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Steven Crowder has leaked portions of the Nashville shooter's "manifesto": https://nitter.cz/scrowder/status/1721545965402726734
I put manifesto in scare quotes because the leaked portions seem to more part of a "schizo mass shooting planning diary" as opposed to "schizo essay on motivations for the shooting." That said, the leaked pages do reveal some insight into the shooter's motivation. The biggest surprise to me is that it doesn't really mention being discriminated against for being trans. Instead it focuses on the shooter's perceived perpetrators being rich privileged white kids with daddy's money. Basically the lyrics to The Dead Kennedys's song Holiday in Cambodia if they were written by a mass shooter. Also semi-surprising to me is their repeated use of the word "faggot" as an insult. I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?
In any case, the documents appear to be genuine though they haven't been 100% confirmed. Currently there's a lot of hubbub over whether or not they were appropriate to leak in the first place, but I see very little questioning of their authenticity. What are your thoughts?
A number of DR figures were 100% certain that this manifesto was being intentionally concealed by The Powers That Be because it would reveal that the shooter hated Christians and committed the shooting as an act of trans rebellion against oppressive Christian conservatism. I am very interested to see if those same commentators will insist that they were basically correct, even though the manifesto as released does not seem to bear much resemblance to that at all.
Frankly, much like any other mass shooter, Audrey Hale appears to have been a garden-variety retarded angry kid, whose motivations were muddled, irrational, and incoherent. Hale was white, so the potshots at white people make no sense, and are merely expressions of untargeted contrarian edgelord rage. Honestly not that interesting, and doesn’t teach us anything of value about “what the trans movement wants to do to every conservative Christian” or “what the left wants to do to white people” or anything like that. Just the sad ranting of a useless retard.
Based on these notebooks, we're not looking at another Unabomber. "Retarded Angry Kid" seems correct. Extremist rhetoric sometimes trickles down to these types and has tragic results. Various shootings have been done by Alt-Right Retarded Angry Kids in recent years.
I believe the phrase they usually like to use is "stochastic terrorism". At least, they like to use it when it can be used against their enemies.
If you haven't read this article, I think you will enjoy it: https://drrollergator.substack.com/p/stochastic-terrorism-a-game-of-rhetorical
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Where have you been this past decade? There’s been a whole cohort of young white people raised to hate white culture and white people because of propaganda that depicts them as stained with the sins of oppression and racism. This is called “white privilege” discourse. The shooter specifies white privilege as one of her motivations for the shooting. The motivation is not muddled. She absorbed far left propaganda to hate her race and she lashed out violently as a result. She mentions white privileged, khakis, fancy schools and “Daddy’s money” because these are the ideological memes that she came in contact with.
Obviously I am intimately familiar with that discourse, but when you are talking about literally wanting to personally kill white people because they’re white, that is not something I believe we’ve ever witnessed a white terrorist or mass shooter do. (Plenty of non-white killers have done so, but not whites as far as I know.)
White progressives who claim to hate white people usually advocate a variety of policies and cultural changes that would adversely affect white people if enacted. These changes would lower whites’ quality of life, deny them opportunities, punish expressions of their culture, dispossess them of the wealth of their ancestors, etc. But believing that it would be a good thing if currently-living white people were violently killed is something that only an extremely tiny fringe of white individuals do. The vast majority of white progressives, deluded as they may be about other things, are perfectly able to recognize the blatant self-destructive insanity of believing “somebody ought to murder me for being white!”. For Hale to believe white people should be murdered, despite being white her/himself, is a pretty clear sign of a deeply distorted and incoherent mind.
This relates to something I've seen referred to as "generational loss of hypocrisy." The first "generation" who put out some bit of hyperbolic, extreme rhetoric may not really believe it, nor live by it. They might quietly carve out unprincipled exceptions for themselves in practice, or acknowledge the performativity of it all in private among themselves.
But if, when "in public," they keep preaching the message consistently, for long enough, then at least some of the next "generation" who absorb it will end up taking it seriously.
There's someone I've interacted with a bit online who, since at least a few years ago, repeatedly raised the issue of the extreme nature and implications of much of academic "decolonization" discourse, especially the bits about being "unconcerned with settler futurity." The common rejoinder to these was always that nobody actually takes any of that stuff literally, or would ever actually follow through to the terrible-yet-logical conclusions implied…
…and yet, now we are seeing that, no, quite a few people do indeed take all that seriously.
A cult leader may have been a conman who made it all up as a grift, but if the group manages to persist long enough after his death, it will probably end up made of true believers.
I see this as greasing the slope while complaining about the slippery slope fallacy. The slippery slope is, of course, a fallacious argument made against people wanting to push forward things like the whole "white privilege" discourse; the fallacy is in that moving away from the status quo to some position X doesn't necessarily imply that we'll go to 2X or 4X or 10X or whatever if given time. We're trying to nail the exact correct height to land at here, and it happens to be lower than where we are right now, and we will engineer society to nail that exact correct height, not an inch lower, and we don't deserve an iota of responsibility for the people who have decided that they want to push it lower the slope. Those are different people, not us.
But it turns out that the method we use to reach that precise lower place on the slope matters, and if that involves pouring grease on the slope so we can more easily go lower, then we don't get to claim innocence (we might be able to claim ignorance, although ignorance would be more damning, not less, in the context of engineering social norms) when people slide down the slope far beneath that precise spot we intended to nail, and in fact we are responsible for that phenomenon. I think this has clearly happened and is clearly happening with the "white privilege" discourse openly attacking things like empirical measurements and logic and discouraging criticism and scrutiny on the basis of "solidarity" and similar concepts.
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