The Political Death Of Nex Benedict

Tragic Suicide Of Mentally Ill 'Non-Binary' Teen Highlights Is A 'Who-Whom' Event

Dagny ‘Nex’ Benedict, from a police bodycam video. She killed herself the next day

Yesterday, President Biden issued a public statement about the suicide of Nex Benedict, a non-binary Oklahoma girl who committed suicide by overdose the day after going to the hospital for treatment following a school fight. The statement begins:

Jill and I are heartbroken by the recent loss of Nex Benedict. Every young person deserves to have the fundamental right and freedom to be who they are, and feel safe and supported at school and in their communities. Nex Benedict, a kid who just wanted to be accepted, should still be here with us today. 

Meaning no disrespect to this dead girl, what Biden says is a political statement not fully in line with the facts. This troubled child’s death is politically useful for the president and for progressive causes, but people should know the actual story is more complicated.

Take a look at the police body cam footage of Officer Thompson’s interview with Nex (real name: Dagny), at the hospital after the fight in the school bathroom. Nex is accompanied by her grandmother Sue, who refers to Nex repeatedly as “she,” and as her daughter. Nex/Dagny does not object or even flinch:

This Officer Thompson is very friendly, open, and supportive. Nex tells him that three younger girls made critical remarks about the way she dressed. In response, Nex threw water on them. Then they physically attacked her.

After hearing this, the police officer advises Nex and her granny on the next possible courses of action. Near the eight-minute mark, he says, “Both parties are victims, and both parties are suspect. You are an offender as well” — this, because she tossed the water on the girls, elevating a verbal confrontation to physical, and accelerating the conflict.

“She’s the one who initiated it,” the cop says. “It doesn’t make it right, but they are the one who defended themselves.”

He hastens to say that he’s not defending the actions of the other girls, but rather trying to give Nex/Dagny and her guardian an idea of how the courts would likely approach the matter if they file criminal charges. “She essentially started it,” he says — and again, watch for yourself, but the cop is not trying to discourage Nex from filing charges, only explaining that if you do this, it won’t necessarily go as you hope. The other girls could file charges against you too.

At the 10:16 point, the officer says that throwing the water on the other girls is meaningful, in a criminal sense. “If you hadn’t done that, you would have been a victim all day long,” he says, meaning that her status regarding criminal law would have been uncomplicated. Later, to Nex’s guardian: “She [Nex] is the one who started the domino effect. [Then, to Nex] If you had not done that, we might not even be here.”

He goes on to explain that the other girls are “just as guilty as you are, 100 percent,” for the fight, but that in the eyes of criminal law, the fact that those girls were allegedly making fun of the way Nex was dressed is not considered adequate grounds for reacting physically.

On the video, we next hear audio of the 911 call Sue Benedict made after finding Nex in physical distress. As the dispatcher questions her about Nex, Sue Benedict tells her that Nex takes seroquel, a prescription antipsychotic given for treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder. The autopsy found that Nex did not die because of head trauma, but because she overdosed on Prozac and Benadryl. Sue Benedict did not mention to the 911 operator that Nex was on Prozac. It is possible, I guess, that Nex had a stash of Prozac hidden away somewhere from when she had been taking it in the past. The point is, Nex was under treatment for mental illness.

So Nex Benedict had very serious mental health issues before she and those girls ever got into a school bathroom fight. Heaven knows I’m not defending the bullies who made fun of this kid, but it’s an important part of the story to know that

a) Nex was under medical treatment for serious mental health problems;

b) according to the police bodycam interview, Nex admitted to accelerating the school conflict, and was advised by the officer that as a criminal matter, this means she is probably just as guilty of assault as the other girls; and

c) Nex’s guardian referred to her repeatedly by feminine pronouns, and Nex did not object, meaning that she was capable of bearing up under so-called “misgendering”

None of this makes the child’s suicide any less painful. But it does make it far less political than activists and the Democratic president are making it out to be. Democrats and activists are angry that Oklahoma is passing conservative laws regarding transgenderism (see here for more). It seems clear that they’re trying to capitalize on this kid’s suicide to get what they want. Oklahoma trans activists accuse the state’s school superintendent of creating a “hostile environment” for trans and non-binary students, because he won’t recognize them for what they claim to be.

This is the bog-standard form of emotional bullying LGBT activists use: give us what we want or you will have the blood of dead kids on your hands.

In the past, I’ve written about how LGBT activist lists of the “epidemic” of transgender murders are purely political documents, nothing but. For one thing, there aren’t large numbers of trans people murdered. For another, when you look into the cases activists cite, there is rarely evidence that the person died because of bias. Many of them died because they are streetwalking prostitutes, which puts them in great danger. Again, it doesn’t mean they deserved to die, but it does put their death in a meaningful context.

This is not the kind of context activists — including advocacy journalists — wish to acknowledge.

It would be useful to know Nex Benedict’s history of psychiatric treatment. Normally this would be nobody’s business but her family’s, but inasmuch as activists — including the US President — have appropriated her and her story in the culture war, the public is entitled to know just how mentally ill the girl was prior to the bathroom incident. After all, by Nex’s own statement to Officer Thompson, the girls she fought with made fun of her for the way she dressed, not because of her sexual identity. Of course the way Nex and her friends dress could certainly be tied to their sexual identity, but then too, teenagers picking on each other over the way they dress, wear their hair, etc., is hardly unique.

I have a certain sympathy for the Benedicts here. Back when I was in eighth grade, which I guess would have been around 1980, a bigger, older boy in my class who had serious mental health issues grabbed me from behind in the classroom and began punching me uncontrollably. The kid, who had been transferred to our class after literally picking up a smaller boy in his previous class and throwing him across the room, knocked me unconscious. The school didn’t call my parents, or seek medical help for me. My mom found me after school on the couch at home, babbling nonsense. She took me to the hospital, and they diagnosed concussion. The kid who assaulted me was removed from school. Later, he was placed into a state home for violent, mentally ill juveniles after police found him masturbating in the bushes while watching a barn he set on fire burn.

So yeah, I am especially sensitive to schools not taking bullying seriously. What my school did forty years ago, and what Nex Benedict’s school did, aren’t the same thing, but they might be the same kind of thing. I don’t know, though, how we can reasonably expect any school to prevent teenagers from trash-talking each other over the way they dress, wear their hear, the music they listen to, and so forth. Mocking other kids for their race, their sex, and so forth, is more serious. But teens picking on each other over their clothes is a federal case? Really?

Why do I bring this up? Because I resent the hell out of the POTUS and activists (including journalists) unfairly using this tragedy to advocate for their political causes. Here’s the ABC News White House correspondent all but boasting on Twitter about how she laid into the Oklahoma school superintendent over his supposed lack of concern about bullying. Has ABC devoted much time this week to writing about how the British government’s National Health Service has decided to stop prescribing puberty blockers to minors over concerns about safety and effectiveness? Have ABC or any other networks reported on the bombshell WPATH files?

Even The Guardian, the gold standard of mainstream British leftism, reported on the damaging information in the leaked files, talking about why it really matters to the trans discussion. Yet I found no mention of these files in The New York Times, and the only place I found it in the Washington Post is in a (very good and balanced) op-ed piece by Megan McArdle. McArdle notes in her piece:

In a large-scale Dutch study, trans patients were found to have almost four times the suicide risk of the general population. The researchers saw 49 suicides among more than 8,000 patients, many of which occurred during or after transition. A nationwide study of suicide rates among trans people in Denmark similarly found 12 suicides in a population of 3,759.

One implication of this is that being “gender-affirming” via medical transition and the other panoply of solutions proffered by LGBT activists and their political and media allies may still not be enough to save trans lives. Could it be that the main problem is not with society rejecting transness, but with a lack of inner psychological stability that leads people to identify as trans in the first place? Shouldn’t we at least be able to ask the question?

All school bullying is wrong, but in this Nex Benedict case, we have a girl who overheard other girls making fun of the way she and her friends dressed — and then reacting by throwing water on the teasers. Had this gone to court, both parties — Nex and the three other girls — would have likely been found guilty of criminal assault. Nex, who looked and acted normal and calm in the hospital interview, had some kind of mental health episode at home, and decided to overdose on prescription and non-prescription medications. Again: a tragedy, but not a national political issue — until Joe Biden decided to make it one.

Pay attention to how this story is being manipulated! Most media will not give you the context — namely, that Nex Benedict was already taking anti-psychotic drugs for her mental condition, and that she admitted to the police officer that she accelerated the fight by being the first to respond with physical violence.

You know who Biden is not talking about? Kaylee Gain, a teenage girl still hospitalized in critical condition after being beaten up outside a high school by another girl. Gain is now in a coma, fighting for her life. She has a fractured skull, brain bleeding, and damage to the frontal lobe of her brain, but doctors won’t know how badly her brain was damaged until she emerges from her coma.

The video of Gain’s assault went viral. You can watch it here, but it’s brutal, especially the part where the assailant repeatedly slams Gain’s head against the pavement. Here’s a still shot:

Notice something? Gain is white; the girl who beat her into a coma is black. Was this simply two girls fighting, or was race a part of the conflict? We don’t know yet. But I think we all know perfectly well that if things were reversed, and a white teenager had put a black one in a coma by slamming her head repeatedly on the concrete, Joe Biden would have issued a statement, and the media would have been going crazy reporting out What It All Means About Race In America.

In official America today, it’s all “who-whom,” you know. The meaning of an act of violence depends on who is abusing whom. We will hear no White House statements of support for Kaylee Gain, any more than we heard them for Laken Riley, the white Georgia student murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. Republicans have tried to capitalize on Riley’s death to blame the Biden administration’s open borders policy, but theirs was not a political stunt; it is actually true. From the NYPost:

The Venezuelan migrant charged with murdering Laken Riley has been identified as member of a deadly gang, but was still waved through the US border, sources have revealed.

Jose Ibarra, 26, is listed as part of the deadly Tren de Aragua gang on internal Department of Homeland Security documents seen by The Post.

He was first arrested for illegally crossing into the US in September 2022 at El Paso, Texas. However, after less than 24 hours in custody, he was released on parole and given free rein in the US until October 2024, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement insiders.

Ibarra made his way to New York City, where he appeared carefree, living in a shelter provided by the city and posting pictures of himself smiling at Big Apple landmarks.

He was even arrested by police in the city but let go, before fleeing to Georgia to meet his allegedly violent brother, who had also been allowed into the country but who cut off an ankle monitor to evade authorities.

Three months later he would go on to kill innocent 22-year-old nursing student Riley, as she jogged near her campus.

The case also highlights how violent and dangerous people have easily slipped under the radar by taking advantage of the Biden administration’s border policies.

After Biden mentioned Riley in his State of the Union (though he misnamed her), he apologized for referring to dear Jose Ibarra as “illegal.” Media and other liberals had faulted the president for being so insensitive as to describe this gang member who crossed illegally into the US as “illegal.”

This is the class of people who runs our country these days. Is America politically polarized? Oh, absolutely. We are so in large part because the POTUS, the Democratic Party, and the media go into paroxysms of activist emoting over a mentally ill teenage girl who committed suicide after girls she threw water on attacked her in the school bathroom … but the savage beating of a white high school girl by a black high school girl gets little to no attention from the president or the media, who seem to be particularly incurious about the racial dynamics here. (There may actually be no racial element to the conflict, and I am not eager to insert one where it doesn’t belong. The point is that our media would not have hesitated to explore than angle were the races reversed.) And we are polarized because the POTUS’s border policies let into the country a violent gang member who allegedly murdered an innocent American, and the POTUS is shamed into apologizing for calling this animal “illegal”.

If polarization is the result of refusing to live by the lying narratives that the Democrats, the White House, and the media expect us to accept, then fine, let’s be polarized. I cannot for the life of me understand why it’s not clear to the Democrats that most Americans have no real way to register their disgust with the current state of affairs, other than to vote. And they will vote Trump, not necessarily because they have much hope that he will fix things, but at least to send a message of no confidence in the Ruling Class.