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‘A Gray State’: From Alt-Right Paranoia To Family Tragedy

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By Mike Verrico
Sentinel Correspondent

“A Gray State,” directed by Erik Nelson (executive producer of the Werner Herzog films “Grizzly Man,” and “Encounters at the End of the World”), focuses on David Crowley, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who in 2010 was inspired to become a moviemaker.

Crowley’s project was called “Gray State,” the story of a near-future dystopia in which the U.S. government has followed through on its plans to transform America into a nation of oppressive martial law. Police militias execute dissidents in the street. Kids are branded like cattle. All civil liberties are crushed under the boot of the tyrannical corporate war machine. “‘Gray State’ is less a movie than it is a warning,” David is heard saying in a promotional video. Moreover, he cautions, “The thing that you have to begin to understand about conspiracy theory is that, at some point, it’s no longer theory.”

Crowley’s engagement with “Gray State” was consuming. “Every little part of this project is me,” he recorded himself saying. In addition to writing six very different drafts of the script, he made three trailers, for which he auditioned, rehearsed, and directed the actors; drew storyboards; designed costumes; found locations and got permits; served as the director of photography, overseeing as many as four cameras at once; and composed music and special effects.

As if inhabiting the world he was creating, he periodically cut his hair in a Mohawk and wore combat fatigues and body armor. An actor named Danny Mason, who helped write the first draft, said that Crowley would take him on hikes through the woods at three in the morning. “We’d come to a clearing and he’d say, ‘See that field?’” Mason said. “‘Imagine there being a convoy there and fires in the distance.’”

Crowley posted a trailer for “Gray State” on YouTube in 2012. It has been watched more than two and a half million times, and the film has more than 57,000 followers on Facebook. Its supporters included “conspiracy theorists, survival groups,” Crowley wrote, “libertarians, veterans” and “the military,” many of whom believe that the government has plans to impose martial law, confiscate guns, and hold dissidents prisoner in camps built by FEMA.

Crowley had an amalgam system of beliefs. He regarded himself as a Libertarian, but he identified with the left-leaning wing of the party, not the hawkish one: being a soldier had made him a pacifist. After uploading the trailer, Crowley spoke at a Ron Paul event in Tampa, hoping to raise money. “Gray State,” he said, would explore such trends as “the slow yielding of our quiet American towns and streets to a choking array of federal surveillance grids, illegal police checkpoints.”

Through a crowd sourcing campaign, Crowley collected more than $60,000, much of it after the conservative radio commentator Alex Jones had Crowley and Danny Mason on his radio show “Infowars,” in 2012, to discuss “the impressive film you’re working on.” The world depicted in “Gray State” was already “happening here,” said Jones, a well-known conspiracy theorist. “The people who have hijacked our country, they’re admitting it. They’re admitting that we’re an occupied nation by foreign banks, they’re admitting they’re getting rid of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.”

From his crowd funding and trailer, Crowley had hoped to raise enough money to turn his trailer into a feature length film. Crowley had managed to get an interview with two producers in Hollywood, which did not lead to any financing. By early 2015, financing had proved elusive and Crowley had still not gotten around to actually making his film.

Then the unthinkable happened.

On Jan. 20, 2015, Crowley, his wife, and their 5-year-old daughter were found shot to death in their suburban Minnesota home, with the phrase “Allah Akbar” written in blood on a wall.

Police determined that Crowley had shot his wife and child and then shot himself, but commentators on the Internet soon began saying that Crowley’s death seemed “suspicious” and “mysterious,” and that he had likely been murdered by government agents, intent on preventing the movie from being made.

Among certain conspiracy-minded, anti-government, Libertarian, and alt-right believers, Crowley has become a species of martyr. In January 2017, the international hacking collective Anonymous, which declared war on Donald Trump last fall, posted a tribute to Crowley, suggesting that the government killed him. A spokesman, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and addressing “my brothers and sisters of the world,” said that the circumstances do “not sound right.”

On Facebook, there’s a page called “Justice for David Crowley & family,” whose stated purpose is to “help to clear the good name of David Crowley.”

The page is overseen by an accountant in Minnesota named Dan Hennen. He and Greg Fernandez, Jr., a tech worker in California, conduct long discussions on YouTube in which they find fault with the police investigation and ask why someone whose future seemed so promising would kill himself.

Nelson’s “A Gray State” features copious amounts of home-movie footage as well as commentary by Crowley’s colleagues, friends, and, most movingly, his father. It also includes extensive footage of the charismatic Crowley shooting scenes for the trailer, as well as glimpses of his intensive preparation, such as an entire wall covered with index cards and Post-it notes.

Together, they delineate a slide into deep depression. Unexpectedly redeployed into military service just weeks after getting married, Crowley returned home bitter and disillusioned. His once-happy marriage began to crumble, and both he and his wife withdrew from friends and family. Distraught journal entries reveal the increasing despair and disaffection that led him to commit murder-suicide, with one friend sadly comparing the couple to “Sid and Nancy.”

“A Gray State” ends where it began, with a man walking into a field, shrouded in a near mist. What led Crowley to take the life of his wife, daughter and himself is ultimately unknowable.

What is known is that Erik Nelson captures the paranoia and misplaced fears of the alt-right movement and mourns the loss of a family taken by it.

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