We’ve shown how WorldNetDaily obsessed over the alleged manifesto of Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale, demanding its release because Hale was allegedly transgender and it could be used to disparage all transgender people as violent psychopaths. That concern-trolling continued in an Oct. 17 article by Bob Unruh:
Students now have been scheduled to return to classes at The Covenant School in Nashville early in 2024, less than a year after a shooter killed three children and three adults in an attack on the educational facility at Covenant Presbyterian Church last March.
Audrey Hale, 28, shot her way through glass doors into the school, and fired more than 100 more rounds and destroyed the lives of Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, each 9, and Cynthia Peak, 61; Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.
Covenant students have been attending classes at Brentwood Hills Church of Christ since the attack.
But the fight over the violence, even though Hale was killed by police officers, is far from over, as there are groups that have insisted on her rantings in writing be released so the public may have the fullest information about a motive, and lawyers for parents and school have claimed releasing them would cause “harm” to students.
David Rausch, of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, said the writings are “journal-type rantings” but they remain secret, even though open-government advocates have explained state public records laws require their release.
The Tennessee Star bluntly reported that those lawyers contend the information would be so damaging to students that it would ‘”lead to suicides.”
Unruh somehow forgot to mention that the movement to demand the manifesto’s release is centered around Hale’s transgender identity and largely comes from anti-LGBTQ groups.
When right-wing garbage human Steven Crowder somehow got a hold of a few pages of Hale’s notebook — not really a manifesto — and leaked, them, Unruh was happy to hype it as “political terrorism” (and make a bit deal of and Hale’s transgender identity) in a Nov. 6 article:
The long-concealed “manifesto” of Audrey Hale, 28, the transgender woman who shot up a Christian school in Nashville earlier this year, killing three children and three adults, reveals that she hoped for a high “death count,” according to a report from social-media personality Steven Crowder.
He posted images online of what he said were copies of the document that has been withheld by authorities who say they are investigating.
[…]The fact that the document has not been available already was pointed out by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who said, “Every shooter’s manifesto should be public. There is absolutely no reason to hide this. Unless of course our government wants to hide the fact that these shooters are on SSRIs and usually brainwashed by leftist’s propaganda.”
Crowder explained in an online video the manifesto was leaked. Authorities said Hale once attended the school, and died at the scene of the shooting.
[…]Commentator Andy Ngo wrote on X, formerly Twitter,, “BREAKING: I have reviewed the manifesto of the Nashville trans school shooter (scoop first obtained by @scrowder). Audrey ‘Aiden’ Hale expressed a violent hatred of those ‘little crackers” [children] with “white privilege.'”
X user DC_Draino said on the platform, “This is why the DOJ suppressed the Nashville Manifesto. It shows how Leftist ideology radicalized a Trans shooter to murder Christian children. This was political terrorism & the Biden regime tried to cover it up We will not be silent after these children were slaughtered.”
Police earlier said Hale’s document would be released, but that has not happened but has been delayed several times, the latest over “pending litigation.”
Unruh made sure to quote another right-winger making the transgender link to violence more explicit:
At RVM News a commentary said, “Authorities have had this information for quite some time. While you’re looking at the disgusting thoughts of a mentally ill transgender murderer, ask yourself why they would keep this hidden from the public…”
Jack Cashill — who loves nothing better than a good conspiracy theory, no matter how bogus or implausible — spent his Nov. 8 column obsessing over the manifesto pages and blaming critical race theory for it:
Presuming that the manifesto fragment leaked this past week to podcaster Steven Crowder is legitimate, the answer may be that young white people like Hale have been taught to hate their own race.
At the core of critical race theory, CRT, is the notion that white people are, directly or indirectly, responsible for all the evils of the world. Complicating matters is that CRT-influenced educators are quick to assign an “identity” to students based not on their character but on their race.
Kids get the message. Either in school or through social media, they hear repeatedly that white people enslaved blacks, killed Indians and despoiled the earth.
For people of color, this message is reassuring. It absolves them of responsibility for their own personal failures and encourages them to project blame on to the white people in their midst, their fellow students included.
For white students, the message is onerous. Says Chris Rufo, the nation’s most effective CRT foe, “This ideology, critical race theory, is a cynical, pessimistic, fatalistic, entrapping ideology.”
Cashill is doing Rufo’s bidding here; he once wrote in an now apparently deleted tweet that his goal was to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category” and, thus, “to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” It’s also worth noting that Cashill has been leaning more toward race-baiting content of late, having written a VDARE-endorsed book seeking to absolve white people of racism for fleeing cities in the 1960s.
Cashill did work right-wing transgender hate into his column, declaring that by refusing to release the manifesto, “The FBI was not protecting an investigation. It was protecting a narrative”:
According to an FBI study, only 3.8% of mass shooters have been female. To prevent future such shootings, it would have been helpful to know whether Hale was taking any hormonal drugs that might have caused her to flip out.
We will likely never know. Other than Twitter, the major social media sites are blocking posts about the manifesto. To the degree that the major media talk about it at all, it is to cheer on the hunt for the “leaker.”
Hale’s entry ends: “I hope I have a high death count. Ready to die ha ha Aiden.” She/her Audrey got the death count she hoped for, but the major media and the FBI refuse to give he/him Aiden the time of day.
Cashill didn’t explain why he thinks “hormonal drugs” turn transgender people into violent killers.