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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:
Direct link to the transcript (click the spoiler):
https://kiwifarms.st/threads/audrey-e-hale-a-k-a-aiden-e-hale.159272/page-119#post-19252781
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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.
What the hell is an orange Emily?
I can think of a pretty wide spread of possible contents for the manifesto. Would it reveal the shooter was…
Those are arranged in rough order of drama. People were suggesting pretty extreme ones, but we ended up stopping at the first or second. Which, sure, the Culture War does nasty things to people. That’s just milquetoast compared to some of the theories. A few choice selections from this forum:
Compared to those, what we got is pretty tame!
It's a /r/PoliticalCompassMemes/ thing... orange Emily is the Woke wojak, basically. She started on 4chan as Art Hoe Wojak. She's usually lib-left but sometimes mid-left or even auth-left (especially when wearing a peaked cap). Characteristically the feminist inverse/counterpart of the purple coomer wojack, who is the "bad lib-right" character. There is pretty consistent "full compass unity" against orange and purple, they are characters who almost never get to be "based" or featured as the heroes in agenda posts (but see a counterexample here). Orange Emily hates Nazis more than anyone else, but is sure that everyone who doesn't identify as a black genderfluid differently-abled Wiccan is a Nazi.
So, you know. An unrealistically excessive exaggeration of negative stereotypes. Except, apparently, for this one time when...
I think the main thing your list omitted was "targeting Christians for being Christians," which the notebook (now I want to know what law enforcement or media figure first called it a "manifesto," because certainly everyone has been calling it that for a long time) seems to not explicitly confirm, while also not actually weakening the case for that idea.
Following the link to this forum's discussion was an interesting exercise; it seems to me that many, maybe most of the posts in that thread have proven basically correct. Very few of the posts address the notebook at all.
True, but you quoted a user with 21 posts, who hasn't been here in almost a year, who got moderated in that thread for (among other things) denying without evidence that anyone died at Sandy Hook, which like... yeah. Reality is always going to be more tame than whatever someone like that cooks up.
Ah, I do recognize that one.
I originally had "targeted Christians qua Christians" in between "wronged by (Christian) school" and "wronged by society," but I tried too hard to streamline the list.
And, yeah, I included psyop guy as an upper bound. I won't say he's representative.
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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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At the time, I thought that even samples of Hale's handwriting gave the game away that he was really a woman.
But credit where credit is due: he seems to have nailed the Rodgerian "sexually frustrated narcissistic incel with delusions of grandeur" mindset with aplomb. "Chicks only want to date dongoloids with huge cocks, unlike Nice Guys like me with average-sized dicks - it's not FAIR!!!" ingeniously substituted with "chicks only want to date Chads with cocks, unlike a Nice Guy like me who doesn't even have a cock - it's not FAIR!!!" Hats off.
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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?
From the school's and parents' point of view: this is the mass slaughter of their children. "Abusing copyright" to decrease grief or discourage copycats is a very small price to pay. Not that these school administrators and parents are necessarily concerned about unrealized gay mixed race sexual pairings.
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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.
Grief does not generally lead people to wisdom, definitely not in the short-term, but I think it would be pretty obvious that suppressing the document would ensure that it gained more attention and extending the misery. If they'd just let the stupid thing be released, people would've stopped caring ages ago.
The only way to prevent the "CW jerkoff game" that would be a full media blackout starting at the same time as the shooting. Once you're thrust into the public eye, you no longer have any ability to stop that, and anything you do in public regarding the tragedy ultimately plays to one side or the other.
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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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There isn't anything damaging but if it came out close to the shooting, when everyone had their attention to it they would be all over Paige. Was it worth it? Probably not, but maybe it seemed so to the people who did it.
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There's a 'copycat' theory that certain types of murderers (and a few other classes of bad actors) tend to attract other bad actors, intentionally or unintentionally, by their works, and as a result making publicly available. These followers are inevitably not-mentally-well to some extent, but the resonance gives them a way to formalize that and point it at their own interpretation of a 'class' of overlapping targets.
This is part of why I don't write shooters' names, whenever possible, instead identifying the location or target; it's also the charitable explanation for companies like LinkedIn purging spree shooter accounts. I'm skeptical that it applies for these sort of narrow details -- the shooter here comes across as a loser -- but I don't have a good mental model for the sorta crazy people that turn into serial killer fans, and it definitely has widespread adherents across the political aisles, many of whom directly evangelize to the victims of shootings and to judges around them.
Less charitably, there was a theory (or more often insinuation) that the shooter had been motivated by severe mistreatment by an employee or student at the school, on the level of assault or sexual assault rather than deadnaming. Progressives assumed that the writings were being hidden to obscure that; conservatives that they were being hidden to avoid exculpating the victims.
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I think "my child has been murdered and I want all of the cruel, idiotic culture warring about his/her murder to end" is more than sufficient to explain the parents trying to block the release of the manifesto/diary. Perhaps not actually the tactically correct move to achieve that goal, but eminently understandable.
Except blocking it just made the culture-war aspect so much worse. People spent months thinking this was a highly premeditated act of political terrorism being covered up by a sympathetic politicized media, when with the diary it clearly just seems like an act of insanity by someone with serious mental health issues.
It made it much worse among a very small segment of people who became obsessed with it, as opposed to being front-page news the day after it was found.
It was front-page news when it was found, and now it's (local, mostly) front-page news again. Suppression ensured there would be at least two front-page events instead of one.
Now, it's local front page news that'll disappear in a day or two if nothing else new pops up, instead of part of the wider culture war and part of the Presidential election.
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That I understand, I expect even, what I don't understand is the legal system cooperating with such behavior, especially to this degree.
It's the people whose job it is to be the cold monsters that remove emotion out of terrible situations to maintain justice and social cohesion even in the face of legitimate overflowing grief. I guess they too are human at the end of the day.
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I didn't have great interest in this story, but I do have one question.
Obviously it's really rare for a biological female to commit a mass shooting. I thought I remembered some level of discussion surrounding whether testosterone treatments drove this person crazy, or more towards the kind of crazy that causes some men to commit mass shootings. I think the hypothesis would be that there are many things which cause crazy men to do this but that hopeless sexual desperation is not an insignificant factor, and the truly intense feelings that drive that kind of sexual desperation are correlated with testosterone. Is there anything in the manifesto related to that?
There is a lot of sexual frustration, yes. However, while females committing mass shootings are rare, they are not unheard of. So you would need at least a few more datapoints.
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Has it been confirmed that Hale was on testosterone? Many trans men (and cis men, for that matter) have reported a major spike in aggression and hostility after taking it (as was the subject of an AAQC from last month). It certainly seems like the most obvious explanation for why Hale went down this route, rather than acting out her despair and frustration in a more typically feminine way (anorexia, self-harm, suicide attempts).
Yeah, I have no clue myself, but I think it'd be interesting to know. I'm guessing based on OP's post that the diary sheds no light on it, though, or else it might have been a bigger deal.
A quick Google returns a dozen articles like "Republicans suggest that testosterone may have made Hale more violent - here's why they're wrong" (followed by a begrudging acknowledgement in paragraph 15 that testosterone does in fact make more people more aggressive - in other news, water is wet). I'm unable to locate any hard evidence on whether the shooter was taking it though.
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Honestly, this is one of a number of pretty massive recent blunders by the conspiratorial wing of the online right (which is basically the entire Twitter right at this point) and it’s at the point where it’s getting increasingly difficult to take any of them seriously. The same people who insisted over and over and over again that we know this diary contains information that must be incredibly damaging to The Narrative™️ are the same people who, within minutes of the Trump assassination attempt, confidently asserted that the progressive media was directly responsible for inspiring the shooter to commit the act, despite nobody knowing anything concrete about the shooter. It’s getting extremely cringeworthy and grifter-esque at this point. Is nobody going to be held accountable for making overconfident and wildly-inflated claims for partisan purposes? Auron MacIntyre, The Prudentialist, everyone else in that sphere.
I mean, I'm on Twitter. And I follow some right wing people.
And yet this story barely crossed my radar. Why not just delete these people from your feed?
Right, that’s precisely what I’m considering doing. Which is very unfortunate, because these precise accounts are some of the major current thought leaders of the online right, who have historically had some very interesting things to say about topics relevant to my interest. Cutting myself off from them would represent a significant step away from the right-wing discourse sphere and accelerate my fast-increasing alienation from that set of ideas and norms.
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I absolutely did not do the latter!
You're being a tad dramatic. After several Alex Jones -tier conspiracies turning out / becoming true before our eyes, I think you should cut us some slack. If people don't course correct after a while, then you can shit on us.
To be clear, I made it explicit that I was referring to Twitter and Substack personalities such as Auron MacIntyre, not anyone on The Motte.
No, sorry, knee-jerk wild accusations of perfidy by your outgroup, backed up by baseless speculation in the total absence of concrete evidence, is clownish behavior no matter who does it. I’m not sympathetic to it at all, and if I ever (in a fit of irrational pique or misplaced credulity) appear to engage in it myself, I expect to be ruthlessly raked across the coals for doing so. It’s one of the most disastrously poisonous aspects of our current media/political environment, and if the right continues to prove that they’re every bit as bad as the left on this matter, I’m going to be beside myself with angst.
I get it, and you're not wrong. However, I maintain we've seen some wild shit over the years, and it has remained essentially unacknowledged beyond a shrug and a "what are you gonna do about it?". Glowies running cover for the Hunter Biden laptop story is by itself insane enough, that people smelling bullshit here ware entirely justified. And damn it, it just feels so good when you stick your neck out, and end up vindicated. Though the problem with sticking your neck out is that you sometimes end up decapitated, c'est la vie.
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I’m going to go with “no,” no one is going to be held accountable.
Legally, we do have pretty robust speech protections. Socially, balkanization takes the sting out of any tribal shunning. That leaves financial incentives. I think those are pretty clearly in favor of sensationalism.
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People making claims of certainty about anything is always a big gamble, but was is really unreasonable to believe there was something more to it given the amount of effort deployed to keep it under wraps?
I was expecting something implicating the school myself.
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I'm sorry, which set of partisans coined the term 'stochastic terrorism' and used it on speech they didn't like? Schmittian dynamics aside, splinter in my eye, log in yours. Even now, after excerpts from her diary saying she fantasized about her imaginary penis to fuck a black woman in the ass, you still hear the calls to respect 'his' pronouns.
Of course this damages the Narrative™️. If the left were more strict about policing autogynophiles and penis-envying school shooters, maybe people on the right would take the self-affirming takes more seriously.
I observe that the left does, in fact, try to police school shooters. Including this one.
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I’m not sure what about any of my post history in this community would lead you to believe that I’m pro-progressive-media, or that I see the online right as my outgroup. My claim here is that both sides have an equally massive log in the eye, and that this is extremely disappointing to me because I’m recognizing the exact same infuriating tendencies on the right as I used to when I still read leftist media.
I think accusations of being cringe and a grifter do code your original post as a bit like something that could come out of online left dogma.
I hate to tone police of all things, but you know as well as I do that if you want people to do things they don't like to do (such as holding their brethren accountable) you need to speak their language, not that of their enemy.
No, this is absurd. First off, I’ve been posting here for years now, so the idea that the second I use the same (accurate, appropriate) words as you think a leftist would use, it’s now reasonable to pattern-match me to a leftist and consequently dismiss my argument, is utter self-serving garbage.
I don’t play pathetic tribal language games, trying to coat my argument in the shibboleths of my supposed “ingroup” just to get them to not immediately reject the substance of the point I’m making. If rightists have become so mindkilled that they will instinctively lash out at even the most blatantly correct criticism of their favorite Substack grifters, then why should I take any of them seriously anymore?
Yoda: and that is why you fail.
Communication is fundementally a multiplayer game. If your online persona is screaming LGTBQ+ Adjacent Zoomer people are naturally going to read you in that light. If you want a cishet crowd to take your words seriously you need to account for that bias in your presentation.
This may or may not be true in a general context, but this forum has a higher standard. People are expected to communicate with charity here, whether or not they are cishet or their opposite sounds like an LGBTQ+ Adjacent Zoomer.
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You keep making this argument. Why would anyone care how long you've been here for? They're commenting on the merits of your argument...
No, they’re not. I criticized right-wing Twitter accounts, @crushedoranges replied with “splinter in my eye, log in yours”. Which I interpreted as an accusation that I am not criticizing progressive media figures for doing the same thing, or at least not to the same extent. So I think it’s appropriate and worthwhile to point out that I have leveled the exact same criticism against the left-aligned media vociferously and frequently for the same behavior. I hate it when progressive Twitter starts making wild knee-jerk accusations against, for example, police officers who used deadly force against a black person; that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t also hate it when right-wing Twitter starts making similarly wild and knee-jerk accusations. Both are bad! “The left is more powerful than me, so their bad behavior matters more than mine” is left-wing logic.
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But other people do. And so you have to account for that if you want to be an effective communicator. I'm sorry, humans are terrible like this, but you can't dispense with rethoric.
Because you're a reasonable person that understands that effectively communicating ideas requires extinguishing the biases that we all, including any potential reader, you or myself, have.
This is why bloodsports style debates never achieve anything, and why this place has a commitment to civility even though we contain some pretty serious disagreements. I tend to get carried away and be too acrimonious myself, but it's not a good thing. And it's not a particular stain on the people who don't take it well.
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This is what relentless negative partisanship does to people. The outgroup is always guilty until proven innocent. Even when they're proven innocent, a lot of partisans don't believe it. I've seen at least a few people on /pol/ claim the FBI is covering up evidence that would prove their theories correct, for both this shooter and the Trump shooter.
Oh my sweet summer child.
If they're proven guilty then they're guilty; if they're proven innocent, they're proven guilty of the crime and the coverup.
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So points for the ‘literally just insane’ hypothesis, I guess.
The general policy of not releasing mass shooter’s deranged ramblings to the public seems like a good one, but in this case it probably did more harm than good. I’m guessing this radio personality had some influence in not getting the manifesto released; it sounds like she was aware she had a lunatic stalker.
I understand the motivation to not encourage more people to make political points with other people's lives, but I still think we should hold to a policy of transparency about public events. If only for history's sake.
Social engineering never has only intended effects.
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PS. I strongly suspect that the reason the diary wasn't released until today was to protect Paige from undue attention, given how prominently she is featured in the diary. There was no conspiracy.
Googling "Paige Averianna Patton" shows that she was associated with the shooting since at least the very next day, publicly talking about being messaged by Hale who said "I'm planning to die today."
I guess we didn't know of Hale's obsession, but the association was always there.
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Yeah, that makes sense now. In particular, why the liberal black female judge who penned the awkward decision to use copyright to conceal the diary would go along with it — it was an attempt to shield a young successful black (lesbian?) woman from undue attention.
Do you think that idpol had much to do with it? A general sense that publicizing manifestos is bad would be enough.
I tried to check how long it took the public to learn about John Hinckley Jr.’s obsession. No luck, though.
The very next day
He had random connections to the Bush family; sweeping it under the rug with a celebrity gossip story would be what you’d expect.
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Well. I can only imagine how surreal it was to see that in the paper.
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From context I would guess she actually wasn't.
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Unfortunately the same mechanisms that are used to suppress these things for good reasons are used to suppress them for bad reasons, and it's impossible to tell them apart.
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