Crooks, the little boy who climbs onto the roof to shoot the candidate, is for me the central figure of the American drama. It is he, Thomas Crooks, the universal incel, the only subjectivity of interest in the US world in the grip of a gigantic psychotic convulsion. The one who suddenly manifests himself on the roof of a warehouse dressed in a grey military suit is the same ghost that Gala Hernandez looks for in La meccanica de los fluidos.

Not Trump, not Biden, not the screaming mob of racists enthusiastic about the Messiah dodging bullets and raising his fist, not the Democrats worried that the United States is plunging into an indecipherable abyss. They hold the power, but they are not the subject of the story. The subject of the story is Thomas Crooks, the little boy about whom we know nothing because there is nothing to know.

“Intelligent an assuming loser”, the investigators define it. “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… the more we know, the less we understand about the exact reason why,” (Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and a CNN national security analyst).

The more we know the less we understand, says the investigator trying to decipher our hero's behaviour. It's great: from what we are given to understand Thomas didn't give a damn about who that Trump guy was, or at least very little. With the same diligent attention, he would have shot Biden or any other famous person whose fame he could reverberate.

The suicidal Narcissus has no interest in the political content of his action. His action has a metapolitical, even metaphysical character. It is the whole world that is to be erased, with that gesture that is not only intended to kill, but above all to commit suicide.

Crooks is the proletarian of the digital hyper-machine; he is the other face of techno-optimism. He is the precarious cognitive worker who writes software for a few dollars in wages. He is the compulsive consumer of electronic stimuli. He is the target of all high-tech companies' promotional campaigns; he is the victim of the neuro-informational bombardment. The suicide hero, crushed by psychic and sexual misery that political rhetoric can in no way comprehend.

At Bethel Park High School, they knew him as a prepared, quiet student. His classmates would bully him several times, this pimply kid who appears smiling in the photo. He liked to play chess and liked video games; he was learning programming languages. His schoolmates reported that he had wanted to join the school's shooting team, but had not been admitted because he had shown in the try-outs that he did not have a good aim.

In 2023, the investment agency Black Rock made a publicity film at the school, and Thomas appears in one scene. Black Rock withdrew the film from circulation immediately after the attack in which Thomas died.

He had been admitted to the University of Pittsburgh and also to Robert Morris University. He was a good student. He could have done his studies, and then a career as an engineer or something. He would have earned a slightly above-average salary. Of his political views we don't know much, in fact only contradictory information: he gave $15 to a Democratic campaign in 2022, then in the last period he registered on the Republican electoral roll.

Why did this little boy pick up his daddy's rifle one day and diligently make his way to Butler where Donald Trump's election rally was being held? What did the orange man represent to him? And above all: what kind of jam is the brain of the US, these people of armed colonists preparing to deport Hispanic or Mohammedan aliens who have crossed super-protected borders and materialise like paranoid nightmares?

The mechanics of fluids

La mecanica de los fluidos by Gala Hernandez Lopez begins with a message from Anathematic anarchist incel, announcing his suicide. After this message, Anathematic anarchist incel gives no more signs of life, in that semi-life that the trolls, the avatars, in short, the alter egos of a generation that has learned more words from a machine than from a human voice. Instead of the unconscious, this generation must have a kind of connective prosthesis, but that does not work so well, evidently, so that the unconscious, encapsulated in the digital cage, produces monsters.

Felix Guattari spoke of Inconscient machinique, long before the digital machine penetrated the dynamics of the mind, but today we know that the connective unconscious is incompatible with the symbolic conjunctive order: the digital recodes language, but makes it incapable of accessing the fluid dynamics of affectivity, desire, friendship.

Recombinant language is not compatible with psychic flows. It impairs friendship when the mind only functions by binary oppositions: the connective formatting of the mind, while optimising functional recombination, prevents it from empathically joining with other minds. A kind of systemic loneliness results from this conjunctive incompetence, and generates a wave of depression.

The Trump Cure

American society is devastated by a systemic depression, and Trump is the cure as Hitler was the cure for the systemic depression of German society a century ago. Depression, drug addiction, and drug dependence are the narrative backdrop of the novel by J.D. Vance, Trump’s chosen vice-president. If Trump is the expression of the people of the second amendment (armed racism), Vance is the expression of the people of Fentanyl (depressive epidemic).

Let’s remember how the Hitler cure ended, and let’s try to imagine how the Trump cure will end. Hitler unleashed psychic energies towards a scapegoat that was within European society, and had to be eliminated. Trump-Vance’s scapegoat, the criminal alien, is more undefined, bigger, more elusive. At the moment it seems that the Trump-Vance cure will be able to consolidate a majority body of American society.

The incel galaxy

The incel galaxy is an electoral reserve for Trump, Angela Nagel had already seen it in her book Kill all normies, from 2017. In La Mecanica de los fluidos, the narrator of the film (Gala's voice) tells us about the search for this anathematic anarchist incel who in 2017 created a group of 17,000 users on Reddit called braincels. Gala had never met this guy except through his posts, and she was struck by his last message, the one in which the anathematic anarchist incel announces his suicide.

“I am a suicidal and I have been for weeks now

There is nobody that can save me now

My family wont’ 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 anarchic incel sent this message then disappeared, and Gala searches for him in the infinite meanders of semi-existence, venturing into the online universe of contemporary sexual solitude, the Manosphere: a universe saturated with aggressive shyness, exalted individualism and disgust for the female. And above all with angry suffering. Gala searches for him in the boundless digital prairies. She searches for him in the countless videos in which shy or aggressive, bearded or hairless males express their vision of a world without females. Many of them film themselves in the cockpit of a car. Some in a bedroom with posters stuck to the wall. All say “fucking” every three words. Then Gala crosses the Tinder universe, 26 million dates a day, souls looking for each other in a desert that has its center in a Silicon Valley building and its terminals in every neighborhood in the world. People search for each other to never find each other, based on an algorithm that evaluates your sexual attractiveness. Yes, yes, the owner of Tinder assures us, many marriages have been possible thanks to Tinder. The market of fuckable or un-fuckable bodies began a long time ago, when Facebook was born precisely for this market in 2004.

I wonder if the point of contagion is in one of your forums of lonely men, says Gala, while a storm sweeps away the boats. Then she enters the universe of video games where men dressed in metal with helmets and electronic visors kill everyone who appears on the screen. There is a forum that collects messages from boys who have committed suicide. A collective tomb for incels. There are sites that publish the poems of incels who have committed suicide.

Bulging eyes focused on the man

While his pair of eyes stared right back

The crowd angered for the last act.

One last trick before parting ways

Glad to oblige he grabbed the saw

Splitting his torso from his legs.

Victims and executioners of the future Reich

Ever since I saw Elephant by Gus Van Sant, the figure of the killer boy has hypnotized me. That film tells the story of the two boys who in 1999 went to their school, in Columbine, armed with machine guns, and shot their classmates, killing fifteen of them. In Columbine, an endless massacre begins, the account of which you can find on Gun violence map, a site that keeps track of the dead, the wounded, the suicides.

In 2015, I wrote a book about this endless massacre, because it seemed to me that in this phenomenon there was the key to understanding the United States, the psychic implosion of a frightening country that is burning faster and faster, but unfortunately it cannot burn without burning the rest of the world.

Now I am more convinced than ever: the word “sociopath” was once used to define that type of mentally ill person who hates their fellow man to the point of wishing him harm, and doing everything possible to torment him. I fear that this term is no longer used to define a specific category of mentally ill people, because sociopathy is now a universal characteristic of humanity that was formed in digital distancing, and then passed through pandemic distancing.

There is a whole crypto-drone industry at the service of this sociopathic society: drones and encryption allow you to anonymously kill someone you have never seen in the face like Israeli soldiers. Many do it just for fans.

Those who have not undergone socio-pathization can only seek escape routes and niches in which to hide as soon as possible. Desert.

Gunther Anders wrote in 1962: “The technique that the Third Reich has started on a large scale has not yet reached the ends of the earth, it is not yet “techno-totalitarian”. It is not yet evening. The horror of the coming kingdom will far surpass that of yesterday, which, in comparison, will appear only as a provincial experimental theater, a dress rehearsal for totalitarianism dressed up in stupid ideology" And also: "We can expect that the horrors of the future Reich will eclipse the horrors of the Reich of the past... when one day our children or grandchildren, proud of their perfect co-mechanization, look down from the heights of their thousand-year empire on the Reich of yesterday, it will appear to them as a minor and provincial experiment." (Anders: We, Children of Eichmann p. 66)

Now Anders's grandchildren witness the triumph of the New Third Reich, which is no longer limited to Germany, but extends across the earth, like a many-headed monster, armed with extermination devices. Anders had understood that the story they told us after '45 was a false fairy tale, or perhaps an optical illusion. The death of Hitler, the destruction of Nazi Germany was not the end of horror at all, but the end of its beginning, the defeat of a first, immature attempt. Now we see it clearly, the monster has resurfaced, with a new multi-coloured guise, and with enormously more powerful equipment. Invincible. Eternal.

Hitler is everywhere in 2024, he has dressed up in different jackets, and everywhere he promises genocide, everywhere he deploys armed guards at the border, everywhere he whips, hangs, tortures.

Gaza is the symbol of the coming era.

Suicide is the most rational behavior for billions of individuals destined for torment, but in general they are held back by irrational motivations: the illusion that tomorrow could be better, the fear of nothingness. Some, increasingly numerous, choose suicide by cop, 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 expands, bringing death to supermarkets, schools, churches, streets, with deadly weapons stored in the cellar together with jams 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, Mephistophelian Narcissus, wants to join the party, and he shoots that orange-haired guy who is talking, no matter who he is, no matter what he is saying.

Here they are, wrapped in a triumphal embrace, who can say who is the victim and who is the executioner?

See, Thomas Matthew Crooks