People Crave Narrative

 

Every time there is a mass shooting, or the shooting of a public figure, people become glued to their information sources for news of who did it and why. That's a pretty universal reaction, because we want to know what the story is. We want there to *be* a story. We want to be able to fit this incident into our understandings of the world.

 

In the contemporary US, where people can hold totally different worldviews and beliefs, and even occupy "bespoke realities" happily served up by content providers, there is a frantic effort to control the narrative that emerges. At the moment I am writing this, factual information about Thomas Crooks, who shot at Trump and instead killed one rallygoer and seriously wounded two others, is scant. This frustrates the millions who want to hear a complete story, most importantly the why of it. What was the shooter's motive?

 

The fact that shots were fired at Trump in a period of intense campaigning primes everyone for a certain explanation: that the perpetrator was a radicalized leftist. So with dread or righteous anticipation in their hearts, people scroll their media and social media, waiting for a moment after the shooter is identified for a trove of his social media posts to be spilled for everyone to pore over. But nothing like that has emerged as of yet. 

 

Some conspiracists are in fact currently claiming that this absence of evidence is itself surely evidence of concerted efforts of nefarious "media elites" and "deep state actors" who are scrubbing away the proof that Crooks was involved with antifa, BLM, or Palestinian-supportive encampments.

 

But most media content providers are doing their best to spin a narrative out of a small handful of published facts: Crooks was a 20-year-old white man from a nice suburb. When he was 17, he made a donation of $15 to a progressive get-out-the-vote group on the day Biden was inaugurated. When he was 18, he registered as a Republican. He won a $500 STEM award at his high school graduation. And he was seen as a shy loner in high school, skinny and socially awkward, a nerd not a jock. 

 

The results are predictable. On the political right, the fact that Crooks was a registered Republican gets scant attention. He donated to a progressive organization, so he is an emblem of the danger of the woke left. On the political left, it is the fact that he was a registered Republican who used a semiautomatic weapon that plays center stage. Two clear, competing narratives drive the reporting on the morning after. Biden encouraged an assassination attempt by his terrible slandering of Trump as a threat to democracy, and anyone who called Trump a fascist shares the blame and must immediately stop. Or look, the right is shocked that gun violence happens and is waking up to the dangers of pushing to arm everyone. 

Of course, this being the US of today, there are also all kinds of much more farfetched conspiracy theories zipping around. On the left, I saw some accounts adopting the Alex Jones playbook: this was a false flag hoax meant to make Trump look heroic, and the members of the crowd who were shot were crisis actors. On the right. . . well. There's a claim that Crooks' skinny body and somewhat androgynous facial features prove that he was some kind of trans person, hence unhinged and evil. Or that the secret service and/or police set the whole thing up (Elon Musk got in on the act of promoting this one). Or Joe Biden ordered a hit on his rival, seeing that he would otherwise lose to the man. And QAnon is still out there, tying this event into their narrative about Democratic pedophile baby-murderers eternally battling Trump, and claiming to have seen a disguised John F. Kennedy on the scene.

I suspect that the reality is that this is another case of a boy who was sneered at seeking to establish himself as a powerful, masculine man and ensure his name never dies by committing an act of dramatic violence. But that isn't the narrative people were primed to hear in this time of partisan national politics. And I expect we'll be hearing conspiracy stories about this shooting for many decades to come, because people crave a narrative that fits their beliefs.