Update (4.17.2024): The hearing to determine whether Audrey Hale’s manifesto should be released to the public is underway (some details). The public needs to see in full these writings so they can determine for themselves whether the motive behind the shooting was formed from movement ideology. There is a suspicion—in my view confirmed by the leak and fact pattern—that Hale’s writings represent an indictment of woke progressive thought’s role is motivating violent extremism. You can’t indoctrinate young people to hate and loathe themselves without expecting that some will become Audrey Hales.
On March 27, 2023, at the Covenant School, a Presbyterian Church-affiliated elementary school located in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a 28-year-old woman identifying as a transgender man named Aiden, and a former student of the school, carried out a mass shooting, killing three nine-year-old children and three adults before two officers from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD) shot and killed her.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, law enforcement officers recovered what was initially referred to as a “manifesto” attributed to Hale. However, David Rausch, the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), disabused the media of that representation; this was, he insisted, a “mischaracterization.” He instead characterized the writings as documents outlining Hale’s plan with entries that resembled journal-like rantings, insisting that there was no ideological content.
Requests for access to these documents by those who preferred to determine for themselves what these writings represented were denied by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD). The FBI, which took custody of the documents, also declined to make them available because they contained, according to a Metro Nashville councilwoman by the agency, a “blueprint of total destruction,” a design that had the potential to inspire other individuals to commit similar acts of violence. (That sounds like a manifesto.) Neither the MNPD nor the FBI have budged on the matter.
We now know, thanks to comedian Steven Crowder, host of the popular Internet show Louder with Crowder, who obtained three pages from two notebooks from a confidential source inside the MNPD, why local police and the FBI suppressed the document: it disrupts the narrative that mass shootings are the work of white supremacists. Moreover, the contents show that Rausch of the TBI misled the public. Crucially, the released pages raise a question about what the FBI meant when it said the pages contained a “blueprint of total destruction”: a blueprint for the total destruction of what?
In the manifesto, Hale looks forward to “DEATH DAY” for the “little crackers” with “white privileges.” “I’m a little nervous,” she writes on March 27, “but excited too.” She continues, “Can’t believe I’m doing this but I’m ready,” adding “I hope my victims aren’t.” Hale, who was white, writes, with optimism, “I hope I have a high death count,” before announcing: “Ready to die.” A page from a spiral notebook dated March 2 reads, “Kill those kids!!!” “Fuck you little shits. I wish to shoot you weakass dicks with your mop yellow hair. Wanna kill all you little crackers!! Bunch of little faggots with your white privileges. Fuck you faggots.” Another page, perhaps from the same notebook, details Hale’s hour-by-hour schedule for the massacre, including “get dressed,” “eat breakfast,” “prepare for attack,” and “time 2 die.”
On April 10th, in my essay Delusion to Illusion: Transitioning Disordered Personalities into Valid Identities, I note the Hale case in a comprehensive analysis of transgender terrorism. I write there that “based on the totality of the circumstances,” the motive is so obvious that, “if the manifesto does not contain a clear motive, or suggests one that doesn’t fit the circumstances, an objective observer might suspect official manipulation.” Well, we see now that the pages confirm the suspected motive. MNPD, the FBI, and the TBI have a lot to answer for, as well as the media, who appear to have seen the manifesto.
In that essay Delusion to Illusion, I also note that Islamism and trans activism (TRA) are highly similar in form and content. In a recent essay (November 6), Woke Progressivism and the Party of God, I show how TRA politics, along with antifascism and antiracism, are steered into an alliance with Islamism by a political-ideology underpinned by post-colonial studies and related species of postmodernist critical theory, such as critical race theory and queer theory. (I have written several essays on this, so be sure to browse the table of contents: https://andrewaustin.blog)
In Woke Progressivism and the Party of God, I suggest that what lies beneath the academic veneer of this brand of critical theory (not all critical theory is reactionary) is a profound anti-whiteness, coded as antiracism. I want to be more obvious in my thesis and show more explicitly how the Convent School shooting is a piece of a whole. Indeed, the anti-white bigotry comes along with anti-male bigotry, i.e., misandry, couched in a critique of patriarchy and misogyny (Embedding Misogyny and the Progressive Mind). Anti-whiteness and anti-maleness are wrapped in misanthropy, i.e., a hatred and loathing of humanity—post-humanist/trans-humanist—depicting human beings as a virus destroying the planet (The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint).
Eminem, a cultural icon for millions, provides a useful instantiation of the self-hating/loathing sentiment. The beloved rap artist says that being white is so embarrassing that he wants to kill himself. We hear something similar from the transgender community—being trapped in the wrong body will drive them to suicide unless society pretends along with them that they really are what they believe they are but can never be and support the hormonal and surgical transformation of their bodies into a bad copies of the other gender or no gender at all (Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy). The difference here of course is the guilt is heaped on others and used as emotional blackmail to manipulate the public.
Eminem has dedicated his life to what often goes by black music/culture. The culture industry, equating whiteness with western civilization, manufactures and promotes a pop culture advertised as the antithesis of white culture, whatever that’s supposed to mean (The Myth of White Culture). The people who built the West were working largely from European cultural beliefs, norms, and values. Elites racialize that as white culture for political-ideological purposes: if the West is an expression of whiteness, and whiteness is racist, with white supremacy supposed as the motive behind colonialism and imperialism, unalloyed evils (despite accelerating the development of backwards societies), then western culture must be rejected and replaced. The good and decent person opposes whatever is white and embraces whatever is non-white.
This atavistic desire causes a large proportion of the white majority to loathe its race and ethnicity and become allied with nonwhites (excepting the white adjacent), and imbibe in the alternative culture, manufactured and promoted by the culture industry, that constellation of powerful corporations producing mass art, fashion, and music. These allies must be careful to stay in their lane, watch their language, avoid obvious cultural appropriation, and be sure to signal virtue. Not just in the aesthetic realm; rejecting western civilization and culture means rejecting its literary traditions, language rules, science, and rational systems of law and politics (Critical Race Theory: A New Racism; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones).
None of this is to condemn “black culture” or promote “white culture.” Rather, it is to say there are no such things. Culture is not a function of race (Culture and Race—Not the Same Thing). However, there is an ideological subculture that is poisoning the West and corrupting its youth. In fact, it is mentally deranging them.
Young men are tormented over their toxic masculinity, so they seek feminization, some of them deluding themselves into believing they’re women, and thus stepping into oppression. Young women are conditioned to believe male success is a function of the patriarchy; they seek empowerment in what have been traditionally male social roles, sometimes deluding themselves into believing they’re men. Some conflate the binary, rejecting gender altogether. All see gender as an oppressive social system of boxes they must escape—into what, who knows? (Utopia, perhaps—literally nowhere.) Gender ideology, which on its face is crackpot, becomes seductive because of the profound alienation of the masses from their bodies, estranged under the corporatist arrangements of late capitalism, gender ideology providing them with a rationalization for rejecting objective reality and believing instead that through drugs and surgeries they can become something they cannot—that they can transcend those bodies (Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex).
This is the context of post-humanism/trans-humanism, explaining also the actions of the climate activist destroying great works of art to protest oil. Observers rightly wonder why those who claim to care about other people block the way to hospitals, airports, and workplaces, violating the fundamental rights of a free people. It’s because those rights are the result of western civilization, which is oppressive—classist, racist, sexist—and therefore worthy of violating. Never mind that the real threat to the environment and health of living things is the contamination of the body, soil, and water with forever chemicals and micro plastics generated daily by the system the protestors reproduce with their ignorance. Everybody has to sacrifice for their movement—except them. Like queer theory, global warming is a quasi-religious ideology that takes advantage of a proportion of the masses made ignorant by woke progressivism.
My blog’s subtitle is “Path through Late Capitalism.” Why did I choose that subtitle? The things I talk about in my blog are manifestations of a pathological phase in the development of capitalism: the New Fascism. The reason why MNPD and the FBI suppressed Hale’s manifesto is because the administrative state is determined to continue the globalist project of dismantling the nation-state, crushing democratic-republicanism, abolishing liberal freedoms, i.e, civil, politics, and human rights, disrupting western beliefs, norms, and values. To accomplish this, they need to dissimulate the indoctrination of western youth in anti-humanist/post-humanist ideology. The objective is to disempower the working class from within to continue the ceaseless accumulation of value and wealth and concentrate it in the hands of the transnational corporations that run the world economy—a concentration of value and wealth that provides global elites with the ideological and material means to command the political power necessary to rule the planet.
Freedom and Reason strives to chart a path through this pathology of late capitalism with essays that expose the agenda in all its facets. Either we do nothing and become serfs in a global neofeudalism (The Coming Era of Global Neo-Feudalism; Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow) or we organize to save our republics and build a new economic system that provides a standard of living worthy of our species being.
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