Was Nashville Shooter a Pagan on Testosterone?

Officials have identified the suspect in the March 27 Nashville Christian school shooting incident as 28-year-old Audrey Hale as Nashville Police released surveillance footage, seen above, on March 28, 2023. (Nashville Police Department)

Commentary

NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Several weeks out from the horrific murder of three children and three adults at Nashville’s Coventry School, important information, including but far from limited to the perpetrator’s “manifesto,” is still being hidden from the public.

Some of this is due to the reluctance—or is it fear?—of the Nashville Police Department, which had behaved so heroically initially to save lives at the height of the event.

And some is undoubtedly due to our FBI, an organization that, to put it mildly, hasn’t built a reputation for honesty. In fact, presidential candidates are now calling for it to be drastically reformed or, in at least one case (Vivek Ramaswamy), entirely torn down and replaced.

But it isn’t just “law enforcement” that’s causing the trouble; members of the Nashville community on both sides of our political divide are reluctant, for differing reasons, to have the truth exposed, even though having it exposed is the best, arguably the only, means of making sure, to the extent possible, that such events don’t happen again.

That these murders were the proximate cause of truly asinine events in and outside of the Tennessee state Assembly that made the national news—the expulsion and then immediate reinstatement of two profiteering “progressive” assemblymen, both named Justin. They used these deaths to, of all things, further brainwash some of America’s already brainwashed youth, making a little honesty about what actually happened all the more imperative.

And now, these two profiteers are being welcomed to the White House to further distract, in the grand tradition of left-wing exploitation, from the facts of the case.

Unfortunately, rather than real transparency, just as nature abhors a vacuum, bits and pieces of supposed truth are beginning to leak out with questionable accuracy.

On April 20, The Tennessee Conservative, a local website, had an article that amounted to gossip about the shooter’s motivation because it had only one source—a no-no in journalistic circles—an alderwoman who heard something from somebody.

The article has since been taken down, but in essence, it ascribed the shootings to a lover’s quarrel.

Besides being contradicted by a number of other sources, including some that say the shooter was contemplating a mass killing at a local mall, this particular explanation veers to the illogical, or the very least, insufficient.

If we calculated the number of jilted lovers since time immemorial, that total would likely be in the billions and, in most cases, include half the people we know. The number of those who were so upset by this that they shot six people and would have shot more had the police not intervened is negligible, almost nonexistent on a percentage basis. This is mighty thin gruel when it comes to a true motivation.

A lot is being hidden—and that would include, rather importantly, the toxicology report. What was this female-to-male person taking? Was it testosterone and, if so, what was the dose?

We are unlikely to find out much, if anything, about this because the FBI, as is its wont, is sitting on the information to shield one of the Democratic Party’s key protected classes—the transgendered.

And if you doubt this class is truly protected in an overtly political fashion, consider that House Democrats voted unanimously against a bill that would have banned male-to-female transgendered athletes from women’s sports, an extraordinary thing to do for the party that once trumpeted itself as the protector of women’s rights.

This firewall of protection is truly dangerous, not just to the future of women’s sports but to all of us personally, wherever we are.

In a superb cautionary Front Page article—“Dressed to Kill”—novelist and journalist Bruce Bawer does an excellent job of detailing the many cases of rage violence from the transgendered in the past few years.

Here’s just one example that came shortly after the Nashville killings:

“Thirteen days later, on April 9 (Easter Sunday), a Portland, Oregon, cab driver named Reese McDowell Lawhon was stabbed to death in the neck by a passenger who had stepped into his cab wearing a tiara. As the Portland-based independent journalist Andy Ngo noted, the police made an arrest but, unusually, waited a day before releasing any information about the suspect. ... Ngo also discovered that Lopez, age 30, identifies as a transgender woman.”

But this was far from all:

“A sampling: in September 2018, a man named Snochia Moseley, who was taking female hormones at the time, took four lives in Aberdeen, Maryland. Likewise, Devon Erickson was undergoing a transition from male to female when he and an accomplice killed one student and injured eight at a school near Denver in May 2019. Anderson Lee Aldrich, who last November killed five people and injured 25 at a Colorado Springs nightclub, Club Q, identifies as non-binary. Douglas Perry, a.k.a. Donna Perry, killed three women in Washington State before undergoing ‘gender-reassignment’ surgery in 2000. Brooklyn octogenarian Harvey Marcelin was already a double murderer under his birth name when, last year, now identifying as a trans woman, he took a third victim. In Scotland, Daniel Eastwood strangled a man to death before transitioning in 2017; he now identifies not as a woman but (no kidding) as a baby.”

And:

“This past Sunday, [The] Epoch Times reported on [an] Ashlee Renczkowski, a middle-school teacher in Florida who’s undergoing a male-to-female transition and who’d spoken about ‘shooting students’ and then committing suicide. Not until Florida officials intervened was Renczkowski removed from his job.”

Sorry to go on for so long, but that’s Brawer’s point, and now mine. It’s hard to see this confluence as accidental.

As much as anything else, transgenderism engenders rage and, too often, rage killings.

Is it the drugs? Is it the surgery? Is it both? We need to know.

Something’s wrong, and not fully revealing what happened in Nashville only encourages more of this. The Nashville Police Department and the FBI, in their silence, are essentially accessories to future crime.

The two assemblymen taking bows in the White House probably weren’t thinking much about this, but they too are accessories.

Off all the writing I’ve encountered about the Nashville event, the most profound I’ve seen yet, the one that gives the deepest explanation, is from Liel Leibovitz in his Commentary article “The Return of Paganism.”

It’s far too long to do it justice here, but the basic idea is that acts such as Audrey Hale’s and similar proliferating amoral and immoral behaviors demonstrate that our culture has lost its Judeo-Christian values of right and wrong and is returning to paganism. This is especially true as those acts are often more excused than condemned, almost as if they had become normal.

“In 1990,” Leibovitz wrote, “scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to [be] believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions.”

Everything will be allowed. Nothing will be censured.

Was Hale just another pagan on testosterone?

The author of this article, a resident of Nashville, would very much like to know why Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and other officials of the state of Tennessee haven’t demanded the release of the manifesto and other materials in the case from the Nashville Police Department and the FBI for the benefit of their citizens.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.