Mike

A Profile of a Killer, Part 2: Audrey Hale

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Part 1 is located here

Anybody remember Audrey Hale? That’s okay if you don’t, few do. The story of Audrey Hale is not only one of a killer, but one whose background is inconvenient for people who have the ability to make people disappear from public view.

It’s been 1 ½ years since Hale, a transgender-identifying woman, entered the Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023 and proceeded to slaughter six people, including three children, and only now are we finding out about any possible motive. Hale had attended Covenant, a private Christian school, some years earlier.

I am not a big believer in “hate crimes” as a legal term, but the basic facts of the incident, transgender-identifying woman hunting down and killing Christian children, had on the surface all the hallmarks of hate.

However, within a day after the slaughter, Audrey Hale started to disappear from public consciousness. This disappearance was a deliberate act in two parts.

The first part dealt with suppressing Hale’s writings, Hale left a manifesto of sorts in her car, clearly with the intention of its being discovered. She communicated with a friend via Instagram before the killings that “One day this will make more sense. I’ve left more than enough evidence behind.” However, federal and local law enforcement seized the material and refused to release its contents, initially citing that there was still an on-going investigation, the fear it would incite other violence, and later the reason given was due to a copyright claim by the parents (the government transferred the copyright to the materials to Hale’s family). No motive for her crimes was provided by law enforcement.

The contrast with a similar case is remarkable. In 2022 Payton Gendron, a white man, drove several hours to a supermarket in Buffalo and killed ten people, all black. Gendron left writings declaring his intent. By the evening of the shooting, local law enforcement had not only reviewed said material but announced to the public that it was “…racially motivated hate crime”. Needless to say, the story filled the media for weeks and Democrats made political bank on it.

Hale’s writings were finally released to the public September 2, 2024, not by the government, but rather by the Tennessee Star which had obtained her writings and other investigation documents from an unknown source. The editor-in-chief of the Star is still under the threat by I’Ashea Myles, the judge assigned to the case, of investigation by a special prosecutor.

Only the New York Post, a few local Tennessee outlets, and some conservative sites bothered to report on the release of Hale’s writings or their content. As Hillary Clinton might have said, it had become old news. Public attention is a fickle thing.

The second part dealt with what David Plouffe, part of the Obama brain trust, once called “stray voltage.” This is a deliberate method which creates controversy to spark attention, which in turn provokes conversation, and that conversation then embeds ideas into the public consciousness.

Three days after the shootings, a mob of several hundred demonstrators entered the Tennessee Capitol. Many of the demonstrators occupied the visitor galleries inside the House chamber, and working in concert with three Democratic legislators who had taken over the chamber’s well, yelled gun-control slogans and ground official business to a halt. That action, along with a larger gun-control demonstration outside and protesters wandering the Capitol, was all over the media.

Controversy, conversation, ideas. What was once a story about a transgender-identifying woman killing Christian children had, within 72 hours, become embedded in the public’s mind as a gun-control issue. Including the protesters outside, an estimated 1,000 people showed up at the Capitol on short notice. Nicely organized, from the protest itself to the narrative switcheroo.

Then there was more controversy. The Tennessee House voted to expel two of the three Democrats who had decided to take over the chamber’s floor. The two who were expelled were black, the one who escaped expulsion was white. All heck broke loose as the racial angle was exploited and inflamed by the Democrats with a visit from Kamala Harris and an invitation for the expelled legislators to come to the White House.

With that, the disappearance of Audrey Hale was complete, buried with a combination of information suppression and stray voltage.

So now after more than a year we can finally start to fill in aspects of Hale’s profile. The part of Hale’s writings that were published last week by the Tennessee Star does not paint a pretty picture. She had been planning the Covenant massacre for some time, was struggling with mental health issues and her gender identity, and was twice evaluated for commitment. You could see how a mentally-unstable, transgender-identifying woman killing children could create image problems.

So what are the larger implications of this story?

This is Information Warfare 101, where the Left understands that while they couldn’t erase the Covenant massacre from history, they could change the way in which it was told. Feed the news cycle with alternative narratives, delay or outright suppress inconvenient information, and wait until enough time passes. Switch topics, suppress, delay.

The story they were going to tell was going to be about racism, gun control… anything but the portrait of a crazed, transgender-identifying killer.

Hole in the Sky

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A few thoughts on the 23rd anniversary of 9/11.

I heard the report on my car radio at 5:48 MST of a plane crashing into the North Tower. It wasn’t clear what was happening and I thought of the B-25 that became disoriented by the fog and crashed into the Empire State Building.

Just as I was entering the gym that morning, I saw on the TV in the lobby the plane hit the South Tower and I had a strange reaction which remains crystalline to this day. It wasn’t shock or horror, it was merely the thought, eerie in its calmness, of “They have come.”

A year-and-a-half before then I was in the DC area on business. I had hauled out a friend of mine as an advisor, he had a very creative and detailed mind when it came to operations.

We were standing on the platform of a Metro stop, waiting for the next train to arrive, when my friend turned to me and out-of-the-blue said “How long until someone drops a biological down here?” I thought of the Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway and the Oklahoma City Bombing, both in 1995. Then there was the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center where a bunch of Islamists tried to topple one tower into another. Mass casualty attacks done by amateurs. We hadn’t even heard from the professionals yet.

When I caught up with my friend a few months after 9/11, he said that when he saw the plane hit the South Tower the first thing he thought of was our conversation in DC.

The thing is that you really have to believe that you are on the side of good in order to perform that much evil.

I spent some time in New Jersey growing up, way out in the sticks. We were fascinated by New York City and as you drove toward it, from many miles away, the first you saw of it was the World Trade Center. A distant yet towering fixture, a welcoming beacon on the horizon that spoke of a larger, wondrous world underneath it.

Then a bunch of barbarians blew a hole in the sky.

Scott Johnson at Powerline has made it a tradition every September 11 to link to James Stewart’s 2002 New Yorker article, “The Real Heroes are Dead”, which depicts the life of Rick Rescorla from his battlefield exploits in Vietnam, to his later marriage, to his efforts on 9/11 where his foresight led to the saving of thousands of lives and ended with his death in the South Tower when he went back looking for stragglers.

Rescorla is not just a heroic figure, but a man who through his character gave hope to his comrades, his fellow man, and most importantly to his wife. An exemplar of what the Greeks would call “Andreia.”

The article formed the basis of Stewart’s book, Heart of a Solider. I have given copies of it to the young men in my family because he was the type of man that the young should aspire to emulate. The most fitting tribute in the article comes from Rescorla’s life-long friend and comrade Dan Hill, who when interviewed by Stewart and said:

There are certain men born in this world, and they’re supposed to die setting an example for the rest of the weak bastards we’re surrounded with.

However the most haunting quote comes from the book when Hill laments:

Somebody cautioned that if a person or thing means the world to you, and you lose that person or thing, then you have lost the world. I lost the world when Rick died.

I follow a certain custom on 9/11. I read Stewart’s article, meditate, and go to 6:30 Mass. I pray for the people who died on that day and especially those who felt the terror as the towers collapsed on top of them. I give thanks for those like the first responders, Rescorla, and the people on Flight 93 who possessed the courage to do what needed to be done.

I say an extra prayer for the “Jumpers”, those who were trapped in the World Trade Center by the flames and smoke and at the end could only choose how they were to die.

It’s a sin of course to think this way, especially in a church, but even now after so many years I cannot help but be possessed of rage.

College Football and Memory

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When I started following sports as a kid, I was fascinated by the Dodgers. I hated them, but with that cool stadium, the uniforms, and that LA vibe, I mean, wow. To me they were LA so when I heard some of the older folks starting to reminiscence about the “Brooklyn Dodgers” and that d*** Walter O’Malley, I found their bitterness hard to comprehend. I was seven, the Dodgers were always LA, and these old guys needed to stop living in the past. I didn’t ask them if they tied onions to their belts when they went to the games in Brooklyn, which I heard was the style at the time.

I think I understand them better now.

They have broken up the Pac-12, my conference since I was a kid, for spare parts to feed TV schedules. I’m reminded of Karl Marx and his quip about capitalism changing our social relations.

Living in Arizona, the Pac-12 was the dream. Day-trips out to LA to catch whoever ASU was playing. Five hour drive, hit the In-N-Out Burger in Palm Desert, both driving out and coming back. Living in Arizona you had a love-hate relationship with LA and with California in general, call it an inferiority complex. However, sitting in those stadiums! There was the Rose Bowl when the sun started to set behind the San Gabriel Mountains. Then there was the LA Coliseum. Al Davis was right when he called it a dump, but to go to a game in that place was as close as a western boy was getting to Yankee Stadium

Then there were the weekend trips to places like Eugene and Corvallis. Strange lands of green landscapes, humidity, and this water falling from the sky that they called rain.

That was the Pac-12, our conference, for us westerners. We were in a time zone that played games when the rest of the country went to bed. Games played in places that were either paradise or big sky. Now we are going to places where people want to escape from: Cincinnati, Oklahoma, Iowa.

A little while ago, a friend of mine reminded me before there was a Pac–12 there used to be a Pac 10. In fact he remembered there used to be a Pac-8 before 1978 when they let in the hicks from Arizona, and wow did the rest of the conference kick up a storm. What I saw as permanence was in reality a snapshot in the midst of constant change.

As my friend said, you had 45 years in the Pac, that should be enough. Things change, life moves on.

This Fall, there’s going to be a kid who starts watching college football for the first time and he will think that it’s normal for USC-Rutgers or ASU-Cincinnati to be a conference game. That’s okay, I can live with that. That belongs to him in the same way that for me the Dodgers belong in LA.

However, I’m never going to a conference game in Cincinnati.

The Death Star of the Electoral System

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It’s only 61 days until the election, and in reality even less given early balloting. It’s going to be a “wild ride” that will probably go well into January. For now I want to focus on just one piece of the larger picture and that is ballot security.

I came across an article in Tablet, Broken Ballots, which compares our electoral system to that of Somaliland and let’s just say we don’t even meet Third World standards.

It’s a good read in general and his line “The new American voting system is practically calibrated to produce mistrust, and to create broad segments of public opinion that believe the whole thing is fake—regardless of who wins” hits the nail squarely on the head.

However there is one point that sticks out, one that I have been pushing for the past four years, which states:

“Unlike Somalilanders, most Americans no longer have to physically show up at a polling place to vote. Instead they have the choice of filling out and submitting their ballots beyond the observation of election officials, which means there is no assurance that the people in whose names ballots are cast actually signed—or saw—their ballots, voted free of duress or the promise of some benefit, or are even still alive.”

Bingo. Down to the last letter.

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Hiroshima and Counting All the Dead

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It’s how you frame the question that often determines the answer you will receive.

Today is the 79th anniversary of the surrender of Japan. It is today, and not August 6th, when it is most appropriate to discuss whether dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was the correct decision.

The arguments are by this time well rehearsed. The opponents of the bombing answer that its use was not only unnecessary and gratuitous but immoral. They state that the Japanese were going to surrender anyway, shocked into submission given the declaration of war by the USSR, and the only reason Truman ordered the bomb’s use was to intimidate the now-menacing Soviets.

There of course was the remorse of the scientists, clergy, academicians, then and since, who denounced the death and devastation caused by the bombing. Many quoted Aquinas, others less eloquent pointed to moral failings of America and its people.

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