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.