A short time back, our editor-in-chief said that there had been a school shooting in Nashville, and asked if anyone would cover it. I wrote the first story about it for PJ Media. It wasn’t the first time I had ever written about human tragedy or cruelty. And I have hated doing it every time. I always feel like Judas collecting his 30 pieces of silver from someone else’s suffering.
Be that as it may, the Nashville shooting mattered, and not just because it gave the Left more talking points about the evils of gun ownership. After all, if we are being honest, the Left can come up with talking points about the evils of gun ownership over a skeeball game. What the Nashville murders revealed was the level of disconnect affecting the transgender movement. As did the fact that everyone from the White House on down seemed to be less concerned with the victims and their families than with the transgender community. Also conspicuously absent from the debate has been the incendiary language that that community has used.
Pertinent information seems to be in the manifesto written by the woman who committed the crimes. And that manifesto has been declared off-limits, so it would appear that no one is getting access to it. That includes journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has even enlisted the aid of lawyers to get the manifesto from the Nashville Police Department. But the firms have decided to back out of the effort.
We've spoken with 2 major law firms in Nashville who said they'd send retainer letters to represent us suing FBI and the Nashville PD to obtain the manifesto of the Nashville shooter, only to back out at the last second.
The political pressures are intense. We should see it.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 17, 2023
“This isn't about the trans debate—it's about the right of journalists to seek public records & illuminate things we ought to know about a horrific killing.
Instead, there seems to be an effort to paper over it.”
Our stonewalled attempt to uncover the Nashville manifesto👇 pic.twitter.com/WUm3M2kgmc
— System Update (@SystemUpdate_) April 18, 2023
In his show on Rumble, Greenwald pointed out that had this been an incident involving a far-right extremist, the manifesto would have been made public. It would have been front-page news everywhere one looked. And Greenwald also noted that understanding the shooter’s motivation is important for a myriad of reasons. Not the least of which is to prevent people from exploiting it. And in the interest of full disclosure, Greenwald might consider this column to be an example of such exploitation. But Greenwald also makes the point that the shooter probably does not fit the narrative that the media and various other entities find so tasty.
There are undoubtedly numerous things with which Greenwald and I might not see eye to eye. We may even wildly disagree about the shooter’s motives or the things that caused the incident. But I respect his desire to get to the heart of the matter and deal with the facts. And as John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things.” And the facts may not always favor the side that interests any given individual. Greenwald is trying to get to those facts, and even the lawyers have deserted him. But the question is: why? What is it about the manifesto that requires its contents to remain hidden?
The mainstream media is asserting that conservatives are attempting to co-opt the issue into an anti-trans narrative. But hiding the manifesto only fuels speculation. As Noah Rothman at National Review observes:
In this vacuum, NBC News suggests, conservatives irresponsibly “seized” on the killer’s gender issues and the prodigious writing she left behind — including a suicide note and several journals, according to local police — and concluded that these proclivities implied an ideological motive. That was speculative. But the absence of evidence to dispel that speculation only fuels more of it. Indeed, the conspicuous information blackout around this killer contributes to the impulse to engage in conjecture, partly because it represents such a departure from the approach that media outlets applied to prior episodes of mass violence.
One of the reasons that people either hate Christianity or attend seeker-sensitive megachurches is this passage from 1 John: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” And as Paul writes in Romans “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Because the manifesto may in fact point not to the sins of the Right but rather to the sins of the Left, there is reason to hide it and avoid the discomfort of self-examination. The manifesto may show that this person was ill-treated by people on the Right, or it may prove that those in the trans community, and for that matter the Left, are not the blameless, selfless victims they have made themselves out to be. And I suspect that there is far too much money and far too many egos, reputations, deals, and political ambitions involved to allow the information in the shooter’s writings to be published. And so the sin will remain unexpiated.
Truth is not always easy, or for that matter, comfortable. I mentioned Adams and his quote about the stubbornness of facts. One of the lesser-known facts about Adams is that he acted as legal counsel for the British troops involved in the Boston Massacre. He knew that doing so would not endear him to his countrymen, but he also knew that the soldiers deserved legitimate representation under English law. Adams knew that the truth is a thing that must be wrestled with in order to have a just society.
This brings us back to Greenwald, his quest for the truth, and the thorny fact that his lawyers have opted to turn tail and run. It raises the question as to why the media, our systems, and our government fear the truth. And for that matter, why they fear a just society.
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