Trans Covenant School Diary Released, FBI Strongly Argued Against Releasing It, Said It Would “Potentially [be] Inflaming the Public.” Why was the FBI Only Against Releasing this One Diary?

Given the lack of media coverage, you could understandably miss it, but “nearly four dozen pages” of the Nashville Covenant School murderer’s diary were just released. The Tennessee Star’s parent company had successfully filed two lawsuits to obtain the diary. There is also a letter from the FBI strongly urging against the diary’s release (shown below). 

The FBI’s request is highly unusual, and the question is why it is this particular case that has drawn the FBI’s concern, especially given that many of their arguments apply to all these mass murderers. It appears that what made this case different was this was another case where the murderer was transgender. Transgender people are committing these mass murders at high rates compared to the rest of the population — since 2018 at over seven times their share of the population.

For example, the FBI notes: “[i]nfamy and notoriety are major motivators for many attackers,” and “dispersion of legacy tokens through the media will only further the infamous and notorious goals of the offender.”

The diary is very revealing. This murderer was suicidal: “A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of. I am the most unhappy boy alive. I wish to be dead.” She was also on the anti-anxiety drug Buspirone, whose side effects include “abnormal dreams, outbursts of anger, tremors, and physical weakness.”

The FBI clearly focused on the murderer being trans in their desire to play down the mental illness part of the problem. They were concerned that the release of the diary could lead the public “to dismiss the attacker as mentally ill,” which would “further permeate the false narrative that the majority of attackers are mentally ill.” Particularly important is their claim that releasing it could have “unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories, which will undoubtedly abound,” and that it will lead to self-professed ‘experts’” who “will proffer their perspectives” in the press, “potentially inflaming the public.”

As to the FBI’s claim about “the false narrative that the majority of attackers are mentally ill,” our own research shows that over the last 25 years, 51% of these mass public shooters were actually seeing mental health care professionals before their attacks.

The mass murderer compared trans individuals to other groups in a way that indicates she clearly believed that transgender people didn’t have the same rights: “Disabled have rights, civil races have rights, LGBTQ have rights, gun owners have rights.” She declared: “with no rights, anyone’s country is a s***** dictatorship.”

We have also previously discussed how the diary showed the murderer had picked the Covenant School because it was a soft, unprotected target. Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake, who had access to the diary, said on the day of the attack, “There was another location that was mentioned, but because of a threat assessment by the suspect of too much security, they decided not to. That area was here in Nashville.” A couple of days later, Nashville Council Member Robert Swope acknowledged the murderer “looked at” two other schools, both public, before deciding “the security was too great to do what she wanted to do.”

There was some coverage when Steven Crowder released three leaked pages of the diary (which noted that the murderer was a left winger who hated whites), but these new nearly four dozen pages, as well as the FBI’s push to hide them, provide a much more complete picture of the mass murderer’s motives. This lack of coverage is particularly puzzling given the extensive news coverage of the lawsuits to get the diary and that there is no question that the murderer really wrote these pages.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s FBI and the news media have selectively again tried to control the information Americans receive about a mentally confused woman who identified as a man. Not wanting to link transgender issues to mental illness or to engaging in mass murder is something that the Biden administration is free to make arguments about, but censoring the information is not the right way to do it.

Google news search conducted at 11:15 AM on Sunday, June 9th, 2024. The story was first reported on June 5th.