More than seven months ago, a sociopathic “transgender” woman attacked The Covenant School in Nashville, murdering three nine-year-old children — Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney — and adults Katherine Koonce (headmistress), Cynthia Peak, and Mike Hill. We always want to remember their names and what they stood for. They were Christians who loved Jesus and were educating, caretaking, or being educated with their whole lives ahead of them. They were living life to its fullest until life was taken from them by an evil and disturbed woman.

It’s understandable that the victims’ families and others did not wish for the killer’s so-called “manifesto” to be released to the public, as they hoped to avoid exacerbating the pain and trauma. In some ways, our nation would be better off never giving notoriety to the deranged rantings of mass murderers. Many of them kill for the attention and the fame, which is why, with rare exception such as an active manhunt, we don’t name mass killers. Deprive them of what they seek.

The counterargument is that a free society ought to be informed about who committed atrocities and why, not be misinformed about or distracted by how they’re perpetrated. Without knowing a killer’s true motivations, the narrative, bereft of context, inevitably turns to the tool.

In any case, after most mass shootings, we quickly learn what drove the killer. Not so after this one. Why?

That’s rhetorical. The obvious answer for this particular “manifesto” is because it would almost certainly show that leftist ideology — specifically “transgender” ideology — was the reason for this otherwise senseless assault against conservative Christians. The media, which usually craves such sensational manifestos, was suddenly totally incurious and instead obsessed over other narratives like whether people were “misgendering” the assailant. The FBI even effectively censored the “manifesto” despite early assurances from Nashville police that it would be released.

Under this tension, it was perhaps inevitable that the Nashville “manifesto” was going to be leaked. Conservative pundit Steven Crowder did just that yesterday. Nashville police have now authenticated the writings, though social media outlets are censoring it. We’ll get to specifics in a moment.

First, an important caveat: We use quotes around “manifesto” because what’s scrawled on a few scraps of notebook paper is hardly a coherent or cogently explicated worldview, nor does Crowder’s release appear to be her complete journal.

Now, to the killer’s purported motivation.

“Kill those kids!!! Those crackers going to private fancy schools with those fancy khakis + sports backpacks w/ their daddies mustangs + convertables [sic],” she allegedly wrote on February 3. “I wish to shoot you weak*ss d**ks w/ your mop yellow hair, wanna kill all you little crackers! Bunch of little f**gots w/ your white privileges.”

“I hope I have a high death count,” she wrote March 27, the day of the attack. “Ready to die haha.”

There’s more vulgarity and hate, but that much will suffice. Clearly, her mental state was suicidal in addition to murderous. Nothing in those excerpts indicates that the killer’s gender dysphoria played a role other than being part of her overall mental illness, though the rest of her journaling may get into that. She was, however, evidently thoroughly indoctrinated in the Left’s anti-white racism. Marxist-based critical race theory treats people not as individuals but as helpless oppressed masses or as cogs in an oppressive wheel. That dehumanization is precisely why CRT is so dangerous.

The killer’s inculcated hatred of a group of people shows why it is so irresponsibly mendacious for leftists — from run-of-the-mill social media trolls all the way up to the president of the United States — to spout racist CRT planks and other woke dogma as if they’re gospel truth. It turns out some deranged people actually believe them and choose to do something about it.

In this case, the victims were the best of us — a hard-working custodian (the sad irony being that he was black), a Christian school principal, a teacher, and three young kids, including the daughter of a pastor. We prayed fervently for their loved ones after the assault in March, and we pray for them now that the pain is again brought to the fore. And we’ll hug our children a little tighter today, too.

(Updated)