Reports of Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale’s manifesto have already got the activist left circling the wagons.
Progressives, including plenty in the press, pretend that the real victims of Hale’s killing spree are somehow trans people in general — not the one man, two women and three children killed in cold blood — and that to protect them, the shooter’s words must be hidden.
“The contents don’t change the outcome of the tragedy,” said a flack for LGBTQ advocacy group PFLAG.
This is hypocrisy.
We don’t yet know to what extent Hale’s gender identity played a role in her mass murder spree.
But we do know demands to sit on Hale’s words amount to a coverup, pure and simple.
If Hale were a right-wing militia member, fundamentalist Christian or an “incel,” her identity would be front and center of a million think-pieces blaming her whiteness, maleness or expressed beliefs for the massacre.
Yes, there are significant moral questions around publishing any document of this kind.
But if the media are going to hold Buffalo mass-shooter Payton Gendron’s racist beliefs under a microscope, they must do the same for Hale’s.
If “journalists” only show exquisite sensitivity when it comes to lefty causes like trans acceptance, they become advocates, pure and simple.
Remember David DePape’s hammer attack last October on Paul Pelosi?
DePape was a psychotic, drug-addled transient, but the fact that his paranoid delusions focused on Democrats meant there was no effort in the press to stop a link with MAGA maniacs.
Recall, too, the Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, who pledged fealty to ISIS on a recorded phone call during his 2016 atrocity, only for the FBI to initially redact all mention of that from the transcript on supposed “sensitivity” grounds — and the media to play along.
Media must give this manifesto — whatever it says — the same examination as any other.
It’s one piece of trying to understand why these atrocities take place.
Making an exception because some ideologues imagine terrible consequences would be absurd.