Thomas Crooks

When I first read of the suicidal action committed by Thomas Crooks in Butler, Pennsylvania, a video essay came to mind. Gala Hernández’s La mecánica de los fluidos (2022) is about an anonymous incel and Reddit user with the handle “Anathematic Anarchist,” who left a cryptic suicide note on the platform in 2018. Lopez’s film can help us understand what we don’t understand about Crooks, the twenty-year-old about whom we know nothing because there is nothing to know.

Crooks, the suicidal young man who climbed onto a rooftop to shoot Donald Trump, is a protagonist of the American drama. It’s his subjectivity, that of “incel,” that comes to the fore when I think about the American social landscape that is today in the throes of a gigantic psychotic convulsion. The young guy who suddenly appears on the roof of a warehouse dressed in a gray military suit is the same ghost that Gala Hernández searches for in her movie. Not Trump, not Biden, not Harris, not the crowd of people enthusiastically raving about their racist messiah who dodges bullets and raises his fist, not the Democrats disingenuously worrying that America is falling into an indecipherable abyss while funding/supplying a genocide in Gaza. They are not the subject of the story. The subject, the protagonist of the story, is Crooks.

La mecánica de los fluidos is a painful and magnificent film that thinks deeply about the sensitivity of what we can call the “connective generation.” The film begins with a message from Anathematic Anarchist announcing his own suicide. But after this message he disappears from virtual life.

Félix Guattari spoke of l’inconscient machinique (the machinic unconscious) long before the digital machine penetrated the dynamics of the mind, but today the connective unconscious is incompatible with the conjunctive symbolic order.1 In other words, the digital has recoded language, but digital language is unable to access the dynamics of affection, desire, friendship.

Encapsulated in the digital cage, the unconscious awakens monsters: the recombinant language of digital technology is not compatible with the fluidity of the unconscious. In the connective dimension, mental activity is forced to function according to rules that do not comply with empathy, friendship, solidarity, pleasure, suffering, because they only understand operational functionality.

Friendship is inaccessible when the mind only works through binary oppositions. The connective formatting of the mind prevents it from connecting with other minds, while optimizing its functional combination. A sort of systemic loneliness derives from this subjunctive incompetence, and generates a wave of depression.

The Trump Cure

Trump offers a type of cure for American systemic depression, like Hitler provided a type of cure for the systemic depression of German society a century ago. Such a depression, self-medicated with addictive drugs, is the narrative background of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy by Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance. If Trump is the expression of the Second Amendment people (armed racism), Vance is the expression of the fentanyl people (depressive epidemic).

Everybody remembers the effects of Hitler’s cure, and so we can guess in what direction Trump’s cure will move; the directionality is similar, even if the conjuncture is different. Hitler directed the compressed energies of the German people towards the elimination of scapegoats within European society: Jews, Roma people, communists, queer people. Trump and Vance’s scapegoat, the criminal alien, is more elusive. Their cure could unleash genocidal violence of planetary proportions—as already expressed by today’s ruling party.

The Incel Galaxy

La mecánica de los fluidos is an attempt to investigate the incel galaxy, an ambiguous cultural dimension—which is also one of Trump’s electoral reserves. The video’s narrator (voiced by Hernández) speaks of her search for Anathematic Anarchist. In 2017, Anathematic Anarchist created a group called “braincels” on Reddit, which quickly amassed seventeen thousand users. Hernández never met Anathematic Anarchist but was taken aback by his final message declaring his intention to die by suicide:

I am a suicidal and I have been for weeks now
There is nobody that can save me no
My family won’t help me, the hospital won’t give a shit about me.
And I am incapable of helping myself.
This is because American culture views people like me
As garbage
The blood of other thousands of people like me is on America’s hands …
My only wish is that I become a martyr.

Anathematic Anarchist sent this message and then disappeared. Hernández searches for him through the infinite meanders of semi-existence, venturing into the online universe of contemporary sexual solitude, of the “Manosphere”: a universe saturated with aggressive shyness, exalted individualism, disgust for the female, and above all angry suffering.

In this online landscape we see shy or aggressive males, bearded or hairless, expressing their vision of a world without females. Many of them record themselves in their cars, some in adolescent bedrooms with posters taped to the wall. Everyone says “fucking” every three words.

Then Hernández crosses into the Tinder universe, which facilitates twenty-six million dates a day. This universe if made up of souls looking for each other in a desert that has its center in a building in Silicon Valley and its terminals in every neighborhood of the world. People are looking for sexual mates, based on an algorithm that evaluates sexual attractiveness.

The market for fuckable or non-fuckable bodies already began a long time ago in 2004, when Facebook was born specifically for this market. But the owner of Tinder reassures us that many marriages have been facilitated by Tinder.

The Suicidal Narcissus

The agents who are inquiring into the Trump shooting speak of Crooks as an

intelligent, unassuming loner … His intentions may have been less politically motivated and more about attacking the highest-profile target near him … Crooks seems similar to the dozens of other young men who’ve wreaked havoc across the US with high-powered assault-style rifles in recent years. He had few close friends, he would often go shooting at a local firing range, and he didn’t seem to display strongly held views that would suggest a politically driven assassination … “This may be a situation where the more we know, the less we understand about the exact reason why,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and a CNN national security analyst.2

The more we know about Thomas, the less we understand why he did what he did. As far as journalists can ascertain, Thomas was not very interested in Trump’s political stance. With the same spirit, the story goes, he might have shot Biden or any other famous person who could garner him some fame.

The suicidal Narcissus has no interest in the political content of his action. His action rather has a metapolitical, and also metaphysical, character. It is the entire world that must be erased with his gesture, not only the intention to kill but above all to be killed. Crooks is the proletarian of the digital Hyper-Machine, the other side of techno-optimism. He is the precarious cognitive worker who writes software for a few dollars. He is the compulsive consumer of electronic stimuli, the target of promotional campaigns from high-tech companies. He is the victim of info-neural bombardment. A suicidal hero, he is only interested in his own misery. A kind of misery that mainstream political rhetoric cannot understand.

Victims and Executioners of the Future Reich

Ever since I saw Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), the figure of the kid killer has hypnotized me. The film fictionalizes the story of two boys who in 1999 went to their school in Columbine, Colorado armed with machine guns and shot their classmates, killing fifteen of them. That was the beginning of an endless massacre.

I’ve come to believe that this phenomenon is key to understanding the psychotic implosion of a frightened country that is burning faster and faster, but unfortunately will not be able to burn without burning the rest of the world.

The word “sociopath” once served to define the type of mentally ill person who has no ability to understand or shows no regard for other people. I fear that this term is no longer useful to define a specific category of mentally ill people, because sociopathy is becoming something of a generalizable feature in the age of digital distancing, reinforced by viral distancing.

A crypto-dronic industry works in the service of this “sociopathic” society. Case in point: drones and encryption tools allow one to anonymously kill someone many thousands of miles away, like Israeli soldiers do. Many of these operators, as reported in multiple sources, do it just for “fun” or because they are “bored.”3

Gunther Anders wrote in 1962:

The technique that the Third Reich initiated on a large scale is not yet “techno-totalitarian.” It’s not evening yet. The horrors of the coming kingdom will surpass by far the horrors of yesterday which, in comparison, will only appear as an experimental provincial theater, a dress rehearsal of totalitarianism dressed up with stupid ideology.

And also:

We can expect that the horrors of the Reich of the future will eclipse the horrors of the Reich of the past … When our children or grandchildren, proud of their perfect co-mechanization, look down from the heights of their thousand-year empire upon the Reich of yesterday, this will look like a minor and provincial experiment.4

Anders’s grandchildren now witness the triumph of the New Third Reich, which is no longer limited to Germany or any one state, but extends across the entire earth, like a many-headed monster, armed with extermination devices. Anders argues that after 1945 the world was told a false fairy tale: the destruction of Nazi Germany was not at all the end of horror, it was just the end of its beginning. Now the monster has reemerged, with a new multicolored appearance, and with enormously more powerful instruments. Invincible. Eternal. Hitler dressed up in different guises, everywhere promising genocide, everywhere deploying armed guards at the border, everywhere torturing and killing. Gaza is the continuation of this tendency.

Suicide is the most rational act for billions of individuals who are destined for torment, but in general they are held back by irrational motivations: the illusion that tomorrow could be better, the fear of nothingness, hope that a nonexistent god will save us all. Some, like Crooks, choose suicide by cop, a suicide facilitated by a policeman who at a certain point bursts onto the scene and shoots you in the head to interrupt your action.

Little by little, the army of suicides is spreading, bringing death to supermarkets, schools, churches, streets, with deadly weapons stored in the cellar together with jars of jam and barrels of bad wine. This is the most likely civil war in Trump’s next America.

Thomas Crooks is the unwitting victim, and at the same time the accomplice. He, too, Narcissus Mephistopheles, wants to join the party, and he shoots the sputtering orange guy, no matter what he says. Who knows who is the victim and who is the executioner?