There’s a reason conspiracy theories tend to crop up surrounding assassins or would-be assassins: For the most part, the men and women who attempt (and sometimes succeed) at these acts don’t usually do so with clear, rational motives.
With the exception of Abraham Lincoln’s killer — who wished to keep the cause of the Confederacy alive — assassins of U.S. history, anyway, tend to be a hodgepodge of fringe lunatics shunned by normal society.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan shooter John Hinckley carried out his act in the hopes of impressing actress Jodie Foster. Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881 was an insane office-seeker prone to fits of unwarranted grandiosity who was shunned from a bizarre 19th century sex cult and was termed, in a 2023 New York Post piece, “one of history’s first incels.”
Most were simply psychotic and wanted to make a name for themselves but lacked the necessary tools to do so — except through infamy.
This invariably leads to conspiracy theories and the suspicion that we aren’t being told the complete story. The conspiracies may be false but the second part is all too true; the establishment media outlets are often all-too-happy to go along with whatever narrative is fed to them until it’s long past time when the facts of the matter could be properly sussed out.
Even then, we’re kept in the dark as Americans far too often — such as with the JFK assassination files, which were supposed to be released in full years ago and, shocker of shockers, still haven’t been fully made public.
Which brings us to the curious case of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old man who shot former President Donald Trump on Saturday at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, wounding him in the ear. One member of the audience was killed and two others were critically wounded.
Crooks, you’ll likely not be surprised to learn, was reportedly bullied throughout high school and described as a “loner.” However, unlike many loners who find solace in the digital world provided by social media, we seem to have very little footprint of Crooks’ online activities thus far.
An NPR profile of Crooks lists only a presence on the social media chat app Discord, where users join one or many of at least 25,000 “servers” (as of 2023, at least, according to Statista) dedicated to everything from music to politics to general chat. Other than that, according to NPR, “[t]o the extent he used social media, it appears he left no major footprint.”
Do you think establishment media outlets are hiding something about the shooter?
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“We have identified an account that appears to be linked to the suspect; it was rarely utilized and we have found no evidence that it was used to plan this incident, promote violence, or discuss his political views,” a Discord representative told NPR.
“Discord strongly condemns violence of any kind, including political violence, and we will continue to coordinate closely with law enforcement.”
Now, for those who are going to become Thomas Crooks “truthers,” several things don’t ring true about this, particularly in the light of a report from, of all places, the celebrity-news-chasing TMZ.
The gossip site has been digging further into Crooks’ life than many other outlets have been — and, according to a Monday afternoon report, “Crooks was … described to us as a savant when it came to computer tech. He was one of the most talented students in class — being able to take computers apart and reassemble them without a hitch.”
Furthermore, the site was able to obtain a video of him in 2020 saying that he was attending Stanford University and had abnormally large genitalia. (The first is untrue, Crooks was in 10th grade at the time. We won’t speculate on the second.)
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
JUST IN: TMZ has obtained footage of Thomas Matthew Crooks claiming he had a 10-inch pen*s.
The video was reportedly taken in February of 2020 at Steel Center Career and Technical Education in Jefferson Hills, Pennsylvania.
Classmates say Crooks was quiet but would open up and… pic.twitter.com/1eJm2jAlDG
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 15, 2024
Crooks, classmates said, according to TMZ, could open up once he warmed up to a social situation. Thus, we are left with a number of questions as to what we’re being told about the alleged shooter’s social media footprint and what is actually known.
And the curiosity is undeniable. TMZ’s post publicizing its report on the social media platform X had more than 1.6 million views as of Tuesday morning Eastern Time — that’s viral by any standard. A post about the report, above, from conservative commentator Collin Rugg had 13.4 million — that’s explosive.
If TMZ is to be believed — and as tawdry as the Hollywood gossip site can get, it’s right more often than not — this was apparently a computer whiz who, in real life, was a loner. Using a priori logic, we can deduce therefore that much of his time could have been spent in the virtual world of social media.
According to a study published earlier this month on data-centric platform Exploding Topics using traffic numbers from the software and analytics companies Semrush and Similarweb, Discord — which started as a platform for in-game chatting for video game players but has since expanded to a general chatroom app — wasn’t even in the top 25 social media platforms by monthly active users, or MAUs. It placed 27th with roughly 200 million MAUs.
Now, some of the platforms ahead of Discord are unique to other parts of the world and wouldn’t be germane to a U.S. social media user. Chinese platforms WeChat, Douyin, Baidu and Sina Weibo, among others, had higher MAUs than Discord.
However, compare Discord’s 200 million MAUs with No. 1 Facebook’s 3.06 billion, No. 3 WhatsApp’s 2.40 billion, No. 4 Instagram’s 2.35 billion, No. 15 X/Twitter’s 600 million or even No. 18 Reddit’s 430 million. We’re being told that a computer “savant” only has a footprint on … Discord?
And, before you ask — no, the explanation isn’t that he wanted to stay off the radar by focusing on a privacy-centric app for social media. In fact, Discord is notorious for being one of the worst offenders when it comes to maintaining user privacy, so much so that even Mark Zuckerberg might be impressed. No. 3 WhatsApp and No. 8 Telegram offer far more privacy features, so that argument goes out the window.
Thus, the question raises itself: Did this shooter have accounts on more mainstream social media apps, and what was he posting on there? The establishment media outlets can’t answer this — nor do they seem to be particularly interested, judging from the coverage.
The answer could very well be nothing. This could be another John Hinckley or Charles Guiteau, just another madman who found an opportunity and went for it. Or, it could be another John Wilkes Booth striking a blow for the Confederacy, or an unstable communist like Lee Harvey Oswald taking a shot at Kennedy. (Or so the official story goes.)
The thing is that we don’t know and that things don’t add up. This is how conspiracy theories spread like pathogens — and until we get a full and reasonable account of who Crooks was and how he managed to go undetected and nearly kill the presumptive nominee for president, the nagging sensation will linger that we aren’t being told the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
