by Daniel J. Flynn
Audrey Hale attended the Covenant School in Nashville as a child before returning Monday morning as Aiden Hale to murder three 9-year-olds, the principal, a substitute teacher, and a custodian.
In some dark but loud corners of the internet, it’s not about the children, the teachers, or the janitor. It’s about them — they/thems to be precise. More significantly, this multiple-victim public shooting, like all multiple-victim public shootings, becomes about blaming them. Who are they? Not us, not our side, not our tribe.
“Another day, another mass shooting,” Spencer Bergstedt, a he/him “gender diversity consultant,” tweets. “The shooter has been identified by his deadname. It appears he used he/him pronouns & was a former student at the school. Of course, MSM & the LEO’s discussing the issue are misgendering the murderer. I’m sad & angry on so many levels.”
The Trans Resistance Network called the events at the Presbyterian grade school “not one tragedy but two.” The group’s news release reads: “The second and more complex tragedy is that of Aiden or Aubrey Hale, who felt he had no other way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others, and by consequence, himself.”
One Twitterican opined, “It’s so infuriating that the media gets to both misgender Aiden Hale as a ‘rare female mass killer’ *AND* misidentify him as a trans fem whose status as mass killer proves trans women are men because women don’t do that.”
If that particular aspect of the story infuriates, then maybe see a psychologist or a priest. Six people died, and yet emotions gravitate toward pronouns and not people.
Of course, most transgender individuals think as humans rather than react with the glob and some non-transgender individuals react with the glob rather than think as humans. In other words, ideologues, not transpeople, offer scary, conditioned responses. So accustomed to their ideology mindlessly classifying one group as “victims” and another as “oppressors,” fanatics experience a blowing of mental circuits whenever the inconvenient facts intrude on their comforting delusions.
“The police/media just put a target on every transperson’s back,” tweeted Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu in reaction to the cops acknowledging that trans grievances possibly motivated the murders. “Like Transgender ppl aren’t demonised enough. The Nashville mass shooter #AudreyHale identified as #AidenHale.”
Sporting tone-deaf facial expressions and accompanied by inappropriate music, an anonymous TikToker, almost with glee, stated, “I wonder if the parents of the victims of the Nashville shooting today would still have their children if these trans bills in Tennessee were never a thing.”
A few weeks ago, the elected legislature of Tennessee passed a law prohibiting surgeries, chemical cocktails, and other medical practices designed to “transition” a minor from one sex to the other. If only the shooter put a MAGA hat on a statue of Gerald Ford, then maybe those offering perfunctory condemnations followed by buts and howevers might see this alleged violent objection to the votes of representatives as not protest but crime. At this point, one cannot definitively say the passage of that law, rather than mental health problems, evil, or other causes, primarily motivated this murder spree. So maybe just everyone come together in mourning it without ghoulishly exploiting it for an agenda?
This includes those cherry-picking the act of one transgender person to darkly color the souls of all transgender people. Most transgenders would not even harm a fly. Yes, Norma/Norman Bates could tell you that. But experience would, too.
Ideologues — NPCs controlled by remote with programmed ideas detached from experience — can and do hurt people. This involves outright murder. It also involves a sin much lower on the pecking order though related, i.e., insensitively transforming any tragedy into an opportunity to argue that it validates an abstract set of beliefs often not even tangentially connected to the horrible events.
This tragedy involved people, not pronouns. The former means flesh-and-blood lives; the latter fixation stems from ideology.
One obsessed the latter cannot be troubled by the former.
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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002).
Photo “Audrey Hale” and “The Covenant School” by Metro Nashville Police Department.
