The Tennessee Star on Tuesday published the nearly 100-page journal of the 28-year-old woman who killed three adults and three children at the Covenant Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.
The journal offers a glimpse into the mind of a self-proclaimed autistic person prone to depression and obsession. The shooter’s two most animating obsessions were left-wing ideas about transgenderism — including the idea that children will kill themselves if they cannot get gender surgery — and white privilege.
The two themes converged in the overall format of the journal, which often takes the form of diary entries addressed to a “brown girl” with whom the shooter was in love. The shooter reportedly played basketball with the girl in eighth grade and had not remained in contact, but created a race-based idea of the girl in her mind.
The diary entries detailed how the shooter’s “autistic brain” struggled with different ideas, like “white privilege”:
(Tennessee Star)
On February 7, 2023, a month before the shooting, the shooter drew a diagram that said “brain -> white privilege -> embarrassment of self.”
The shooter wrote poems about her longing for interracial sex:
(Tennessee Star)
(Tennessee Star)
Nothing in the nearly 100-page journal appears to justify the FBI’s claim that it was withholding it in the name of public safety. Nashville City Council member Courtney Johnson told The New York Post that the FBI said the manifesto couldn’t be released because it “was a blueprint on total destruction, and it was so, so detailed at the level of what she had planned… That document in the wrong person’s hands would be astronomically dangerous.”
A police inventory says that there were two journals on the shooter’s desk, one under her desk, and seven under her bed, so it is possible that such information was in another journal. But this journal, which appears to be the most recent, does not include any detailed information about penetrating a school or carrying out a shooting.
Tennessee Star editor-in-chief Michael Patrick Leahy filed a lawsuit under the Tennessee Public Records Act seeking release of the writings. Nashville judge I’Aesea Myles blocked the release of even a single page, saying the diaries were copyrighted. She also threatened Leahy with contempt of court.
Leahy said he obtained the diary through legal means outside of the Public Records Act, and published it because it was in the public interest to do so.
“These documents and photos have helped us inform the public about the underlying reasons for this heinous attack, and have helped drive the public discussion of what should be done to prevent such acts of violence in the future,” Leahy said. “We have documented a massive failure of the mental health system as a root cause of Hale’s reprehensible actions.”
The shooter wrote angrily about American politics, appearing to echo left-wing talking points about gender.
“’Land of the Free’ means, whatever f—er is taking away human rights is not of a human at all,” she wrote. “I wish death upon myself cause of the pure hatred of my female gender. With no rights, anyone’s country is a shitty dictatorship.”
She made a chart using the critical race theory buzzword of “deconstruction,” pairing it with “reconstruction”:
(Tennessee Star)
Autistic people are especially susceptible to adopting ideas that they are born in the wrong body. “Male brain -> my autism?” the shooter wrote.
“Mom just says I’m young and young people make mistakes. but with me, it’s painfully more than that. with being autistic and waste time all the time,” the shooter writes.
“The torchure [sic] of being raised a girl, and actually believed I just had to deal with it, and tried to be feminine. But that didn’t last long after high school ended + no longer had to fear of being called a dyke or a faggot. It was only until my early 20s I finally found the answer-that changing one’s gender is possible. But oh f—ing no, not w/ my mother. What she believes, how she grew up conservatively and that LGBTQ-especially transgender in her era was an enigma, nearly non-existent,” she wrote.
The shooter also echoed the claim that children will commit suicide if their parents deny them the opportunity to change their gender.
“How could they not ever think of their own child suffering, and that they hate their gender so bad they cut + want to kill themselves first, and their preference of conservative religion-gay sh– makes them believe that their child they’re given should stay that way.”
Minutes before the shooting, the perpetrator messaged the person typically referred to as P.A.P. or “brown girl” in the journal, the woman —radio host Paige Patton — told ABC News after the incident.
“I’m planning to die today. This is not a joke. You will probably hear about me on the news after I die,” the message said. Patton called the police, who said they would send someone to review the screenshots.
Police did not arrive until after the shooting occurred.
