On March 27, the country was rocked by yet another shooting, this time at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. Audrey Hale, 28, a former student at Covenant who identified as trans masculine, using the name "Aidan" though she was born female, claimed the lives of six people during her bloody rampage, three of them students. Hale herself was shot dead by the police when they arrived.
In the aftermath of the shooting, it turned out that Hale had left a manifesto detailing her months of planning for the attack; apparently, the act was far from a spur-of-the-moment episode of mental illness. It was cold-blooded, premeditated murder of children, full stop. She even had concerns that she could have been caught in the summer of 2021. The Metropolitan Police Department of Nashville, as well as the FBI, refused to release these handwritten documents. Now, we may know why.
This week, Steven Crowder leaked Hale’s manifesto, reading the contents of the three pages that had been leaked to him aloud on his show. The pages have been reviewed by The Post Millennial’s Andy Ngo, who has described their contents in grisly detail. The manifesto Crowder leaked is undoubtedly Hale’s work, and its authenticity has been confirmed. What is of most interest to police and Nashville's elected leaders, however, is who leaked it.
Make no mistake, the words are incendiary. The document paints a picture not merely of mental illness (the young woman was very concerned about what would happen to her stuffed animals after she died, which she fully expected to do), but of a social contagion that affects large portions of the country, and whose carriers include not just Hale, but arguably the president of the United States himself.
This is a president who instructed parents to "affirm their kids" during his first "Trans Day of Visibility" in office, and who draped the White House in a Progress Pride Flag before shaking hands with a trans influencer who then posed topless on the White House lawn.
The irony is not lost on us that, by the standards of Leftists who point fingers at conservative public figures every time a neo-Nazi shooter strikes, this makes President Joe Biden himself a stochastic terrorist, to use their meaningless phrase du jour. What’s more, we cannot help noting the irony that upon deciding she was, in fact, a white male, Hale then proceeded to shoot up a school. The Babylon Bee couldn’t have written a better headline.
Nevertheless, the contents of Hale’s manifesto are shocking, even by the standards of what we, along with so many other conservatives, speculated were Hale’s motives. A trans shooter attacking a Christian school was an event where the motives almost wrote themselves, yet Hale’s purported manifesto goes well beyond the hatred for Christians, or for traditional ideas of gender that might’ve been expected.
The manifesto seethes with hate, but it's more self-hatred than anything else.
Hale refers to her targets as “faggots” in the course of the document, even though she had identified as a lesbian before determining that she was male. She revels in the thought of “kill[ing] all you little crackers,” who, she later elaborates, are marked by the fact that they go “to fancy private schools with those fancy khakis sports backpacks w/ their daddies mustangs convertibles.”
“Wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little faggots w/your white privileges fuck you faggots,” she rails at one point.
Hale was white, attended the Covenant School herself as a child, and even made reference to keeping her belongings in backpacks. Whether they were sports backpacks will remain a riddle for the ages, but would anyone be surprised if they were?
The picture we see is of a troubled young woman who came to hate not merely her sexual orientation to the point of changing her gender identity, but also to hate the very place she spent her childhood, not to mention anyone from her social class who reminded her of herself, including children. Whether Hale was self-aware enough to realize this is beside the point; the fact is, hers was an act of what can only be described as genocidal self-hatred turned outwards.
What we need to be asking is “why?”
Why would a young woman with, to all appearances, a talent for graphic design worthy of admission to Nossi College of Art and Design, a school that bills itself as Tennessee’s “premiere art and design college,” be willing to commit such an atrocity?
How much of her hate was fueled internally and how much did she learn from external factors? A Democratic Left that swims in a sea of hatred for American "whiteness" and privilege is leaving an indelible mark on American youth, and it's one that is only getting harder to wash out as the inflammatory ideologies dig deeper into our culture.
And that is where President Biden comes in. Biden has repeatedly railed against the “venom and violence” of white supremacist ideology, branding it “the single most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland.” He has described white supremacy as a “poison running through our body politic [that] has been allowed to fester and grow.” To the extent that he was thinking at all when he said this, Biden presumably was thinking of events like the 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, in which the shooter—Robert Bowers—left behind writings which unquestionably established him as a bona fide neo-Nazi terrorist. But if that tragic event can be spun out into evidence of a poison running through the body politic, then what does that make the anti-white hatred that consumed Audrey Hale? Are we to call her slaughter evidence of an outbreak of “non-white supremacist ideology,” or perhaps of “white masochist ideology,” seeing as it was perpetrated by a white person? People blamed President Trump for encouraging mass shooters for less; shall we blame Biden by the same standard?
These are not idle questions. The same hatred that animated Audrey Hale is also responsible for events like this past weekend’s “intifada” in DC, an honest-to-God insurrection where they demanded Biden be brought out of the White House to face them. It ended with pro-Hamas protestors scaling the White House fence and leaving vile graffiti on our nation's public monuments. Why? Because it comes from the same conviction voiced by one beleaguered student debater, who argued that the presence of a white student on the opposing team meant that their side was unfairly advantaged because they had “more whiteness” on their side:
In all such cases, the sentiment is the same: white people delenda est. Whether they’re (ironically, often non-white) Israelis fighting genocidal terrorists, students trying to win an argument, or innocent children makes no difference. The message is that they all must die, for the sake of mass mental illness masquerading as ideology. Most depressingly of all, we know that Hale’s manifesto will be ignored by smarter members of the woke Left, while the less restrained will try to spin it as the voice of a marginalized person crying out under whiteness, which they will claim is what's really responsible.
Like all race-baiters, even when their ideology produces violence, they can only conceive of one answer: wipe out the scapegoat faster. It would be pathetic, if it weren’t a worldview that has captured such massive ground in America’s elite spaces, thanks entirely to legitimization by Democrats from President Biden on down.
Biden will not address the anti-white hate he espoused now that it's seen in action. Neither will any of those who fueled his fires, such as those who called for Catholics who preferred Latin mass and parents who speak up at school board meetings to be treated with the same tools as domestic terrorists.
But these are the people who have legitimized anti-white hate, and if they will not speak against it, they must be removed from power and sent back to the fringes, where all such gaslighting purveyors of bigotry belong.
