Since the vile and civic calamitous assassination attempt on Donald Trump, some of the former president’s allies have rushed to blame those who tried to warn about the danger he poses to democracy. «The central premise of Biden’s campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,» wrote Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, on social media. «That rhetoric directly led to the assassination attempt on President Trump.» Strengthened by the righteous fury of victimhood, the Trump movement wants to present the debate about his autocratic record and vengeful threats as an incitement, stifling the debate in the 2024 election center in a cloying aura of sanctimony.It would be easy to expose Republican hypocrisy and list the many, many times Trump has encouraged violence against his opponents. But in this case, the general debate on polarizing political rhetoric is not only steeped in bad faith. It also seems irrelevant because the more we learn about the shooter, the less sense it makes to analyze his actions in conventional ideological terms. Although details are still scarce, this seems to be a story less about fanatical partisanship than about the crisis of lonely and disconnected young people radicalizing towards pure nihilism.Immediately after the attack, in which rally attendee Corey Comperatore died while protecting his family, many understandably assumed that the perpetrator was a leftist like the man who shot Representative Steve Scalise and several others in 2017. ComplexityBut what we have learned since then, while not enough to draw firm conclusions, complicates the picture.The potential killer, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, is a kind of enigma and leaves few online traces. When he was 17, he made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project, which, as reported by Ryan Grim, is «one of those PAC spam that bombard your inbox, delivering emails with flashy colors and extravagant fonts and using every trick possible to convince people to donate 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-wing. A 2021 photo provided by the Bethel Park school district shows student Thomas Matthew Crooks who graduated from Bethel Park High School with the class of 2022, in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. (Bethel Park School District via AP)»Most of the class was on the liberal side, but Tom, whatever happens, always stood firm on the conservative side,» a student in his American history class told The Inquirer. Reports that have emerged so far describe him as a pariah, not an activist. A classmate told CBS News that he was relentlessly bullied. Another told The Wall Street Journal, «People would say he was the student who would shoot up a high school.» He seems to have had a passion for gun culture.According to reports, he went to school in camouflage clothing or hunting gear and wanted to join the rifle team, although he was rejected for being a poor shot. He joined a local gun club and, when he was killed on Saturday, he was wearing a Demolition Ranch t-shirt, a gun enthusiast YouTube channel.Some studying terrorism and violent extremism find the shooter’s story of humiliation and obsession with firearms familiar. «We are starting to see some of the key markers we see in individuals who have committed acts of targeted violence,» said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. In those individuals, ideology may be secondary to the desire to wreak havoc and gain notoriety.GenerationsLast year, Jacob Ware, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a report titled «The Third Generation of Online Extremism,» describing how digital radicalization has changed over time. At first, he wrote, the Internet simply allowed movements that existed in the real world to transmit their propaganda and communicate covertly. Then came the arrival of social media in the mid-2000s. «In this new online environment, radicalized extremists would congregate in so-called echo chambers: closed spaces where alternative views are not dismissed with erudite arguments but with a simple click of the ‘unfriend’ or ‘unfollow’ button,» Ware wrote.What distinguishes the third generation of online radicalism, which Ware dates back to the late 2010s, is its surrealistic and all-encompassing character. For those radicalized online in recent years, Ware wrote: «Organizations are not only less important; ideologies are less important.» Many extremist chat rooms, he wrote, «now peddle a fatalistic ‘apocalyptic sense’ that fosters increased violence by normalizing, and even celebrating, suicidal ideas and glorifying forum members, for example, ‘going ER,’ an incel term denoting ending one’s life in an act of suicidal mass murder.» New eraIn this new era, Ware wrote, we may be seeing a reduction in «the distance between a ‘terrorist’ and American mass shooters, more conventional and non-ideological.»The rise of post-ideological terror is clearly a political issue, stemming from social isolation, hopelessness, and anomie among young men, along with the easy availability of firearms. But it is an issue that our politics are proving utterly incapable of addressing. In her new book «Black Pill,» journalist Elle Reeve described the miserable men who congregate in the darkest corners of the Internet, convincing themselves and each other to take apocalyptic actions. «You can’t keep going like this forever,» she wrote. «It hurts so much. You need some relief from the relentless doom. You start to imagine what comes after this system fails. That’s the world you have to prepare for, not this one. If the current reality is corrupt and dying, then you are no longer bound by its moral and ethical constraints.» Another way to put it comes from one of the Batman movies: some men just want to watch the world burn. We still don’t know if Crooks was one of these men. But so far, the absence of a clear justification for his heinous and historic act has been astonishing, and Ware’s framework offers a way to understand this unsettling gap. Certainly, there is no indication, at the time of writing this article, that Crooks’ motives can be included in our partisan battles. By now, it is a truism that widespread American entropy and despair led to Trump’s rise. Those same forces may have incubated the failed man who tried to turn him into a martyr.
