefs.
That a “person of color” would also be a white supremacist “incel” who had Nazi tattoos is disturbing — and hard to believe. But it also illustrates how the left’s obsession with defining everyone solely by their racial origins — as is required by the woke diversity, equity, and inclusion catechism of intersectionality and critical race theory — is out of whack.
Double Standard
Newspapers such as The New York Times thought the question of Garcia’s motive was essential to understanding his crime, and the ADL thought it important that the public understand that the killer “embraced misogyny, antisemitism and white supremacy.”
It’s not unreasonable for them and others who make a living by seeking to shine a light on extremism to do so in this case if the evidence backs this up. But what isn’t reasonable or defensible is their distinct lack of interest or even curiosity when it comes to the motives of a person who slaughtered six people including three children at a school.
The silence of the corporate media and groups like the ADL about the shooter’s motives makes plain that as far as they are concerned, mass shootings are only to be discussed if they can be used to further their political agenda about guns or white supremacists. If the victims are Christians and the murderer is a disturbed transgender person with a grudge against those who believe in traditional values, then the motives must be kept secret or go undiscussed even if they are made public.
Hypocrisy of this sort may no longer be shocking, but it is nevertheless still egregious when you consider what would have happened had the shooter shared the same twisted beliefs as Mauricio Garcia. Had that been so, the media would have never stopped talking about the three murdered children and three murdered adults. But since their killer was a member of a group that must at all times be spoken of as oppressed victims, and the actual victims were members of a group that is considered beneficiaries of “white privilege,” evidence of the motive behind the crime must be suppressed or ignored.
The public has a right to know why the shooter committed a mass murder. That they aren’t being told the answer is just one more reason why anyone who hasn’t drunk the woke Kool-Aid about race and transgender ideology no longer believes a word the leftist media and organizations like the ADL say.
