(LifeSiteNews) — The second school shooting at an American Christian school in two years has left two innocents dead: a teacher and a pupil. Like the mass shooting at Covenant Christian School in Nashville last year, the killer was a female—15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who was a student at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. The victims have not yet been named. Six others were injured; two are in critical condition with reportedly life-threatening injuries.
According to the Madison Police Department, a second grader called 911 at 10:57 a.m. to report that a shooting was underway; a deputy with the Dane County Sheriff’s Office arrived three minutes later, with a police officer arriving at 11:01. Law enforcement immediately entered the building, and the teenage shooter was “down” by 11:05. She was holding a handgun. EMS arrived on the scene at 11:05 to aid victims, and by 11:14, officers were clearing the building. According to news reports, two victims have since been released from the hospital.
The Madison Police Department and the mainstream press have released few details about the shooter thus far, but earlier today a reporter with the gender-critical news outlet Reduxx.info, which frequently breaks news about the transgender movement, published what she alleges to be Natalie Rupnow’s six-page manifesto, which she states she received from Rupnow’s boyfriend (who, strangely, knew her as “Samantha” Rupnow). The manifesto’s authenticity has not yet been confirmed by the police, the family, or other news outlets, but it contains details that were not released by authorities until hours later.
The manifesto appears to be genuine: it is rambling, incoherent, and lacks a clear motivation for the school shooting. Unlike Covenant Christian school shooter Audrey Hale, Rupnow does not identify as transgender or “queer.” According to the reporter—who goes by the X handle “Pagliacci the Hated”: “I have made contact with the alleged boyfriend of the Wisconsin shooter. He has very graciously provided me the full manifesto, which I verified by having him screen record himself opening it from a direct link the shooter sent to him via WhatsApp.”
I have made contact with the alleged boyfriend of the Wisconsin shooter.
He has very graciously provided me the full manifesto, which I verified by having him screen record himself opening it from a direct link the shooter sent to him via WhatsApp.
I told him I would do my… pic.twitter.com/CeuOeQLn3h
— pagliacci the hated 🌝 (@Slatzism) December 16, 2024
The “manifesto”—if it can be called that—is titled “War Against Humanity,” and it is a nihilistic and despairing document. Primarily, Rupnow seems filled with anger at her parents, who are divorced. She refers to them as scum, and claims that they did not want her and did not love her, and that she was the “wrong child” in the family. (She does not provide any details about her family in general.) She writes that she had initially planned to commit suicide but decided instead to perpetrate a school shooting because it was “better for evolution rather than just one stupid boring suicide.”
“Humanity is filth and I don’t like filth nor want to live in it nor should anyone else and I know it follows me and how it has followed me and will follow me because of how the world is runned [sic],” she wrote. “There were so many things I wanted to do as a kid, yet I can admit I was afraid of the other kids, and also even with my own parents but I don’t trust them and at that age as well I didn’t and I never will. My parents are scum, there is nothing that will save them to make me think good of them Ever again.”
She continued: “No family to ever trust and to never trust society…I can agree that I don’t know what I’m doing with my life but neither did my parents or anyone around me, I have changed and I will NOT go back to that, ever again hardened and I’m different.”
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Later in the document, she again cites her familial chaos: “My so-called family never included me because I was too weird for them…My parents divorced quite a few times which didn’t help me at all but not did it really affect me it just made me a little lonely because nobody was there for me and never really has. My mother tried overdosing when I was around 12 or something, I don’t care if she would have survived or died from it but yet she was still here, doesn’t mean she actually was in my life. I see my parents as failures for everything they’ve done to me and just kinda f*****g with my life.”
She returns, again and again, to her father, stating that: “He will never love me like he loved his ex or her kids or even alcohol but that doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter anymore because nobody heard me out and just made fun of me my entire life and I’m sick of it.”
Rupnow clearly spent much time researching mass killers on the internet. She cites Pekka Eric Auvinen, who killed eight people and injured one at the Jokela High School in Finland on November 7, 2007 (she notes that she was born “exactly two years” after him); Arda Küçükyetim, a neo-Nazi who stabbed five people outside a mosque in Turkey earlier this year (she calls him “an ultimate saint”); and Vladislav Roslyakov, who killed 20 people and wounded 67 in a shooting and bomb attack at the Kerch Polytechnic College in Crimea in 2018. Rupnow uses racial epithets at one point and references a “revolution,” but the manifesto lacks any discernable overarching ideology.
The impression one gets of Rupnow from her hate-filled musings is of someone who was deeply miserable, felt out of place, and consequently became filled with a desire for revenge (a word she uses). Indeed, the term “manifesto” seems hardly appropriate for her stream-of-consciousness scribblings. Rupnow comes off as a bitter, lost soul who turned to the internet and found herself inspired by similar figures who allowed their misery to metastasize into deadly hatred. Now she is dead and has left behind her only grief.
READ: Nashville school shooter’s ‘manifesto’ highlights the destructive nature of porn, sexual confusion