On Wednesday, a 17-year-old white-supremacist murdered a classmate and injured another before turning the gun on himself, according to police, in a shooting at a high school in Nashville, Tennessee. The shooter, Solomon Henderson, was African American and was a follower of neo-Nazi and fascist politics.

Wednesday’s shooting is the first shooting of the year at a K-12 school in the US and comes just days after the inauguration of fascist president Donald Trump who, along with his wealthiest funder, Elon Musk, promotes the same racist and anti-immigrant politics as the shooter.

The shooting took place at Antioch High School, a majority-minority school, with the largest racial demographic being Hispanic at 45 percent, followed by black at 40 percent, 10 percent Arabic and five percent being white.

In 2018 students at the school held a walkout in support of gun control. The Covenant School, 17 miles east, was the location of another school shooting just a little under two years prior which resulted in seven deaths.

The victims of Wednesday’s shooting include 16-year-old Josselin Corea Escalante. Josselin’s aunt, Maria Corea, told CNN in Spanish that Josselin played soccer, got good grades and was well-loved. “Oh, God,” she said through tears, “She was my girl.”

After being shot by Henderson, Josselin was evacuated to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead. Her father, German Corea, told CNN in Spanish “It’s not fair.”

The shooting occurred in the school cafeteria. One student suffered a grazing wound to his arm while another student suffered injuries after falling down while fleeing from gunfire. Henderson committed suicide by gunshot according to police.

The shooting was partially streamed on the video-streaming platform Kick but was quickly banned. Following the shooting, News Channel 5 posted a 288-page online diary allegedly from Henderson which detailed his pessimistic, self-hating, racist and fascist worldview.

The diary was on a platform which could be edited by anyone and had been vandalized, but Channel 5 independent researchers assert they were able to restore what appears to be the original.

Separately Channel2Now posted a separate 47-page manifesto that was revealed by the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD). The manifesto, diary and social media accounts all share the same fascist politics. The manifesto’s title is “The West has Fallen” and featured an ape in the center of a Nazi sonnerand. In the manifesto Henderson espoused the antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory,” which asserts that leftists and Jews are trying to replace the “white” race in the United States with “inferior” races.

The diary, whose legitimacy has yet to be confirmed by police, details preparations for the shooting and Henderson’s apparent thoughts up until the shooting with the last entry reading “4 hours to go.”

A BlueSky social media account referenced in the 47-page manifesto shared memes glorifying school shootings. The final three posts read:

“Today seems like a good day to die.”

“I thought someone had found out when I got called to the office but it was just probation officer.”

The last post stated, “We’re good everything will be going [as] scheduled.”

The diary, manifesto and social media accounts paint a disturbing picture of acute social distress and political backwardness. In the diary, Henderson accused his mother of being abusive and that he contemplated killing his parents as well as bombing a middle school and an elementary school. If the diary and social media account is accurate, Henderson was almost caught with a gun by police.

The selfies in the diary and manifesto are also revealing.

In one, Henderson poses with an image of Adolf Hitler with his fingers shaped in a white-power symbol. In another he is pictured wearing a neo-Nazi band T-shirt, and in “white face” with a cartoon figure superimposed holding a book titled “The Great Replacement Theory.” Some entries described self-loathing and numerous racial slurs against black people.

One such entry reads, “Only the ill mentally will praise me after my death and the only good n****r is a dead n****r, which includes me.” Another entry read, “I wish I was white” and he describes himself worthy of the “Self-Hating N****r Award.”

Henderson may have been in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). One selfie in the diary shows him in a JROTC uniform. JROTC is set up in many of the poorest neighborhood schools in order to funnel children into the military once they are of age. It isn’t known if there was any connection between Henderson’s politics and JROTC, if he was indeed in it, though it is known that the US military is a hot-bed of far-right politics.

In the manifesto, Henderson praised other fascist killers including Christchurch mass shooter Brenton Tarrant, the Buffalo grocery store shooter, Payton Gendron, and El Paso, Wal-Mart mass murderer Patrick Crusius. All of them shared the Great Replacement Theory in defending their action.

ABC News, citing a law enforcement source, reported that it appears at least one of Henderson’s social media accounts was following 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, another fascist who conducted a mass shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, this past December.

The same BlueSky account that appeared to be Henderson’s last posts before the shooting also featured an edited picture of Rupnow with the caption: “What the [jews] stole from me.”

The fascist, white supremacist politics Henderson adopted are the politics of despair.

Since Henderson was born, American imperialism’s “solution” to every problem its faced has been overwhelming mass violence. The US is currently at war with Russia which threatens nuclear war and is preparing for a disastrous war against China. Trump is currently looking to annex Canada, as well as to invade Panama and Greenland.

Meanwhile, since 2020 the population has been subject to the homicidal “let it rip” response to the COVID-19 overseen by the Republicans and Democrats which has resulted in more than 1.2 million deaths and tens of millions infections. Life has been deemed to be extremely cheap by the ruling class.

Vulnerable people such as Henderson, who are in the formative years of their lives and suffering from varying levels of social distress, are deeply impacted both economically, socially, and politically by these developments.

Henderson’s descent into far-right mass violence is not an isolated incident. The American ruling class is oozing fascism out of every pore.

The fact of the matter is that the views espoused by Henderson originate from the depths of the Republican Party and are rife in the fetid halls of the White House.

Musk, Trump’s confidant and advisor, espouses and promotes the same filth that Henderson adopted including the Great Replacement Theory. Musk backs the Alternative Fur Deutschland (AFD)—Germany’s neo-Nazi party—as well as Britain’s most prominent fascist, Tommy Robinson.

Trump has dined with fascist Nick Fuentes and Hitler lover Kanye West. His fascist picks for State Department posts such as Michael Anton are similar followers of the Great Replacement Theory, which could be more correctly described as part of the Republican Party platform.

Media pundits and Democratic Party officials put forward the usual and worn-out explanation and policy prescription in response to this latest shooting—that access to guns causes shootings and that gun control reform will stop them. The point of this cynical and surface level of analysis is to tie opposition to the shootings to the Democratic Party, as well as to cover up the actual social and political origins of school shootings.

As was the case with the past years following 2020 when school was mostly virtual, there is no reason to expect this year won’t continue the grotesque trend of record breaking school shootings for both the number as well as fatalities going back to 2008 during the height of the Great Recession. A total of 83 such shootings were seen in 2024, with 2022 being the most deadly among these years with 47 deaths.