Note: The following is the transcript of a recent episode of System Update. Watch the full video here:
Why have we not seen the manifesto left by the person responsible for the massacre at a Christian school in Nashville on March 27th more than three weeks ago? Ordinarily, when a mass shooter can be linked to a far-right ideology, the manifesto or other political writings they left take center stage in the media narrative and for understandable reasons. Though I strongly oppose efforts to exploit such shootings to place blame at the doorstep of journalists or activists, said to have “inspired” the shooting with their words, understanding the motivation of such a horrific act is journalistically important for all sorts of reasons – to know what influence has caused it, to know how to prevent it in the future, to prevent ideologues from exploiting such tragedies for their own unrelated purposes. Yet, notably in this case, the media has shown almost no interest in trying to understand whether political ideas motivate the shooter or not. And that's almost certainly because the murderer, Audrey Hale, identified not as a far-right ideologue, but as a trans activist with a long line of clues suggesting sympathy with left-wing cultural causes of the type the media supports. As a result, we tried retaining law firms in Nashville, and after speaking with two quite prominent ones, which said they would send a retainer letter to Rep. Starr in our efforts to sue the FBI and the Nashville Police Department to obtain the records, each backed out at the last second. We'll examine everything that is happening here.
Plus, Brazil's President Lula da Silva has provoked and is provoking virulent attacks in the U.S. and the West generally for pursuing policies that he believes benefit the Brazilian people, but that nonetheless conflict with the interests of the United States and its foreign policy community. Provoking the greatest anger is Lula's refusal to use Brazilian resources to fuel the proxy war in Ukraine, arguing instead that Brazil has no war with Russia, only a war to improve the lives of Brazilians. He's also pursuing greater trade relations with Beijing because in the past that has spurred economic growth in Brazil.
There's a glaring irony here, namely that the CIA and the Biden administration made no secret of their efforts to help Lula defeat Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. But don't we want political leaders, including our own, to use national resources to improve the lives of their own citizens rather than a tiny sliver of international institutions fighting endless wars on the other side of the world? We'll examine what Lula is really doing with Ukraine and with Russia and with China and with the American dollar and why that's provoking so much American animus.
And then, for our last segment, we'll examine the very strange yet common claim often found in liberal politics that the least relevant metric, the least relevant for judging a person's character and values are the personal actions they take in their lives, the way they live their lives, the way they lead their lives. Instead, the focus on what hashtag someone posts or what slogans they chant, or what party they support takes center stage. And that's often a very convenient excuse for justifying why someone should be able to live their life in a way that completely contradicts their claim of political values without being criticized for it or held accountable. I know this is a somewhat elusive and ethereal topic described this way, but one we think is very important. So, we'll make it as concrete as possible in our last segment.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
One attribute that has become extremely common every time there is a mass shooting is that the manifesto left by the shooter or other clues about their political ideology is pored over by media outlets, usually to claim that the shooter was motivated by a particular right-wing ideology. And therefore, anybody who shares that ideology, anybody who advocates that ideology at all related to the shooter's political views is also to blame for that shooting. They try and place the blame for the mass shooting at the doorstep of people who have done nothing more than advocate their political ideology and to do that, they typically center the manifesto or the other political writings left by the shooter. This is something that has become extremely common whenever there is a mass shooting that seems to be politically motivated.
So just as a couple of examples. Here, from May 2022, when a person who identified as a white nationalist deliberately chose a predominantly African American neighborhood in Buffalo and massacred people inside a grocery store. Most media outlets took his manifesto and tried to claim that he was in some way the brethren of all sorts of mainstream conservatives and media, beginning with Tucker Carlson, whom they absolutely tried to say was responsible for that Buffalo massacre, even though Tucker Carlson has never once even implied, let alone explicitly stated, that people should go and murder innocent people or carry out violence in the name of his political views. Even though the political views expressed in this manifesto have very little to do with Tucker Carlson's views and even though the Buffalo shooter actually left a long list of people who he said inspired him and not one of them worked at Fox News, let alone with Tucker Carlson, and even though there was no evidence that this shooter even watched Fox News or even knew Tucker Carlson was, let alone was motivated by him, and yet so hellbent was the media on exploiting the corpses in Buffalo that they constantly disseminated the narrative that Tucker Carlson was to blame. And to do so, they took this manifesto that the shooter in Buffalo posted shortly before going on his shooting spree and they dissected every part of it. They quoted from it. They showed the public what it said, all as a way of linking it to their political enemies.
So here you see the NBC News article, which is very illustrative. We could show you hundreds of similar ones. The headline was “The Buffalo supermarket shooting suspect allegedly posted an apparent manifesto repeatedly citing ‘great replacement’ theory. The manifesto includes dozens of pages of anti-Semitic and racist memes, repeatedly citing the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, frequently pushed by white supremacists.” (NBC. May 15, 2022).
By doing this, by highlighting this manifesto, by discussing its contents over and over, that was obviously an implicit admission by these media corporations that they regard the contents of the manifesto left by a mass shooter as relevant, as journalistically relevant. And although I found the attempt to blame their political adversaries for this violent crime repulsive, and I said so at the time, I certainly agree that the manifesto and the contents of the person's political views are relevant, because when an attack of that nature, such an atrocity so extreme is carried out, we of course, want to try and understand what caused it, what motivated it. And so, it's very common for media outlets to highlight the manifesto.
Here's another example, when another white nationalist, this time in New Zealand, went into a mosque and carried out a horrific massacre, killing dozens of Muslims who were praying. Here is Slate, in 2019. “What the Christchurch Killers Manifesto Tells Us. Ignore the parts that read like 8chan jokes. We're facing a global movement of white hate.” The article dealt very deeply with the contents of the manifesto. This is something that happened over and over and over again. You can go online and read the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, who was responsible for mail bombings throughout the United States in the nineties. And I would recommend that you go and read that manifesto. It's incredibly provocative and parts insightful, notwithstanding the violent nature of his crimes. So, the idea is that we read Manifestos of killers or even if we don't read them, we report on them, we analyze them. That's extremely common. That happens all the time.
