Steven Crowder, right-wingers pivot to white privilege argument after Nashville shooter manifesto doesn’t discuss gender

In March 2023, a trans man shot and killed six people at a school in Nashville, Tennessee. In the wake of the shooting, police obtained a manifesto of the shooter, which was kept unreleased as authorities investigated.

Because of the gender identity of the shooter, a number of conservatives used the incident to push claims of a trans mass shooting pandemic, wherein an armed transgender community was hunting down cisgender people who refused to accept their gender identities.

No such pandemic exists, but the fact that the manifesto was kept under lock for so long helped aid the argument, that the government was trying to secretly keep hidden the fact that trans people were hell-bent on murder.

Today, right-wing vlogger Steven Crowder released three pages of what he said was the transgender shooter’s manifesto on his live stream.

While it’s not the full manifesto (according to Crowder there were many more pages), nothing in it discusses the shooter’s transition or gender identity.

The shooter, Audrey Hale, does use gay slurs to describe people at her school. But the manifesto seems to be more directed toward white kids, calling them “crackers.”

In kicking off his show, Crowder called the manifesto “pretty disturbing.” But he also noted that what seemed to motivate Hale was not trans identity, but “hatred of white people and hatred of white privilege.”

Now, right-wingers like Alex Jones, who helped Crowder publish the manifesto, instead focused on the shooter being a “brainwashed” liberal who hated white people, looping in topics in school like critical race theory, and how the education system is turning kids into anti-white crusaders

While certainly another right-wing talking point, that still doesn’t have anything to do with transitioning.

During his live stream, Crowder noted how the motivations of recent shootings, such as in Buffalo and Jacksonville, were revealed to be racially motivated immediately following the incidents. Nashville, however, wasn’t initially labeled as racially motivated, leading Crowder to now now claim the manifesto was kept under wraps for its race content instead of gender identity concerns.

In the pages Crowder released, there was also a timeline of the day the shooter wrote out, which included the phrase “film video.”

While it’s unclear if a video was actually filmed, now a number of right-wingers online are demanding the video get released, further moving whatever goalposts they had.

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*First Published: Nov 6, 2023, 10:15 am CST

David Covucci

David Covucci is the senior politics and technology editor at the Daily Dot, covering the nexus between Washington and Silicon Valley. His work has appeared in Vice, the Huffington Post, Jezebel, Gothamist, and other publications. He is particularly interested in hearing any tips you have. Reach out at [email protected].