Why making the Nashville shooter's manifesto public is important
The content may demonstrate hardship for transgender people under Christian values or a reaction to cries of genocide over state measures.
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Summary: The manifesto of the shooter behind the mass killings at The Covenant School in Tennessee needs to be made public. The content will shed light on which institutions had a role in the killings, depending on whether it reveals a long history of repudiation based on Christian values or an obsession with cries of genocide over measures in state legislatures.
If there were any week more dystopian than this one, I don't think the Weekly Dystopia has seen it. We started off with the horrific news about a mass shooting a Christian school in Tennessee that left six dead, including three nine-year old children. We ended with a politically suspect indictment of a former president and current presidential candidate based on flimsy grounds. It could be the progenitor of legal charges aimed at bringing down political opponents that were previously unheard of in the United States.
This article, however, is going to focus on the mass shooting at The Covenant School and the manifesto left behind by the one responsible for the act. Tennessee authorities are reviewing the material in coordination with the FBI and set to release the manifesto in the near future, according to a report in the New York Post. The release of the manifesto will be important because it will bring clarity to which institution is on the decline and led to the death of three adults and three children in the shooting, as well as the person who pulled the trigger.
Normally, I don't pay any attention to the manifestos left behind by people who sought to promote their ideas by violently depriving people of their lives and their loved ones. Validating those beliefs would reward those who commit those atrocities and incentivizes mass killings in the future. We saw that last year with the Buffalo shooter, whose manifesto echoed the writings of a shooter years earlier in New Zealand in their shared racist animosity against minority communities.
Moreover, the writers of these manifestos appear to be keenly aware of the sensitivities in our society, whether they be racial or political issues, and ensnare public figures at various levels. See the reference to the popular YouTube personality Pew Dee Pie in the New Zealand shooter's manifesto. Reading those tracts has the effect of blowing up those tensions in a free for all within the media. (Not that this has ever stopped the media from indulging in this free for all.) Ironically, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson was blamed for the Buffalo shooting, although his name never appeared in the shooter's manifesto.
But this time the situation is different. I'm not saying those principles I just stated won't apply here as well, but in this unusual case we can have more unique power structures in play. More insight into the motivation of the shooter would shed light on which one influenced the thought processes behind the attack. That would be a first step towards finding a solution to prevent future harm, even if ultimately reaching an agreement — or even finding one to make that happen — may be unlikely.
For example, let's say the shooter (whom I refuse to name because I don't want to dignify that person any further than necessary), is able to document a history of hostility towards identifying as a transgender person. If the shooter were a former student at the Christian school, as stated by Nashville police, it wouldn't be unfathomable to think the shooter may have faced punishment or shame for not fitting into traditional gender models. The media has already documented accounts of hostility toward the shooter's gender identity, including one report in The Daily Mail describing how the family of the shooter refused to allow the practice of gender transitioning in their home.
Conservative media pundits are railing about the thought of sympathetic accounts of the shooter, but a demonstrated history of animosity would put in stark display an oppressive religiously motivated power structure resulting in personal anguish, and perhaps mental illness. If that were the motivation behind the attack, the institution would share a degree of culpability with the shooter.
On the other hand, let's say the manifesto fails to demonstrate personal hardship over refusal to accept the shooter's gender identity. Instead, the content is a rallying cry for resistance by any means necessary against the tyranny of society against transgender people. The shooter might validate the call to action by pointing to states putting up roadblocks to gender transitioning for youth, including criminalization of providing puberty blockers, hormones and gender reassignment surgery for minors. There's no shortage of denunciations of these measures as criminalizing the very existence of transgender people themselves or an act of genocide against them.
Personally, I think that characterization is an overstatement and used to gin up political opposition to the measures for people who won't even bother to read the underlying text or understand the issues surrounding them. I could see, however, that ideology finding its way into the mind of the shooter and serving as justification for the violent act.
Of course it isn’t a valid justification. Those nine-year olds had nothing to do with the measures, nor the three adults who were victims, nor necessarily the Christian school itself. The levers of democracy are fully available to opponents of those measures, even though those levers are available to supporters of the measures as well.
If that were the basis for the shooting, it would make things different because it would be an extreme reaction based on hyperbolic criticism of the state measures by transgender activists. It's strange to think of the transgender community as having a dominant role in the power structure, but if drumming up hysteria to the point of absurdity influenced the shooter, it may be cause for reflection on those who uttered those words. In that case, Christian ideology wouldn't bear the blame in the shooting and the idea the attack was a hate crime against Christians, as articulated by Sen. Josh Hawley, would be all the more plausible.
Either version of the manifesto is possible. It might be a combination of the two, which would muddy the waters a bit. There's also the case the shooter may be less than truthful about the motivation for the attack, so any account would have to be taken with a degree of skepticism and the media should do due diligence for corroboration.
We may get the document soon. Tennessee authorities and the FBI are set to release the document after it completes the review process, according to the report in the New York Post. There's no timeline for making it public as far as I can tell. The sooner that happens, the better.
It seems callous to place so much attention on the motivation of the shooter who killed six people who were either going to work or children going to school. I do wish we could shift more attention to them as opposed to the shooter who deprived them of their lives. But if we're going to learn about the failures in cultural institutions that engendered the idea for the shooter to murder kids at school, the manifesto would be the place to look.