Remember the Covenant school shooting in Nashville?

You are not supposed to. It is supposed to fade quietly into the background because, well, the facts are inconvenient to the Narrative™.

Immediately after the horrific events we learned that there was a “manifesto” left behind by the shooter making it abundantly clear why she committed the act. In her last message to a friend, she also indicated that she left behind writings about why she committed evil acts.

So far that manifesto has been withheld from public scrutiny. The powers that be don’t want you to see it.

For a brief period, the authorities tried to reverse course and claim that there were only the ramblings of a disturbed person that made no sense. That was their first excuse for hiding what the shooter left behind.

Nobody bought that for a number of reasons, so a fallback position soon emerged for why the tender eyes of the public must be protected from exposure to the rantings of a lunatic: the words are magically dangerous and hearing or reading them might make people spontaneously explode or something.

Nashville shooter Audrey Hale’s manifesto is a “blueprint on total destruction” which the FBI are stalling releasing, according to local politicians, who describe its contents as “astronomically dangerous”.

Almost a month after Audrey Hale, who identified as transgender, killed six at the city’s Covenant elementary school before being shot by police authorities have yet to release a motive or any of the writings seized from her home, despite growing pressure.

Given that one can walk into any bookstore or library and get a copy of Mein Kampf, this strikes me as a bit apocalyptic. When I was a graduate student at Duke I helped teach a class on “political ideologies” where we read Hitler, Marx, and Mussolini, and last I checked their works led to over a hundred million deaths last century, and more in this one.

Hiding reality doesn’t make it go away. Studying it may help you prevent evil deeds in the future.

I suspect that the excuses for committing violence put forth from the disturbed mind of a 28-year-old girl will do less damage to society than Hitler’s call to arms.

There have been press reports that the authorities consider the manifesto to be “astronomically dangerous.” They may be unsettling and even dangerous, but the question is the right of the authorities to keep such evidence from the public and the press… https://t.co/4jc688m3bJ

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 5, 2023

The whole “astronomically dangerous” dodge is also proving ineffective in quieting calls for the manifesto’s release, so the next line of defense is that the “investigation is ongoing,” preventing the release of the manifesto.

As if the authorities need to preserve evidence for a trial, or prevent contamination of the jury pool. The criminal case is for all intents and purposes closed, as there is nobody to prosecute. There may be I’s to dot and T’s to cross, but no secrecy is necessary to do so.

Which has led to this:

The National Police Association and other groups are suing to make the writings and other materials of mass shooter Audrey Hale public in the month since the deadly Covenant School killings.

The NPA filed a lawsuit against Nashville and Davidson County to make Hale’s manifesto public. Authorities have held on to the materials during their ongoing criminal investigation into the March 27 massacre that killed three children and three adults.

The Tennessee Firearms Association also filed an administrative appeal for the materials, The USA Today Network reported.

The NPA is requesting text messages and communications to and from the Nashville Police Department regarding Hale’s writings.

“It has been more than a month since the shooter was killed and the officers involved have been praised for their actions in the incident,” Doug Pierce, a lawyer for the NPA, said. “Accordingly, there is no criminal case and there is no reasonable likelihood of there ever being a criminal case arising from this incident.”

“The Metro Nashville Police Department has sought to rely upon a rule of Criminal Procedure to deny public access, but those Rules only relate to a ‘criminal proceeding,” Pierce added.

I am as interested to see the emails and texts ABOUT the manifesto as the manifesto itself. We all have a very good idea indeed what was going through the shooter’s mind as she planned and executed her attack, although it is important to have the presumptions confirmed, and any collateral information about who might have inspired her to commit such atrocities.

But the motives of the authorities who are hiding the manifesto are in many ways more important, because they will give us insight into the thinking of the people who are trying to hide the reality from the public.

The public should see why and how these government officials and political actors lie and scheme to deceive them.

We’ve already seen the public squirming of the officials. It would be illuminating to see the behind-the-scenes scheming done to defraud the public. “Astronomically dangerous?!” Come on. There is a movie playing in theaters right now about how to blow up pipelines, and celebrating the environmental terrorists who would do such a thing.

It’s important to see not just the manifesto, which, after all, is filled with the ravings of a lunatic. But even more important to see what our government officials are doing to withhold the information illegally from us.

I want to know who and why, and how far up the chain the guilty parties are.