After almost 18 months of legal proceedings in Nashville, Tennessee, the relevant journal pages kept by the Covenant School assailant have been published. Tennessee Star Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy had filed suit to obtain numerous diaries and messages the assailant had written prior to the assault.

After publishing 90 journal pages most relevant to the attack, Leahy contended, “Our reporting on the Covenant Killer investigation has served the public interest.” He added, “We legally obtained writings by [the assailant], MNPD investigation documents, and MNPD crime scene photos from a source familiar with the MNPD investigation in June 2024. These documents and photos have helped us inform the public about the underlying reasons for this heinous attack, and have helped drive the public discussion of what should be done to prevent such acts of violence in the future. We have documented a massive failure of the mental health system as a root cause of [the attacker’s] reprehensible actions.”

Leahy further noted, “We have had a First Amendment right to publish these documents from the moment we legally obtained them in June 2024.”

Included in the published documents is a final note from the killer to her parents, written on the day of the attack, which made clear that her actions amounted to “suicide by cop.” The combined journal entries reveal an individual in the grip of mental illness exacerbated by the ideological cult in which she was immersed.

Other writings suggest an autism diagnosis that isn’t entirely clear, but what is clear is that she had bought into the radical leftist gender-confusion ideology as well as the anti-white racism of CRT. These lies fueled her anger and a suicidal fixation.

For example, she writes: “‘Land of the Free’ means, whatever f***er is taking away human rights is not of a human at all. I wish death upon myself cause of the pure hatred of my female gender. With no rights, anyone’s country is a s***** dictatorship.”

In another entry, she writes, “The torchure [sic] of being raised a girl, and actually believed I just had to deal with it, and tried to be feminine. But that didn’t last long after high school ended + no longer had to fear of being called a dyke or a faggot. It was only until my early 20s I finally found the answer — that changing one’s gender is possible. But oh f***ing no, not w/ my mother. What she believes, how she grew up conservatively and that LGBTQ-especially transgender in her era was an enigma, nearly non-existent.”

One thing is certain: No solution to such violent and deadly school assaults can be reached if the heart of the issue is continuously avoided. And the heart of the issue is what we are teaching our kids — not just in our schools or our homes, but more broadly in our culture writ large. Secularism as an ideology promotes the idea that God does not exist or is entirely inconsequential if He does exist. Furthermore, secularism suggests that meaning and purpose ultimately don’t exist. With young people being fed this inherently hopeless and depressing ideology, it comes as little surprise that it breaks many of them. While the vast majority don’t turn to violence, many do engage in other self-destructive behaviors, such as drug use.

The point is that what we are witnessing as a nation with these school attacks are the symptoms of a bigger problem: our culture’s loss of a love for and fear of God.

The solution for our cultural condition is not found in politics or government. Rather, it is found in our nation repenting of its embrace of godless self-sufficiency in which we worship ourselves and the power of the state. It is found in turning back to God and embracing our Creator as the ultimate authority and sustainer of our lives.

(The day after the Nashville assailant’s journal notes were released, there was another rare but equally tragic school shooting in Georgia, which also took the lives of four victims.)