MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: It’s democracy in the dark without Nashville shooter manifesto’s release.
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the (sometimes ironic) slogan of The Washington Post.
But it’s also a fair description of what’s happening in Tennessee, as the state Legislature is being called to a special session even as local and federal officials withhold information that might be critical to its decision-making.
Gov. Bill Lee ordered the special session to begin Aug. 21 in response to a March 27 mass shooting in which three adults and three children at the Covenant School, a Christian school in Nashville’s Green Hills neighborhood, were killed.
The Nashville Tennessean article refers only to “a shooter.”
The shooter was a female-to-male transgender shooter named Audrey Hale, aged 28, who left a manifesto before being killed by police. . . .
Local and federal authorities with access to the manifesto have refused to make its contents public.
Though Hale sent an Instagram message to a friend just before the shooting, saying, “One day this will make more sense. I’ve left more than enough evidence behind,” we haven’t seen that evidence.
Vivek Ramaswamy, running third in the GOP presidential primary, recently called for the manifesto’s release. He characterizes the government position as “stonewalled silence.”
Well, I generally believe that when government officials don’t want us to know something, it’s because they fear we would think or act in ways they wouldn’t like if we knew it.
I think that here, too.