One of the enduring mysteries of the past couple of years has been the person behind the name "Thomas Crooks."
I don't mean that literally, quite, but rather just that we have a name, a few pictures, and a few basic facts about him, but nothing that gives us any insight into how a young man became an assassin. We know more in a day about most shooters than we have learned about Thomas Crooks in over a year.
Thanks to Miranda Devine at The New York Post and an investigator she has been working with, that is no longer true.
BREAKING: New Account linked to Thomas Matthew Crooks shows furry fetish, transgender ideology
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) November 17, 2025
https://t.co/jdC3Cc3aOy
It's no surprise that Crooks was a disturbed young man, because assassins are almost always, by definition, disturbed. Sane people don't go on suicide missions to kill political candidates. Still, it's essential to understand how someone like Crooks becomes radicalized, especially in a case of such high profile, where the public has a strong and legitimate desire to know the facts.
The FBI has been remarkably close-mouthed about Crooks. What little they did say suggested he was a radical right-winger who hated Jews and immigrants, suggesting that he was very right-wing.
WE were also led to believe that he was not very active on social media. In fact, he had a not-insubstantial social media presence for much of his life, only dropping off the radar late in his short life. And that profile tells us a lot about Crooks, including that he started as a rabid supporter of Trump, and later soured on him late in his first term, eventually calling for terrorist attacks.
Christopher Wray, then FBI Director, testified to Crooks' nativism:
Then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress after the July 13, 2024, attack that the bureau had found nothing in Crooks’ online history that pointed to a motive or political ideology.
A week later, Wray’s deputy Paul Abbate told Congress that comments posted on one of Crooks’ social media accounts “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”
That was true, for a while, but hardly the entire story. In fact, he turned his hatred from these groups to President Trump before dropping off the social media radar. Crooks, like so many other killers, turns out to be a "known wolf," which may explain why the details of his social media profile have been hidden.
Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abbate misled Congress by omission, because he left out an entire section of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.
Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.
The online interactions from when Crooks was ages 15 to 17 give us a better understanding of his evolution into an assassin, and invite more questions about what — or who — reversed his ideology.
“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” says the source. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”
People who interacted with Crooks on social media warned law enforcement about Crooks' calls for violence, and while we don't know whether or how they responded, there is no doubt that they had reason to have an eye on him.
Yet the source found reams of information that shows Crooks “was not simply some unknowable lone actor … He left a digital trail of violent threats, extremist ideology and admiration for mass violence. He spoke openly of political assassination, posted under his real name and was even flagged by other users who mentioned law enforcement in their replies. Despite this, his account remained active for more than five years — and was only removed the day after the shooting.
“None of this online activity was referenced in the final congressional report released in December 2024, making this even more troubling,” the source said.
Crooks went from idolizing Trump and even calling for the murder of his political opponents to a hatred and fear of Trump that eventually resulted in his attempt to murder him.
Crooks’ trajectory from pro- to anti-Trump is evident. He referred to Trump as “the literal definition of Patriotism” in a comment at 1:17 a.m. July 20, 2019.
He also issued several targeted threats against the Democratic congressional representatives in “the Squad.”
“I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who don’t deserve anything this country [sic] has given them,” he wrote at 8:18 a.m. July 20, 2019.
“MURDER THE DEMOCRATS,” he wrote in all caps on Dec. 12, 2019.
But in early 2020, Crooks’ online behavior flipped 180 degrees and he became very critical of Trump, Fox News and Republican complaints about mail-in voting. ...
Through the summer of 2020, Crooks’ online rhetoric became increasingly radical and violent.
On Aug. 5, 2020, Crooks wrote: “IMO the only way to fight the gov is with terrorism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building and set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders etc and try to assassinate them.
Crooks wasn't hiding his identity. He wasn't some anonymous figure who was impossible to track down. Law enforcement had been warned, albeit only (as far as we know right now) through replies tagging law enforcement on social media. But in an era where censorship organizations and the FBI were monitoring social media and tagging accounts for deletion and suppression, they had to have Crooks on the radar.
VIEW THE NEW SCREENSHOTS HERE: https://t.co/j0utv7TuLS
— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) November 17, 2025
That doesn't mean they knew he was a ticking time bomb, exactly. People spout off all the time. But it's hard to believe they didn't have at least a cursory file on him in their vast databases. They probably had a profile of him within minutes of identifying him, and had all his social media accounts deactivated almost immediately.
The former FBI agent who investigated the Las Vegas mass shooting confirms that Crooks had to be on the radar.
When told of Crooks’ online threats, he said there was no way the FBI would not be aware of the teenager.
“No matter how ridiculous the allegation, no matter if it’s COVID or not, somebody is going to knock on somebody’s door,” Swanson said. “If they investigated that kid there’s a record of it and there’s an assessment that some leader made that this was not a threat or it rose to a level and they did something else.”
There could be many reasons why the FBI has downplayed its prior knowledge that Crooks was a potential danger, the most obvious being that it makes them look terrible. After all, since 9/11, there have been a ton of cases where "known wolves" turned out to be genuinely dangerous, and in retrospect, many of the incidents could have been prevented. It may be unfair to expect the FBI to prevent crimes, Minority Report style, done by people who have yet to break the law, so it is easier to hide the fact that the FBI could have stopped the crime if it had been more diligent.
Another reason why they may have hidden Crooks' social media? He appears to have been, as many recent prominent political murderers, deeply involved in alphabet ideology.
He described himself with the pronouns “they/them” on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest online hubs for “furry” art and the “furry” community. (A furry is someone who has an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish.)
Two accounts linked to Crooks’ primary email were found on DeviantArt, under usernames “epicmicrowave” and “theepicmicrowave.” The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle-bound male bodies and female heads.
The Biden administration, too, was a huge promoter of alphabet ideology, and the fact that a rash of recent attacks is associated with trans ideology was an inconvenient fact, especially since it muddied the "radical nativist" narrative they were suggesting motivated him.
One of the people Crooks interacted with online was “Willy Tepes,” a member of Norwegian neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.
Tepes encouraged violence and Crooks’ extremism, using a Maoist phrase, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” which Crooks repeated several times.
In one comment on Oct. 5, 2025, more than a year after Butler, Tepes commented to another user that he had been contacted by both Russian and American intelligence.
Of course, one has to wonder why all this information has been so closely held by the FBI, even under Kash Patel. Bureaucratic butt-covering is hardly a surprise, but Patel is a new face and can easily distance himself from failures under a different director whom he has criticized mercilessly on other matters.
Johnson had to issue a subpoena in July on the first anniversary of the Butler attack and complained that he had been “stonewalled” by the FBI and the Secret Service in his efforts to request security camera footage, forensic reports and other documents related to the Crooks case.
Trump and those close to him are skeptical about the official story and question how the impoverished parents of Crooks, who had to ask for money from neighbors to pay for their son’s funeral, could afford to hire a white-shoe law firm, Quinn Logue out of Pittsburgh.
It is hard to believe the FBI and/or Secret Service missed Crooks. The question is, what did they do about him?
The absence of information from a source that clearly has it doesn't tamp down questions; it makes you even more curious. What are they hiding? Why are they hiding it? Without clear answers, the only resort is to speculate, and often the speculations are worse than the truth.
But also, often not.
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