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Notes -
There was some talk previously, here, about the "manifesto" of Audrey E. Hale, the 2023 Nashville Elementary School Shooter. The shooting happened in 2023-03-27 and the FBI hid the "manifesto" for well over a year, with only a few select pages leaking here and there.
Because the shooter was trans (female to male specifically) people speculated that the "manifesto" contained all kinds of nefarious ideological reasons.
Well, it's all out now. You can get it from The Tennessee Star or, if you don't want to give them your email, from the Kiwifarms.
Basically, there's nothing interesting to it. Alas, the mystery box strikes again: fantasy was better than reality.
A few observations in no particular order:
The backstory is that she was in love with two (black) girls, Sydney Sims who died in a car crash in august of 2022, and Paige Averianna Patton, who is a local radio personality (as Averianna The Personality). Syd never reciprocated, Paige only briefly in high school. On the 27th of february Paige had her first live show (I'm not sure what kind of live show that would be), which coincidentally was also her birthday, so that's probably why the shooting happened on 3/27. This is what Audrey writes about said live show:
Er. Obsession with "brown girls," "queer" and trans identity, fixation on sex and sexuality, a bit of "gay Jesus" blasphemy, like... if I were trying to write a fictional story about a mentally unwell person who had become the avatar of "orange Emily" Internet degeneracy, I could not model that character on Audrey's notebook because everyone would accuse me of unrealistically excessive exaggeration of negative stereotypes. You don't find anything interesting about that? It doesn't make you think, "huh, maybe this culture war stuff really can be damaging?"
Because, to be clear--maybe Audrey in a different culture becomes a terrorist, or a torturer, or whatever. The biological/sociological interactions that manifest in what we call "mental illness" are complex and poorly understood. But I think in many cases the radicalization process is deliberate. Muslim terrorists cultivate radical killers into ideological pawns. Race supremacists cultivate violent actors and train them to have maximum effect.
Whereas the "Woke" meme lacks central authority, tends to train institutional actors rather than radicals, and it's kind of an emergent ideology/neo-religion that mostly surfs on the backs of several not-entirely-comfortable-with-each-other-but-otherwise-basically-normal social and cultural institutions. Will there be more essentially "accidental radicals" in this vein? Or is Audrey just such an extreme outlier that there's simply nothing to learn here?
I'm open to the possibility that Audrey and most mass murderers are in fact such extreme outliers that they should not budge our priors much. But every time a scorned man goes on a misogynistic shooting spree, I'm assured that this is what we should expect from the Manosphere, and this is what the people asking to see the so-called "manifesto" were, I think, really asking after. It doesn't look much like a manifesto to me! But maybe this is just what a manifesto looks like, from the "orange Emily" ideology. How could we know? We don't seem to have a lot of cases to compare. Hopefully, we never will--but that brings us back to what makes this one more interesting than you seem to imply.
Beyond that, of course, the media's steadfast refusal to report on the thing lent it a great deal more mystique than might have otherwise been the case.
Judging from the diary, it seems like ideology may have been part of the reason Audrey was so unhappy and mentally unwell. But it doesn’t look like she intended the attack to be propaganda of the deed for the cause, or to strike back at enemies of the revolution. To me it looks more like the typical mass-shooter motive for an aggressively postured suicide. Elliot Rodger seemed to have considered himself to be on a crusade of personal vengeance, but I don’t think he necessarily considered it a political act. Compare both of those to Ted Kaczynski, where although he was perhaps mentally ill, he had a pretty defined ideology he was acting under and specifically intended his attacks to advance that ideology.
This all seems correct to me, but what I'm wondering is about the nature of "radicalization" when the relevant ideology is ungrounded, emergent, deliberately obscurantist, etc. I think usually such ideologies just don't produce extremism, because it's hard to be a zealot for something so conceptually slippery. This particular case is exceptional in several respects, which might mean the best thing to do is chalk it up to noise in the system. But I don't feel sure of that. At minimum--I do not, at all, agree that these notebook pages contain, quote, "nothing interesting."
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