Since the vile, civically calamitous attempted assassination of Donald Trump, some of the ex-president’s allies have rushed to blame those who tried to warn of the danger he poses to democracy. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, wrote on social media. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Empowered by the righteous fury of victimhood, Trump’s movement wants to cast discussion of his autocratic record and vengeful threats as incitement, smothering the debate at the heart of the 2024 election in a cloying fug of sanctimony.
It would be easy to expound on Republican hypocrisy and list all the many, many times Trump has encouraged violence against his opponents. But in this case, the mainstream debate about polarizing political rhetoric isn’t just suffused with bad faith. It also seems to be irrelevant, because the more we learn about the shooter, the less it makes sense to analyze his actions in conventional ideological terms. Though details remain sparse, this appears to be a story less about fanatical partisanship than about the crisis of lonely and disconnected young men being radicalized into pure nihilism.
In the immediate wake of the attack — which killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore as he shielded his family — many understandably assumed that the perpetrator was a leftist like the man who shot Rep. Steve Scalise and several others in 2017. But what we’ve learned since then, while not enough to draw firm conclusions, complicates the picture.
The would-be assassin, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, is something of a cipher, leaving little trail online. When he was 17, he made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project, which as Ryan Grim reports, is “one of those spammy PACs that carpet bombs your inbox, delivering emails with splashy colors and wild fonts and using every trick in the book to convince people to give small amounts of money.” But when he was 18, Crooks registered as a Republican, and according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, his classmates remember him as right-leaning. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” a student in his American history class told The Inquirer.
The reporting that has emerged so far describes him as an outcast, not an activist. A classmate told CBS News that he was bullied relentlessly. Another told The Wall Street Journal, “People would say he was the student who would shoot up high school.” He appears to have had a passion for gun culture; he reportedly wore camouflage or hunting gear to school and wanted to join the rifle team, though he was rejected as a bad shot. He joined a local gun club, and when he was killed Saturday, he was wearing a T-shirt for Demolition Ranch, a gun-nut YouTube channel.
Some who study terrorism and violent extremism find the shooter’s history of humiliation and obsession with firearms familiar. “We are starting to see some of the key markers we see in individuals that have committed acts of targeted violence,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. In such people, ideology can be secondary to the desire to wreak havoc and win notoriety.
Last year, Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a report called “The Third Generation of Online Extremism,” describing how online radicalization has changed over time. At first, he wrote, the internet simply allowed movements that existed in the real world to broadcast their propaganda and communicate covertly. Then came the advent of social media in the mid-2000s. “In this new online environment, radicalizing extremists would congregate in so-called echo chambers — closed spaces where alternative viewpoints are not dismissed with erudite arguments but with a simple click of an ‘unfriend’ or ‘unfollow’ button,” Ware wrote.
What distinguishes the third generation of online radicalism, which Ware dates from the late 2010s, is its surreal, grab-bag character. For those radicalized online in recent years, Ware wrote, “Not only are organizations less important; ideologies are less important.” Many extremist chat rooms, he wrote, “now trade in a fatalistic ‘doomerism’ which encourages greater violence by normalizing, and even celebrating, suicidal ideation and glorifying forum members, for example, ‘going ER’ — an incel term denoting ending one’s own life in an act of suicidal mass murder.” In this new era, Ware wrote, we might be seeing a narrowing of “the distance between a ‘terrorist’ and more conventional, and nonideological, American mass or school shooters.”
The rise of post-ideological terror is clearly a political issue, stemming from social isolation, hopelessness and anomie among young men, coupled with the easy availability of guns. But it’s an issue that our politics is proving wholly unable to reckon with. In her new book “Black Pill,” journalist Elle Reeve described the miserable men who congregate in the darkest corners of the internet, talking themselves and one another into apocalyptic action. “You can’t go on like this forever,” she wrote. “It hurts too much. You need some relief from the unrelenting doom. You start to imagine what comes after this system fails. That’s the world you need to prepare for, not this one. If the present reality is corrupt and dying, then you are no longer bound by its moral and ethical restraints.” Another way to put this comes from one of the Batman movies: Some men just want to watch the world burn.
We don’t yet know if Crooks was one of these men. But so far, the absence of a clear rationale for his hideous and history-making act has been uncanny, and Ware’s framework offers a way to understand this disturbing lacuna. There’s certainly no indication, as of this writing, that Crooks’ motives can be slotted into our partisan battles. It’s a truism, by now, that widespread American entropy and despair led to Trump’s rise. Those same forces may have incubated the failed man who tried to make him a martyr.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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