DEBATE: 90 pages from journal belonging to the Covenant School shooter LEAKED – but should we read it?

Yesterday, the Tennessee Star published 90 pages from the journal belonging to the Covenant School shooter. The document contains entries from January 2023 to the day of the shooting, March 27, 2023.

Davis Hunt, founder and editor of the Pamphleteer, joins Jill Savage and the “Blaze News Tonight” panel to discuss the leak.

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“What were the new details that we learned today that we previously didn't know?” Jill asks.

“I don't know that there was anything revelatory,” says Hunt. “We kind of already knew that she had some animus towards Steven Crowder's leak” and certainly toward “white Christians.”

“I looked over it. I didn't read the whole thing. I don't really care to spend my waking hours digging through the thoughts of a deranged person, so I tried to stay away from it, but the clips that I did see kind of confirmed what we already knew,” he continues.

Blaze Media’s editor in chief Matthew Peterson, however, isn’t so sure avoiding the document is the best call.

“I guess what you're saying is it pretty much, when you look at it, confirms everything that you thought was true — this is a person who bore animosity towards Christianity, white people, as well as heterosexuals who were opposed to the trans movement. Is that correct?” he asks.

“Yeah, I think that’s generally correct. ... It was an act of violence carried out against a specific group of people; it wasn't random. It's not like she went to a mall or some other public gathering place. She went to a private Christian school that she was familiar with,” Hunt explains, adding that this opinion has been “somewhat controversial.”

“Is there one part that stood out for you as you did go through [the released document]?” asks Jill.

“There was a lot of very weird, kind of racial ideology bundled up in there that was maybe unexpected,” says Hunt.

“I'll be honest with the [Blaze] audience,” says Peterson. “We've had a policy for a long time not to highlight or quote from these sorts of manifestos.”

“The environment has changed though,” he acknowledges. “In this manifesto, maybe the most chilling part I've heard so far is not even all the crazy hatred of her own community” but rather “the lack of normal human emotion ... and that makes me think: What should the policy be for media today?”

Hunt explains that according to the Violence Project’s research, the one thing school shooters have in common besides “self-evident mental issues” is that “they all studied the actions of previous school shooters.”

“They all draw a lot of influence from each other,” he says, pointing to Columbine as the “core incident that ignited” the tragic movement.

Ultimately, Hunt thinks that “minimal coverage” is probably the best route.

“You're naturally curious about what would drive someone to do this and in a way, it's kind of perversely compelling to try to understand why these things happen and what would drive someone to do that,” he explains, but he nonetheless thinks it’s best to keep the psychoanalysis to a minimum because Hale’s motives were “self-evident” based on who she targeted.

“Let me go to the other side of the coin here,” Peterson counters. “I think the problem is that [Hale’s journal] was held up for what — a year and a half? The government was threatening to put this journalist in jail for revealing it” likely because it would lead to “one side of the ledger being blamed.”

He explains that more often than not, these shooters are “politicized” in that “they're drenched in some weird ideology” — in Hale’s case, trans, anti-white ideology.

“The problem is in this case that the government wanted to hide one side and promote a narrative about the other,” leading a lot of people to say, “Just let it out.”

To hear Hunt’s response, watch the episode above.

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