We Need to Talk About Audrey Hale and Riley Gaines

“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

If we had strong leaders in the White House, which we do not, they would have stepped up to a podium somewhere after the mass shooting at Christian Covenant and the attack on champion swimmer, Riley Gaines by trans activists and tried to lower the temperature.

Instead, just days after the shooting, the President took the opportunity to blame Republicans, especially those in Tennessee still reeling from a shocking massacre at a Christian school.

From CNN:

President Joe Biden is using International Transgender Day of Visibility on Friday to sharply criticize acts of violence and discrimination against Americans who identify as trans and nonbinary, zeroing in on the growing number of Republican-led bills targeting trans youth.

And if that wasn’t enough, the second in line, Kamala Harris, used the opportunity not to visit the victims and the families but instead to perform a bit of Civil Rights Theater. If she wants to be an activist, nothing is stopping her. If she wants to be entrusted to lead this country, that isn’t going to cut it.

And Riley Gaines? Nothing from our President or Vice President. Nothing from the Titans of feminism. Nothing from the legacy media. It was all quiet on the Leftern Front. Shame on all of them.

She’s 22 years-old and sticking her neck out to fight for women's rights to compete in sports without having to compete against biologically advantaged men. The activists told her to “cry, bitch.”

As the trans activists push harder to infiltrate every area of American life, the Conservatives push back just as hard. Without strong leadership at the top, we should all be worried about where this is going.

We Need to Talk About Audrey Hale

Whenever there is a mass shooting, the keyboard warriors on Twitter take to their battle stations and search for the identity of the shooter. If they are white, then it becomes a major news story. If they are non-white, down the memory hole it goes.

When the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was released, it was clear that he’d been isolated and radicalized during lockdowns. He probably wasn’t the only one. But rather than talk about that, the entire thing had to become about Tucker Carlson, Fox News, and “replacement theory.”

When 28-year-old Audrey Hale armed herself with a semi-automatic and slaughtered six people, including three children, the media went almost completely dark on the story, pivoting instead to guns and somehow racism. Yes, racism.

A story about the first biological female and trans-identified male going on a shooting rampage a few days before Biden’s Transgender Day of Visibility, with a raging culture war inflamed on both sides, was somehow reimagined as the Summer of 2020.

“The Tennessee Three” turned into a multi-day, multi-media event, complete with talk show appearances, long agonizing essays, and even somehow tying it to January 6th.

No one in the legacy media wants to talk about Audrey Hale because she is an inconvenience for the activists, for the media who ignore their intensifying violence against women like Gaines, and up to the President of the United States.

Sorry, Joe, we have to talk about what just happened. We have to talk about Audrey/Aiden.

If she was really a male, a white male, then why wasn’t she demonized as any white male would be? Because it’s all a lie that “trans women are women” or “trans men are men.” No, they aren’t. They’re a protected group who remain protected, even when they shoot children.

Audrey Hale believed herself to be two people. To her family and friends, she was Audrey - a shy and awkward 28-year-old still living with her parents. But she was also Aiden, a vicious mass murderer, a psychopathic killer leading a double life.

This double life is expressed in her artwork, which is mostly like Audrey herself appeared to be, kind of sweet, kind of childlike.

But she was also Aiden, hiding a darkness that took pleasure in the kind of evil of Jack Torrence in The Shining.

“Redrum” in The Shining is written on a mirror by Danny, who is trying to warn his mother that Jack is about to try to murder them with an axe. But Jack was also trapped in the Overlook Hotel, and began to imagine that he was about to murder his wife and son.

Is this Audrey/Aiden identifying with Jack in The Shining where the ultimate ending is a massacre?

I would never blame The Shining for inspiring mass murder at Christian Covenant, but I might blame the media for turning school shooters into legends, as they have since Columbine.

The minute she left the home of her Christian parents, who did not want her to be either gay or transgender, she would put on the costume of Aiden and become him. She prepared for many months for the shooting, researching other mass shooters throughout history.

She was spotted, dressed as Aiden, at a shooting range practicing to become a good shot. A Nashville woman who took the photo said, “I was like, there’s something weird here. I was just thinking, if something was to happen, I need a picture of this person.”

She needed Aiden to avenge the painful life of Audrey. This story is most noteworthy because we’re constantly being told transgender people are victims, not perpetrators. Are they now going to warn all of us that if we aren’t 100% compliant with “gender-affirming care,” we won’t only be causing suicide but, now, mass murder?

Best not to even discuss it, right? Best to just pivot to racism and guns. It’s cleaner. Tucker Carlson can be responsible for untold numbers deaths, but anyone on the Left can see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil when it comes to Audrey Hale.

Hale’s “manifesto” has not yet been released, so we can’t possibly know what mad scramblings will be revealed. We can only guess why she would do it. She was suicidal because anyone in the transgender community is told that if they can’t live as themselves, their only option is suicide.

Suicide is known to be a contagion, and yet they fling the word around willy-nilly. Hale was diagnosed with high-function Autism, meaning she might take what they were saying literally, with no way to tell that it is, at least partly, hyperbole.

Of course, for the Democrats who never let a crisis go to waste, this was the moment to double down on a ban on semi-automatic rifles. But how could they not talk about suicide since that is also the common link between all of these mass shooters?

This could have been a moment for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris to calm things down and reach out to those suffering right now with suicidal thoughts. This country has been through a lot; the statistics bear this out.

The number of suicides by guns dwarfs that of school shootings. This spike in 2020 and in 2021 likely had something to do with the isolation of lockdowns.

From GunViolence.org.

From ABC News:

The rate of young people taking their own lives with firearms in the U.S. has increased faster than for any other age group, and the youth suicide rate is at its highest point in more than 20 years, according to a new gun violence prevention report by Everytown For Gun Safety and first obtained by ABC News.

Most gun deaths in this country are by handguns, not semi-automatic rifles. That is true of suicides or crime statistics. Throughout the 90s, gun control focused on handguns mainly because of gang violence.

Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which banned semi-automatic rifles. The Columbine shootings occurred in 1999 before the ban expired in 2004. How did they explain it? Loopholes, they said.

Mass shootings using semi-automatic rifles have increased since then, but so has every other statistic related to handguns, crime, and suicide. I’m not sure what problem they’re trying to solve other than to rally their base.

In focusing exclusively on guns, the Democrats are missing the bigger picture of this perilous moment.

We Need to Talk About Riley Gaines

Throughout the drama unfolding in one America, with the “Tennessee Three” rallying the base, pivoting to racism (and guns), and the Transgender Day of Visibility was at the top of Biden’s agenda, Riley Gaines was bullied and harassed by trans activists just for exercising her right to speak about biological men competing alongside women in sports.

A champion swimmer whose dedication to the sport began at 12 years-old, Gaines trained hard at Kentucky State, becoming their most decorated swimmer. She was used to winning races. She knew her strengths and her weaknesses. Like most women, she is competitive and must know those who might beat her in a given race.

But never, in all of the years of training, was she told she would one day have to compete alongside a biological man as she did when swimming alongside Lia Thomas.

Thomas has all of the gifts that go along with having spent his/her whole life competing and training as a man - upper body strength, wider shoulders, bigger hands. There is no way for Gaines to have trained harder and gotten stronger to defeat a biological man.

In this video, Thomas says the quiet part out loud, that the most common misconception about her is that she transitioned because it would give him/her an advantage.

Making progress for trans-identified women means taking a step back for women like Gaines. It’s such a touchy subject that, according to this story in the Free Press, no one dares to stand up and speak out, though most women feel discouraged and frustrated by how this has suddenly been foisted upon them.

Why is this their burden to bear?

How has this gotten this far, and it’s left to a 22 year-old Riley Gaines to take such a brave stand and fight for all women who wish to compete and win in a fair race? Where are the Titans of feminism? Hillary Clinton? Kirsten Gillibrand? Kamala Harris? Jane Fonda? Oprah? Michelle Obama? Gloria Steinem? Killing off what’s left of the “Feminist” movement, that’s where.

Remember at the Women’s March that we proudly proclaimed, “The Future is Female,” only to wake up in 2023, to find the word “female” exclusionary?

Second-wave feminism was gutted because it was considered “white feminism,” white women being the majority (and still are). But now, there isn’t even a way to BE female. One is expected to “identify” as female.

But we are born female. We have periods. We ovulate. We get pregnant. We are only one of three mammalian species to go through menopause because older women are needed both for leadership and to help very young mothers with childbirth and with childcare. Mothers are connected to daughters through DNA:

Mitochondrial DNA is the circular chromosome found inside the cellular organelles called mitochondria. Located in the cytoplasm, mitochondria are the site of the cell's energy production and other metabolic functions. Offspring inherit mitochondria — and as a result mitochondrial DNA — from their mother.

During the Trump years, women soothed and championed each other and felt pride in their womanhood and feminism. The Woman’s March had some 3 - 5 million attending. Once Biden took office and the transgender movement mobilized, those women had nothing to anchor them anymore. They were purposeless, unseen, no longer celebrated.

Now, I watch those same women, the Hillary Democrats, embrace “antiracism” and go on and on about “white fragility” to have some purpose to their lives. Now, they’ve become mothers and allies of transgender people because their only value now is supporting men wishing to become women, just like them.

I have always respected and liked many trans-identified men and women. I use preferred pronouns. I have no problem with them doing whatever they want to do as adults. But I draw two hard lines. One is “gender-affirming care” on minors and the other is biological men competing alongside biological women, thanks to Riley Gaines.

Gaines isn’t the only woman speaking out who has become a target of rage and even attacks. Posey Parker was recently swarmed, spit on, and screamed at in New Zealand.

It’s time to say, “not through me.” Consequences or no consequences, it’s time to have the backs of these women out there with very little support from other women. I might not agree with everything they are fighting for, but I will fight for their right to say it.

Cry, Bitch

Back in 1969, one night in August, a brutal mass murder shook a country to its core. Members of the Manson family, most of them young women, viciously and repeatedly stabbed everyone inside.

When Sharon Tate begged for the life of her baby, nine months in her womb, Susan Atkins said, "Look, bitch, I don't care a thing about you. You're going to die and there's nothing you can do about it."

The trans activists who attacked Riley Gaines said almost the same thing, “you gonna cry, bitch?”

The same kind of dehumanization Manson foisted on the women he brainwashed now courses through the veins of trans activists who believe they have the right to talk to Gaines that way, because to them, by now, she’s not even a person.

They think just by talking she’s putting trans lives at risk. That justifies everything they say - but they’re horribly misguided, and someone must teach them manners. Who raised these monsters anyway?

The Manson murders were shocking enough that they awakened and sobered up a culture hypnotized by the 1960s. That, along with the bombings at the Capitol, the kidnapping and radicalization of Patti Hearst, America was done with the activists.

Mass murder is mass murder. It isn’t always about guns.

Where There is a Will, There is a Way

Audrey Hale wasn’t the only 28-year-old who committed mass murder in recent months. Bryan Kohburger is also 28 years old and has been accused of sneaking into the home of young students in Moscow, Idaho, and stabbing four of them in under nine minutes.

There was no talk of banning long knives after that or warning young women about the dangers of displaying their beautiful bodies on Instagram tagged with their locations. The focus was squarely on the perp.

Darrell E. Brooks in 2021, drove an SUV into a parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six people, including a child. He had been previously arrested for driving that same SUV over his ex-girlfriend and was let out on $1,000 bail.

Yet the conversation will never be that SUVs are too dangerous, so let’s eliminate them. And because Brooks was a Black man, it was too difficult of a subject for the legacy media, and it never became a major news story.

Mass shootings with manifestos attached are closer to acts of terrorism, not unlike suicide bombings, which kill hundreds every month.

And lest we forget, Timothy McVeigh drove a truck loaded with explosives into the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds, including 19 children.

Guns might be easier and faster, but they aren’t the only way to commit mass murder. What all shooters have in common is that they want to make the world suffer for their pain. If one method is eliminated, they’ll find another.

The Democrats want to talk about anything but the underlying cause for these shootings. It’s much easier to pivot to their comfort zone of racism and guns, anything to cast themselves as the good guys and the Republicans as the bad guys.

And if a shooter emerges that might contradict that message, the legacy media helps them bury it.

Stand and Deliver

It isn’t enough to stay silent and hope this awkward moment passes. It isn’t enough to hide behind a fake veneer of going along to get along. It isn’t enough to always be a passenger waiting for others to take you where you need to go. Sometimes you have to rise to the occasion and do the right thing.

That means it’s time to protect the kids from harm. It’s time to be hated and alienated for a good cause. It’s time to stand up for Riley Gaines, have her back, and let her know she is not alone.

I have a daughter the same age as Gaines. I can’t protect her from everything, try though I might. I can’t protect her from broken people filled with rage. I can’t protect her from the unexpected tragedies of life and death. I live with that fear every day. But I can make her future a little brighter and a little more free by teaching her there is nothing wrong with pushing back and telling the truth.