DOJ Won’t Say If It Will Investigate Trans Shooter’s Attack On Christian School As Hate Crime, But We Can Guess The Answer
It’s been 17 hours since Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who identified as transgender, shot her way into a Christian grade school and killed six people, including three 9-year-olds — but the Department of Justice doesn’t seem to care.
The DOJ has yet to acknowledge the tragedy even happened, despite Attorney General Merrick Garland previously issuing same-day statements in response to mass shootings. After a shooter murdered 21 people in a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school last May, Garland rightly slammed the “act of unspeakable violence.”
“The Justice Department is committed to providing our full support to our law enforcement partners on the ground in Texas and to the Uvalde community,” Garland promised.
After a gunman killed 10 people at a Buffalo, New York grocery store the same month, the DOJ issued a similar day-of statement, adding that “The Justice Department is investigating this matter as a hate crime and an act of racially-motivated violent extremism,” due to racist sentiments the shooter had posted on social media.
But despite the depravity of yesterday’s bloodbath in Nashville and the red flags hinting at Hale’s motive, the DOJ doesn’t seem interested in investigating why a mentally unstable transgender person might shoot up a Christian school.
Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters that Hale, a former student of the school, had a “manifesto” relating to the shooting as well as a “map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.” Drake also confirmed the shooting was a “targeted attack.” Just a few weeks earlier, Tennessee lawmakers passed a law protecting minors from mutilative transgender surgeries and chemical castration, which drew vitriolic backlash from transgender activists. A “Trans Day of Vengeance” is scheduled to take place in Washington D.C. and online on Friday.
While police haven’t yet released the shooter’s manifesto, there’s no need for the DOJ to wait to investigate the “targeted attack” that bears telltale signs of a hate crime. And while talk is cheap, there’s even less reason for the nation’s top law enforcement agency not to acknowledge the anguish that the families of The Covenant School are experiencing due to the unhinged actions of a transgender maniac.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday, demanding “an investigation into this shooting as a federal hate crime.” The letter, which Hawley also sent to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, noted that “Police report that the attack here was ‘targeted’ — targeted, that is, against Christians.”
“Federal law explicitly criminalizes acts of violence against individuals based on religious affiliation as hate crimes,” Hawley wrote. “According to Nashville law enforcement, Hale’s attack was both premeditated and ‘targeted’ against this Christian school, its students and employees.” Noting the manifesto, Hawley added that “Moreover, police detectives believe that Hale had ‘some resentment for having to go to that school.’”
Asked by The Federalist whether the DOJ would investigate the Nashville shooting as a hate crime, Spokeswoman Aryele Bradford said the Justice Department is “declining comment at this time.”
Meanwhile, when a mass shooter’s ideology corresponds to one of the fringe movements that leftists in the corporate media love to extrapolate to the entire right, there’s no such timidity about the perpetrator’s motive.
The DOJ charged the Buffalo shooter with numerous federal hate crimes, and media coverage was similarly brusque — CNN published a piece titled “How White’ replacement theory’ evolved from elderly racists to teens online to the alleged inspiration for another racist mass homicide.”
Likewise with Dylann Roof, the racist who killed nine people at a predominantly black church in South Carolina in 2015. Years after the Justice Department prosecuted Roof for hate crimes, Garland and two of his deputies went out of their way to emphasize the “hateful” nature of the murders. The New York Times wrote about how “Dylann Roof, Suspect in Charleston Shooting, Flew the Flags of White Power.”
The DOJ charged a Texas mass shooter who killed 23 people at an El Paso Wal-Mart with 45 counts of hate crime-related offenses. After a gunman killed five people at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, the Justice Department promised to “review all available facts of the incident to determine what federal response is warranted” — something it won’t promise to do in Nashville. (The Colorado Springs gunman turned out to identify as “nonbinary,” however, and the DOJ seems to have forgotten about him.)
Unsurprisingly, from the media to federal law enforcement, there’s a glaring hesitancy to acknowledge the apparent motives or even the basic facts of a transgender perpetrator targeting a Christian school. A Washington Post article about Hale ambiguously notes that she had a “manifesto” but doesn’t mention that she identified as transgender until the fourth paragraph — and completely avoids using either biologically accurate or “preferred” pronouns to refer to Hale, hiding her sexual confusion as much as possible. Reuters outrageously framed the story as “Former Christian school student kills 3 children, 3 staff in Nashville shooting.”
It’s no secret the Department of Justice is nakedly politicized. In 2022 alone, the agency targeted a former president and terrorized peaceful pro-lifers while turning a blind eye to pro-abortion violence. Apparently, that partisan corruption extends to overlooking the deaths of six innocents at the hands of a transgender psychopath.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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