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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:
I don't understand why people would go to such lengths including making up terrible copyright law to hide a bog standard story of insanity.
I understand this is not exactly a fun time for the public figure here, but having been briefly involved with a person of the same sex that turned insane isn't some socially damaging high crime or something. We're not in the 1950s anymore.
Am I missing something? Is there something so damaging to someone that it was worth damaging the public trust and creating bad precedent over this?
I would guess that, if my loved ones were murdered in a senseless and insane attack, I would prefer that it not be discussed as a CW jerkoff game for people on the internet. Which was always going to be the inevitable result once it was released. We're even seeing the rhetorical Judo throw where people are turning it into a CW jerkoff game about how it doesn't contain any/enough CW material. I can understand the families of the victims, or the school community as a whole, feeling it was not worth the psychological harm of having the story in the news longer than it needed to be to have the manifesto made public knowledge.
As I say elsewhere, such sentiment is to be expected from victims, but judges and LEOs are not supposed to let such things cloud their judgement.
Indeed, while you dismiss interest in the concealed as a judo move, I find it quite reasonable to argue that concealment made this story stick, which is the opposite of the intended purpose.
We sadly have things to compare this to. Randy Stair was trans and had an even more insane and lurid justification for his killings, and yet that dropped out of the news cycle like a stone. Because, well, who's going to argue about someone that obviously deluded.
People here should be all too familiar with scissor statements. It is ambiguity that breeds culture war. Straightforward things don't produce the engine like reaction of one side to the other that ignites these flamewars.
I think a much more reasonable way of ensuring the interest of everyone would have been to release this diary as evidence and to redact the name and personal details of the people Hale was infatuated with instead of entertaining these absurd adventures in copyright.
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