By Nathan Sykes
COMPARISONS BETWEEN 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired eight rounds at former President Donald Trump, and Lee Harvey Oswald, framed for President J.F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963 are not unfounded.
Oswald and Crooks were patsies for the permanent government or deep state. However, without definitive evidence to the contrary, we will assume, that whereas they duped Oswald, Crooks shot Trump. If he did not act alone, he certainly intended to fire on the ex-president. Yet, how much does the (apparent) ineptitude on the day incriminate the Secret Service?
We are 99.9% positive that Oswald did not shoot Kennedy. That fraction of a percentage of a doubt is purely academic deference to the official account. We strongly believe otherwise. While we reported the anomalies surrounding the attempt on Trump’s life, in the absence of wider confirmation of the ‘second shooter’ on the water tower, we’ll proceed as though Crooks was the sole gunman. Nevertheless, if he was, the subsequent account of his brief life and the shady circumstances preceding the events on July 13 will likely persuade you that the spooks groomed him, just like in the plot of the 1974 political thriller The Parallax View, or per the brainwashing techniques of MK Ultra. We cannot say that happened at all. The final judgment is yours.
Crooks and Oswald were both portrayed as inept marksmen. Whereas that is believed accurate about Oswald, adding strength to the contention of a conspiracy in light of the magical shot he supposedly fired from the Texas School Books Depository building in Dallas, it is entirely inaccurate in Crook’s case. Following the shooting of Trump in Butler, the mainstream media reported that Crooks was “barred” from his high school rifle team due to poor skills. Their choice of adjective is interesting, assuming it wasn’t just lazy copy.
CBS interviewed Jameson Myers, formerly a member of the school’s varsity rifle team. He said, “He never made the side. And he never returned for try-outs for the remainder of high school.”
Myers added, “I’d never have thought him capable of anything I’ve seen him do in the last few days.”
Frederick Mack, currently a team captain, agreed they rejected him for being a “bad shooter.”
Whatever the story, he certainly improved. Bill Jenkins, 63, attended an intermediate Pistol 2 class at the Keystone Shooting Centre in Cranberry Pennsylvania on June 22, 2024. He was one of only two enrolled persons. The other attendee was Thomas Crooks. Jenkins swore that far from fudging the course, Crooks nailed the centrepiece of a target with a volley of precision shots. He informed The Sun, “When we went to the range, he started shooting immediately… It seemed like he had experience with weapons… I congratulated him on his good work, and he just laughed.”
Jenkins shared further information to the British tabloid revealing that when they returned to the classroom with the instructor, Jenkins and the latter conversed about politics and Trump. Crooks turned silent and flashed a wry “little smirk” as if he was “biting his tongue,” he related.
Jenkins “flipped out” when the FBI contacted him and he learnt that the shooter was the same ‘smirking’ crack-shot from the class.
Thomas Crooks’s short but baffling time on earth began on September 20, 2003. His parents, Matthew and Mary, both 53, were licensed behavioural health counsellors. They raised him with his older sister Katie at Milford Drive in the well-to-do Pennsylvania suburb of Bethel Park.
Crooks attended Bethel Park High School and excelled academically, joining the National Technical Honour Society as a high school junior, in 2021. The NTHS is an international honour society for students gifted in the technical fields. They offer scholarships and connect tomorrow’s movers and shakers with industry to “build a highly skilled workforce.” The National Math and Science Initiative similarly applauded his efforts by awarding him a $500 prize. He graduated with high honours in 2022.
Claims emerged that he came across as though he occupied a dark spot on the autism spectrum earning him the nickname “school shooter.” However, accounts diverge about Crooks’ social status at school. In contrast to his sister, described as both “outgoing and popular”, Thomas was considered a loner. Former students say he was bullied, while others dispute the degree of the harassment that he is alleged to have suffered. An erstwhile student appeared in an NBC report insisting, “He was always alone, he got bullied every day. He was an outcast, and you know how kids are nowadays. They will see someone like that and target him because they think it’s funny. It’s honestly …. sad.”
Still, the school never logged any incidents of bullying involving Crooks in its register. He is understood to have gotten along generally with fellow students and teachers. Nevertheless, a video surfaced on social media showing another pupil tugging his trouser leg while he sat in class. He repeatedly asks the harasser to “stop” but he is smiling. The incident is little more than mischievous niggling. Nothing that is especially cruel is happening.
Mark Sigafoos questioned this version. In a statement to the Inquirer, he explained, “He was very kind. He was a nerdy kid, but I don’t think he was as harshly bullied as some say. No one I know found him to be a creepy, loner kind of guy.”
Perhaps his nature was such that few got to know him well while others were in closer proximity. Moreover, those students the media interviewed might’ve expressed their perceptions rather than a prevailing attitude about him. A former student who never shared classes with Crooks but saw him about told reporters he was ridiculed for his oddball dress, such as hunting outfits.
Recollections also differ about his political beliefs. An ex-student recalled a mock debate about politics in a history class in which he characterised him as standing his ground “on the conservative side” while “the rest of the class was on the other.”
Sigafoos again contradicted this impression, conveying he was more interested in how the government works and “not trying to insert his beliefs into [class].”
Schoolmate Vincent Taormina remembered him better than most. He recollects Crooks belittling him for being pro-Trump, to the point that Taormina considered his attitude offensive. Submerged in Crooks’ condescension was the accusation that being of a non-Protestant ethnicity, Taormina should not be supporting Donald Trump; a typically leftist trait that borders on the ‘racism’ they profess to hate.
The media harped on the revelation that Crooks registered as a Republican when he turned 18. But then it was revealed he’d donated $15 to The Progressive Turnout Project the day after Joe Biden was sworn in on January 20, 2021. Was he meshuga, as the Jews say? The PTP aimed to increase Democrat Voter turnout. Had he joined the GOP as part of a strategy to try and influence its democratic process? The fact that he attempted to assassinate Trump suggests he wasn’t keen on Republicans.
Furthermore, according to Allegheny County officials, he only voted in one election, in 2022, and Trump was not on the ballot.
Another former classmate, Sarah D’Angelo, told the Pittsburgh Tribune, “[Crooks] never spoke about his political views or how much he hated Trump or anything.”
In other words, their (mostly) quiet school fellow was a political chameleon.
Curiously, a bespectacled Crooks appeared alongside schoolmates from Bethel High in a 2022 30-second clip for the ominous asset managers BlackRock in which football coach and economics teacher Brian DeLallo spruiks their retirement funds.
BlackRock admitted, “In 2022, we ran an ad featuring a teacher from Bethel Park High School, with several unpaid students briefly appearing in the background, including Thomas Mathew Crooks.” BlackRock then removed the video.
With differing accounts of Crooks, it may appear the jury is out on whether or not he was “creepy and weird” and bullied because of it. However, Vincent Taormina shared an unsettling account of Thomas threatening to blow up the school. The circumstances are vague and allegedly occurred when he was 15 and a freshman at Bethel Park.
He told the Daily Mail, “We had this anonymous place you could post things or tell on someone on school computers. He posted something like, ‘Don’t come to school tomorrow,’ and something else that made it sound like he’d put bombs in the cafeteria and bathrooms.”
The woolly nature of the post aside many took it as a serious threat. “Half of us didn’t come to school the next day,” he said. “I didn’t. But it wasn’t taken seriously.”
As to how Crooks came to be the suspect, he explained, “We all texted one another and it came out pretty quickly that it was Thomas and his group of friends who’d made the threats to shoot the school up.
According to Madison Rudolph, 17, who shared Crooks’s computer class his group of friends, such as he had any, were “outcasts” with “strange hobbies.”
She said he ate alone and was “shy and weird.” Following the global pandemic, Crooks earned the contempt of fellow students by wearing a mask long after the threat passed.
Finally, Crooks only ever appeared in one of Bethel Park High’s yearbooks, in the widely circulated picture from 2020.
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Crooks stood apart from his peers by shunning social media. In the post-shooting analysis of him, he left no social media profile that might offer insight into his motives. However, according to the owner of GAB, an ultra-conservative networking site, he posted a handful of pro-Biden messages. Given the nature of GAB, Crooks’s choice of social media destinations seems trollish.
Still, the budding technician played chess and video games and studied computer programming at the Steel Centre for Career and Technical Education. In April 2024, he graduated from the Community College of Allegheny County with an associate degree in engineering science. Both the University of Pittsburgh and Robert Moss University accepted him. He chose the latter institution. However, there is no word on whether he enrolled or when he planned to begin his studies. Regardless, all of this seems quite the investment in education for a young man on a suicidal trajectory.
Thomas worked as a dietary aide at the Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre, to cover his bills. In a statement, Administrator Marci Grimm confirmed that Crooks, “performed his job without concern and his background check was clean.”
The gawky “nerd” was undergoing a radical personality change. When had the internal ‘turning point’ occurred? Lean and acne-spotted, he grew his hair. By the time of the shooting, his fair mane hung untidily around his shoulders. There is no indication that he showed any interest in girls. Similarly, he had no friends. Instead, along with computers, he became obsessed with firearms; an activity that otherwise never made it onto anyone’s radar. Perhaps he only registered as a Republican for the guns.
Matthew Brian Crooks’, 53, Thomas’s father, purchased the DPMS DR-15 with its collapsable stock—which his son used in the shooting—in 2013. We have no idea if the two ever visited the range together. Nevertheless, Thomas joined the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club in Pittsburgh in September 2023, where he perfected his shooting skills at its many ranges. The authorities are now claiming that Crooks made more than two dozen “firearm-related purchases” beginning a year earlier. They allege he utilised a fake name and elusive tactics to hide his identity while shopping online. They did not elucidate the meaning of “firearm-related.”
According to NBC, on the day of the incident, police searched the family home and found a “dozen guns.” They have not clarified whether they belonged to Thomas or his father. Nevertheless, the story goes that Crooks’s father contacted the police that day, concerned about Thomas. His son had taken the DR-15 that morning and went missing. He believed Thomas attended the range but he was away too long. Something about his son being out there all that time with that firepower spooked him. Little did he realise, as he made the call, Thomas lay on the roof of an industrial building beside the Trump Rally with half his head removed by a police sniper’s bullet.
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At 9:00 am on Saturday, July 13 the Butler Emergency Services Union (ESU) gathered for a security briefing over that evening’s Trump Rally. Members of the local SWAT team, along with Butler County, Beaver Country, and Washington Country Sniper units attended. No one from the Secret Service or Federal Law Enforcement showed up.
Those in attendance watched a 46-page slide outlining their areas of responsibility, staging locations, and sniper positions for each local unit and the Secret Service. They were briefed on the outline of the security perimeter. Initially, the SS declined to provide sniper units but changed their mind at the last minute.
Surveillance footage showed Thomas Matthew Crooks entering a Home Depot Centre in Bethel Park at 9:27 am. Fourteen minutes later cameras caught him buying a 5.5 ft aluminium dual platform ladder. CCTV followed him as he left a minute later lugging his ‘supplies’ into the carpark, loading his van, and exiting the lot. They could not make out the make of the vehicle.
We shall forego detailing what happened next, which we covered in the previous Trump article, although at some point in the early morning, he returned home to retrieve the DR-15. Whether this was before or after visiting the Home Depot is not clear.
About two hours before the Trump Address, he surveyed the rally’s outer perimeter after parking his van a mile away. There are no details yet about his motor vehicle registration, or whether the vehicle was hired, borrowed or belonged to him. He abandoned the van allegedly hiding homemade explosives containing “six chemical precursors” he bought with a fake ID during the first half of 2024.
Nevertheless, the gangly gunman strapped on a backpack hopped on a bicycle and peddled to the outer perimeter of the rally’s site. Crooks then scoped out the area with a drone 180 m from the stage area where he streamed for about 11 minutes. That is according to FBI Director Christopher Wray. He does not say to what platform he live-streamed since Crooks was notoriously absent from social media. That might be divulged in the fullness of time. So too might details about how he brought in and placed the ladder beside Building 3—equipment the FBI now thinks he did not even use. When it is, will it be true though?
This should concern us. Swallowing anything the US government feeds us from now on will be tough; especially given how they have treated MAGA supporters and their leader. These are the pigs who target Catholics for their religion. That is not to say their findings might be invalid, but they should be taken with a pinch of salt. It must be treated as disinformation on general principles. If these people tell us the sun will rise tomorrow it is best to get a second opinion. They hate Trump. Christopher Wray tried to deny he was ever shot.
Big techs like Google and Facebook are already interfering with searches and shares relating to the shooting. The so-called ‘fact-checkers’ are obfuscating the ‘facts’.
Also, there is the question of what—if anything—they are still hiding. The FBI is likely holding cell phones from many rallygoers who captured footage on the day. One man who had his phone seized just went public with a video showing police surrounding Crooks while he was positioned atop Building 3, waiting five whole minutes before taking him out. What other secrets are these phones holding?
Purportedly, Crooks had two cell phones with collectively only 27 contacts. Anyone with two phones is hiding something. The question is, what? We are told that he encrypted one, or both, so well the FBI could not access them. That is hard to accredit. Their sophisticated surveillance system scarcely lets a bug crawl along a leaf in the Amazonian jungle without them knowing. They did forensically examine his laptop, or so they reckon. Once more, we are not saying this is a lie, only that given their track record be careful what you believe.
Even here, in the post-mortem, we find irregularities. Crooks had multiple encrypted messaging accounts, so who was he chatting with? And for a chap with no experience with explosives, he learned enough to make the bombs he left in his van, connected to the remote detonator he was shot with. Was whoever he chatted with instructing him? Where are his phone records?
In the case of Crooks’s computer, they say he searched a range of targets for assassination, such as members of the British Royal Family, Christopher Wray, and US Attorney General Merrick Garland. Do we buy that? We certainly are not about to accept that he planned to shoot members of the Royal Family. Let us not forget, according to their version of events, Crooks was one step ahead of law enforcement the entire time. Then there is his academic background. That is like trying to tell us he planned to shoot Xi Jinping.
In between “watching porn” he then evidently researched “mass shootings”, such as the attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, and the location of power plants. Naturally, he brushed up on the Kennedy assassination by searching how far Lee Harvey Oswald was at the time the 35th President of the United States had his brains blasted.
On Tuesday, the FBI’s Deputy Director Paul Abbate revealed the existence of a social media account linked to Crooks at a senate hearing. Or, at least he made it sound as though he did. He claimed Crooks created an account between 2019 and 2020 when he was 15 or 16 (around the time of the alleged school bomb threat). He told the hearing that over 700 comments appear on the account, and are “evidence about a potential motive.”
“I want to share a social media account, something just recently uncovered, which is believed to be associated with the shooter,” he announced.
“Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”
This all sounds dubious and hastily cobbled together to support the profile of a far-right extremist. What’s more, Abbate does not say the account is definitively linked to Crooks. But that does not make it untrue, it only adds to the mire surrounding the affair. Indeed, this is all quite damning and fits the narrative of a screwball shooter well. Too well. Yet, those from the other side did research of their own. That is being roundly dismissed.
It is the prerogative of biased left-wing media to repudiate anything that the Right says or does. Over these troubled years in the United States and beyond, they have played a crucial role in bolstering the official narrative, no matter whether that meant peddling wholesale lies to the masses. The media’s mendacities, obfuscations, defamations, and criticisms have proven dangerous.
Therefore, it is little surprise that when the conservative Oversight Project claimed to have tracked Thomas Crooks’s movements in the year leading up to the shooting the Huffington Post scotched the claims as “catnip for MAGA conspiracy theorists.” They said that about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and everything COVID related. They were wrong every time, worse yet, they deliberately misled the American public. So, with their track record for duplicity in mind, we shall entertain the Oversight Project’s findings. They are alarming.
The Oversight Project—part of the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation—posted the disturbing findings on X. Their boffins used ad data from mobile phones to trace Crooks’s movements for a year before he undertook his fatal course. They identified “nine devices located at Crooks’ home and work.”
Their investigation suggests that “someone who regularly visited Crooks’s home and work also visited a building in Washington DC, located in Gallery Place. This was in the FBI office vicinity on June 26, 2023. Whose device is this?”
Interestingly, the Secret Service’s building is only a block away from that location.
That was not the only unexplained visitation they followed. Another device “linked to the shooter’s work” shows someone who travelled from Boston to Plymouth Harbour Massachusetts then to Boston then to Pittsburgh to see him. Remember, Crooks was a shy loner; he had no friends.
Further data indicated a person travelling to Butler PA on July 4th and 5th. All activity ceased on July 12th, a day before Trump was shot.
One might absorb all of these details about Crooks’s brief life and sensational ending and adduce that his lack of popularity and social standing pushed him to his headstrong course. That appears to be the case. Yet, so much inconsistency haunts the memory of this unknowable loner; there are too many irregularities in both the account of his final day and those leading up to his terminal incapacitation on the roof of Building 3 of the American Glass Research facility in Butler on July 13.
On the one hand, Crooks invested in his future. Either academic studies came to him naturally or he diligently applied himself. On the other hand, the shift in his life’s direction was fanatical. It guaranteed his death. Yet, he left no manifesto or indications that he suspected he might not return after leaving home that Saturday morning.
Crooks planned the shooting too well for us to put his actions down to mental illness. The level of premeditation and the audaciousness in his choice of targets run counter to the likelihood of him being a terminal crackpot. Nonetheless, he was not normal. Something was the matter with him. He made perfect ‘Manchurian Candidate’ material. The final narrative has him comparable to John Hinckley Jnr, a mentally disturbed man who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Hinckely hoped to impress actress Jodie Foster, of Taxi Driver (1975) fame. Who was Crooks trying to impress, if anyone? Was he seeking notoriety?
Following the attempt on Trump, Hinckley commented, “Violence is not the way.” The way for what though?
As the salve of media reports highlight the “FBI’s investigations” and make disclosures that appear to sustain the theory he acted alone—as you come to believe that in the wash-up this was merely a horrendously bungled job by the Secret Service—don’t! You will be doing just what they want. You would buy the “rational opposes conspiratorial” narrative they’re hawking. Never forget what they’ve already done, not only against Trump, but his supporters too. There was nothing reasonable or just about their nefarious activities then or now. Moreover, their ‘rationale’ is self-evident. ■