With a few clicks on Amazon, you can acquire copies of the manifestos of Theodore John Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, and Adolf Hitler, a man who needs no introduction. But there is someone whose manifesto you can’t buy anywhere. You are not even supposed to lay eyes upon what this person left behind. So explosive are the thoughts and writings of this individual, that monumental efforts have been taken to ensure they never see the light of day. 

If you’ve given up guessing the identity of this person, here’s the answer: Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who also went by the name “Aiden” as a self-identified transgender man. Hale, who was born and died a female, was responsible for a March shooting at a Presbyterian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, that left six dead—three students and three staff members. Seven, if you count Hale, who was shot and killed at the scene by police.

Now, in a bizarre twist of events, conservative talk show host Steven Crowder apparently released Hale’s leaked writings, which had been withheld from the public by the authorities. Crowder is a comedian and notorious provocateur, so there was skepticism about his “exclusive” at first. A sick joke by a bad actor?

Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell wasn’t amused. He said he directed Metro Nashville Law Director Wally Dietz “to initiate an investigation into how these images could have been released.” The Nashville Metropolitan Police Department released a statement from Chief John Drake that also seemed to verify Crowder’s find. “I am greatly disturbed by today’s unauthorized releasee of three pages of writings from the Covenant shooter,” he said in a press release.

It is hard to write about things like this for a monthly print magazine. By the time my column is filed and published, new facts may emerge, and I could look the fool. It could come to light that this was an elaborate hoax by Crowder, in which event I would be the first to contribute money to the legal effort to grind him into a fine powder. However, Chief Drake did effectively confirm the authenticity of the pages and, more importantly, the “manifesto” itself is not the main character in this story. Rather, it is the psychodrama that erupted in the aftermath of the murders.

Before the bodies of Hale’s victims had gone cold, the media formed a phalanx around the “transgender community,” which to them seemed as endangered as the African forest elephant, although the pachyderm lacks such a powerful lobby in its corner. It was reminiscent of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the American ruling class’s key concern following the murder of 3,000 people on American soil was whether the public would react by becoming Islamophobic.

“Shortly after news broke Monday of a fatal shooting at a private Christian Nashville elementary school, police said the suspect was transgender,” read an NBC News lede the day after the killings. “This detail, according to trans people in the state, has poured fuel on an already combustive environment that has led many of them to fear for their safety.” You get the impression that they feared for the safety of transgendered people more than they mourned the children—all under 10 years-old—murdered by Hale. 

The New York Times and CNN carefully avoided “misgendering” Hale in their reporting—the former actually apologized for not initially using her preferred male pronouns, because that was apparently the most important part of covering the bloodbath. MSNBC also issued a correction after using “female” and “her” in reference to Hale. “A previous post about the Nashville Christian school shooting included initial information from police officials about the suspect’s gender,” the outlet reported. “Those officials have since noted that the shooter was transgender.” What a reckless grammatical error. Someone could have been killed.

This pronoun lunacy obfuscated what should have been the obvious takeaway from Hale’s story: that violence is endogenous to far-left movements, including the transgender movement. The self-conception of oneself as a victim of society, which lies at the heart of all left-wing ideology, enables the most unspeakable acts of cruelty toward perceived oppressors. Only in that framework could someone like Hale perceive small children as her enemies, villains in a narrative of oppression who are no longer even human.

There is no limit to the amount of pain and suffering that can be inflicted by individuals who see themselves as victims, because all their actions, no matter how barbarous, can be justified to themselves. That is why Hale wrote, “God let my wrath take over my anxiety,” before carrying out mass murder. In her mind, she was dispensing a kind of justice. That is also why fantasies of violence are common in this movement. 

Indeed, before the killings, transgender activists announced plans to hold a “Day of Vengeance” protest. According to the Daily Mail, transgender supporters of the event posted a picture of a heavily armed individual with an assault rifle and threatening to “kill christcucks.” That wasn’t even the worst of it. Two other trans activists posted footage and photos of themselves with rifles, which appeared “to be in direct response to the Nashville shooting,” Daily Mail reported. One said that they “will use the weapon for ‘protection’ against ‘transphobes’ who target them.” But what constitutes “targeting” that could trigger violent reprisal? Misgendering? Supporting policies to prohibit the administration of drugs and surgeries to children experiencing confusion about their gender? Is someone pumped with cross-sex hormones in the right state of mind to discern between real and perceived threats?

The self-conception of oneself as a victim of society, which lies at the heart of all left-wing ideology, enables the most unspeakable acts of cruelty toward perceived oppressors.

Ironically, the “Day of Vengeance” was canceled in the end after organizers cited a “credible threat to life and safety.” Always the victims, even when armed to the teeth. 

The contents of the pages initially produced by Crowder are disturbing but unsurprising. Hale, a former student of the school she targeted, expressed deep resentment toward white people. “Wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little faggots w/ your white privileges,” she scrawled in a notebook. She remarked about the “mop yellow hair” of the children she intended to kill. There was a deep, burning resentment toward the normal in her scribblings. Beyond that, Hale created a timeline, a sequence of how she wanted the shooting to go. Chief Drake said in a press conference following the attack that police recovered “a manifesto … and a map of how all of this was going to play out.” 

But the most alarming portion of Hale’s writings was the suggestion she had attempted this before. “There were several times I could have been caught especially b—ack in the summer of 2021,” she wrote.

Are there more clues as to what that could mean? Could this tragedy have been avoided? Were there obvious red flags? An inventory sheet shows police seized several journals, notepads, a memoir, a “psyche folder,” a suicide note, and much more during their investigation of Hale. Presumably there are answers there. 

And yet, the most the public has seen to date is what has been published by Crowder, an act that triggered yet another psychodrama centering around the endangered transgender community. Phil Williams, the chief investigative reporter of NewsChannel 5, tweeted:

Multiple sources have told me that the selective leak of three pages of the #CovenantSchool shooting “manifesto” is EXTREMELY misleading. People who have read the whole thing say “there’s something in there for everybody.” Another, “She hated everybody.”

How comforting.

After Chief Drake made his initial statement, the Nashville Police Department announced it had placed seven officers on “administrative assignment” over the leak, which was confirmed by WSMV4 Investigates. It would be a mistake to get too angry at the police. After all, it was a team of Nashville cops who heroically hunted down and killed Hale. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that there has been a concerted effort at the level of leadership to suppress the evidence she left behind. It doesn’t take a genius or more leaks to figure out why.

Transgenderism is so often either a form of mental illness or indicative of underlying issues, like mood and anxiety disorders or trauma. But instead of treating it as something that requires psychiatric care, we have endeavored to normalize and impose it on society in totalitarian fashion, asking people to disabuse themselves of reality as we play along with the charade. In other words, we take people who are unwell and feed their sickness, telling them that the reason they are miserable is because of “privileged” white Americans who won’t accept their contorted vision of reality.

Hale is someone who took that message to heart. Her writings evinced that pathology, and that is why they must be kept under lock and key. But I did not need to read them to know that. ◆