Police Report on Nashville Transgender Shooter Plays Into Left’s Narrative

After more than two years, Nashville, Tennessee, police on Wednesday finally released their report into the transgender shooter who targeted The Covenant School, and it plays into the Left’s biased narrative on “right-wing extremism.”

While police tend to release the manifestos of mass shooters shortly after their attacks—especially in cases that ostensibly reveal “right-wing extremism“—police refused to release the manifesto of Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, who shot and killed three children and three adults just over three years ago on March 27, 2023, at The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school in Nashville. Police fatally shot her in the attack.

The police report, released Wednesday, finally gave an explanation for this perplexing decision.

According to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, authorities didn’t release the manifesto … because there wasn’t one.

“Early in the investigation, it was suggested Hale left behind a ‘manifesto’ detailing her motives and intentions,” the police report noted. “This has elicited a great deal of interest from the public and had led to repeated demands this manifesto be released for public study and comment.”

“In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist,” the report claimed.

Oh, really?

Police were at pains to define the word “manifesto” to justify their refusal to produce the documents Hale did leave behind.

“By definition, a manifesto is a mission statement or other document written and disseminated by an individual or group to enumerate or expound upon the guiding principles and beliefs that inform their actions,” the report noted. “Regardless of length, a manifesto is a single document that outlines all the factors, intentions, and objectives of an individual act or a series of actions.”

“Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack,” the report added.

Yet police did discover a treasure trove of information about Hale, her motivations, and her mental state.

Police found 16 notebooks; “assorted folders and loose documents”; seven sketchbooks and composition books; a yearbook; three VHS cassette tapes; eight memory storage devices with a combined 379.6 GB of data; six cellphones; three laptops; two Google Drive data cloud accounts; and more.

The report notes that the seven composition books and sketchbooks included 520 pages of content Hale wrote between 2009 and 2022.

In other words, the police had far more than enough evidence to determine the shooter’s motivations. Yet they would not release those materials because they “required a careful review of the material to understand Hale’s motive.”

Conservative commentator Stephen Crowder released some of those pages in November 2023, causing a stir because they suggested a more left-leaning motivation for the Nashville shooting.

“Kill those kids!!! Those crackers. Going to private fancy schools with those fancy khakis and sports backpacks with their daddies mustangs and convertibles. F— you little s—s,” Hale allegedly wrote. “I wish to shoot your weak ass d—s with your mop yellow hair, wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little faggots with your white privileges. F— you faggots.”

In June 2024, more than a year after the shooting, The Daily Wire released more pages from the composition books. In those pages, Hale wrote scathingly about Christians.

The shooter repotedly condemned her parents. “F—ing parents like them who think of themselves first and their preference of conservative religion-gay s— make them believe that the child they are given should stay” in distress about identifying with the opposite sex.

“I’d kill to have parents who would let their child be happy no matter how different it is to their viewpoints or don’t agree, or scared of it,” she added. “I’d kill to have had those resources; 2007 was the birth of puberty blockers and a newfound discovery for treatment of non-conforming transgender children.”

“Aren’t parents manipulative? It’s total ignorance when parents step in + try to change their child’s environment,” the shooter wrote in another passage published by The Daily Wire. “Make them go to youth group + force Christian friends in their life because the old ones were a ‘bad’ influence. … Parents actually believe religion can change nature. That could explain why I don’t practice religion anymore. Let kids think for themselves … .“

Despite these and other references, the police report claimed that Hale was not motivated by hatred toward Christianity or Christians, but merely by her desire for “notoriety.”

“Regarding why she selected The Covenant, many have speculated Hale selected this location for racial, religious, or economic motives,” the report noted. “It is certainly true she raged over these topics at times in her writings. But none of those motives impacted her decision to attack The Covenant.”

According to the police report, Hale chose the school for three reasons: It provided a sense of infamy so great that she would be remembered; the targets would not put up much of a fight; and she had a close personal connection to the school.

Yet even in this analysis, the police report noted that Hale chose the school in part because of its Christian faith.

“She believed the Christian faith of those within would make them meek and afraid, which further assuaged Hale’s self-doubts,” the police wrote.

Hale does not represent the Left any more than Timothy McVeigh represented the Right, but her story does highlight some of the horrifying trends on the Left—the hatred of Christians and the prioritizing of an internal sense of gender above all else.

The police report seems to follow the same trend Americans have seen from the “experts” time and again. Whenever a mass shooter can conceivably be connected to a conservative cause, be it anger at illegal immigration or a hatred of certain types of people, the manifesto appears almost immediately, and the Left pounces on evidence of “right-wing extremism.”

Yet, when a shooter motivated by gender ideology or hatred against Christians carries out an act of evil, the “true motives” remain a mystery.

The Anti-Defamation League, for instance, seized on Hale’s use of the word “faggot” to claim that she was not a left-wing extremist. The ADL cited this “hateful epithet directed against … LGBTQ+ people” in order to avoid the comprehensive picture.

Meanwhile, the ADL had no such qualms in describing as “right-wing” extremists motivated by hatreds that the conservative media loudly denounces. Contrary to the Left’s rhetoric, conservatives are not racist, yet racist mass shooters get branded “right-wing” in an effort to justify crackdowns on conservative dissent from the Left’s worldview.

Unfortunately, this police report gives the ADL more fodder to continue the charade.

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