RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them] @hexbear.net

10mo ago

Thomas Matthew Crooks: The registered Republican and gun lover who shot Trump

www.telegraph.co.uk

Open-source intelligence analysts reported that Crooks didn’t appear to use mainstream social media channels such as Facebook or Instagram and had an almost negligible internet footprint, which is highly unusual for a 20-year-old. Instead, analysts said that Crooks corresponded with friends and associates on a Discord server that they were now trying to access.
Discord servers are restricted ring-fenced sections of the internet. They are often used by gaming groups and communities as secure chat rooms but are also used by fringe organisations to push their ideologies and discuss wild conspiracy theories and plots.

politics @lemmy.world

TokenBoomer @lemmy.world

10mo ago

Thomas Matthew Crooks: The registered Republican and gun lover who shot Trump

www.telegraph.co.uk /world-news/2024/07/14/matthew-crooks-shooting-assasination-attempt-suspect/

106 comments

I feel like it’s not that weird for a 20 year old not to have a Facebook and only use Discord.
- He also played a violent new video game that has just recently been discovered, called "Fortnite," and described himself as having "skibidi rizz" but not being a "sussy baka." These slang terms are gang lingo used by only the most dangerous terrorists.
- I'm 26 and my peers are mixed on using Facebook. Some still have it to message relatives, and that's about it. I cannot imagine many 20 year olds using it.

he was The One Never-Trump Republican democrats are always trying to convince
- Shameful that the libs have thrown him under the bus like this.
  
  If the same thing happened to Biden I'm almost certain mainstream Republicans would be saying things like "this is the people standing up against the woke mob, God Bless Them!"

Facebook or Instagram and had an almost negligible internet footprint, which is highly unusual for a 20-year-old. Instead, analysts said that Crooks corresponded with friends and associates on a Discord server that they were now trying to access.
The kids aren't using facebook, and a lot of them also aren't using Instagram. A 20 year old man using primarily discord is the most normal thing.
- "intelligence" ""analyst"" being paid 6 figures to be absolutely fucking stupid and useless
- yeah i do backgrounds on people for work and if you're over 70, it's hard to find you and if you're under like 23 it's really difficult as well.

First it was the nefarious CCP using TikTok to indoctrinate the naive youth into not liking genocide.
Now it's the dangerous shady Discord servers allowing extremists (from both sides) to plot against Our Democracy™.
I would not be surprised to see some sort of police state crackdown on Discord and other non-public parts of the internet resulting from this.
- Discord will have his data served up on a platter in no time. I don't see anything changing because they already cooperate with the state heavily.
- Isn't 4chan basically supervised by Feds at this point? The NSA already have access to Facebook and Google so it goes without saying that Discord is next. They want to ban TikTok because they can't gain that level of access to their user data.
  Why don't zoomers rediscover Usenet and IRC? Can't rely on corporate platforms at all.
  
  I'm pretty sure I remember moot himself saying that he cooperated with law enforcement when they demanded IP adresses every time some 4channer broke the law.
  It was from a court transcript somewhere, but you're absolutely correct in assuming 4chan is heavily monitored and participated in by law enforcers, government officials and far right recruiters.
- I was thinking the same thing. It’s kind of the next logical step for platforms that have locked their users onto their sites. What good is a walled garden internet if you can’t link 100% of your users to real world consumers. Hello TSA internet.

The FBI says it has not yet identified a motive for the shooting
I suggest checking the last ~6-12 months of his 4chan history. Key word searches to try: "Trump Zionist" "Kushner" "Fuentes"
I suppose on the positive side, probably some of the clammiest, palest groypers in existence will be getting some door knocks in coming weeks and months.
On the extremely negative side, if the guy is 100% confirmed a groyper and his motive is anything in the realm of "Trump supports Israel" or whatever... ain't gonna be good for future anti-Zionist movements.
Not that the future was ever bright considering how they've reacted to peaceful sit-ins. But yeah, anything groyper related and against Israel (for explicitly antisemitic reasons) will be lumped with anti-imperialism/anti-genocide related resistance to Israel. Very convenient packaging to barrel right past the unavoidable truth of the peaceful nature thus far of anti-Zionist moments. Yes it's totally nonsensical, but if it aids Zionist narratives that both parties share, it's too tempting.
- Apparently the shooter said the following in his twitter bio before it got scrubbed: "on a mission from God (cross emoji) to end Epstien's evil empire"
  
  If you're telling the truth then I called it last night when I said the shooter was a disillusioned QAnon-Head mad at Trump. I mean it's easy to guess because they're the only ones who are armed and do adventurism.
  
  so he did have an internet presence...?
  
  I was seeing a ton of fake stuff posted trying to frame him as like antifa and such last night, so I will stand by waiting for more on that type of stuff before really forming opinions on it.
  
  pretty clearly faked, check the Epstein reddit, top comments sleuthed out the fact it has 0 posts, photoshopped the shooter's face onto a different pic, etc
  
  It's unclear right now if that's a real account, from what I saw.
  
  Where did you see that?
  
  Any evidence of this? Very interesting
- I guess I'm out of the loop on this. It makes sense upon reading it however. So the theory is, based on your analysis, that because he was off mainstream social media, and associated with gun culture that he was likely on the neo-nazi pipeline.
  This pipeline involving an antisemitic anti-zionist framework, that believes support for Israel is support for white genocide in effect. Is this a widely held view among groypers?
  
  To the last part, yes, basically. They hate Israel because (this is me summing up a lot of disconnected "ideologies" from them):
  -Israel is Jewish. -They hate Jews. -Zionist=Judaism.
  Some of them, although all this stuff is very disjointed, believe that Trump is like a "Jewish puppet" (they will sometimes substitute Zionist with the intention of meaning Jewish. They do not distinguish a difference. All Jews are Zionists loyal to Israel to them. Classic antisemitic stuff). His son in law, Jared Kushner, was in charge of a lot of foreign policy stuff in the Middle East including the treaty that was meant to full solidify the alliance and support from the surrounding Arab countries like Saudi Arabia with Israel. This was interrupted by partly 1) Trump losing re-election but mostly 2) recent Palestinian resistance starting on Oct 7 last year. The groypers see this as Kushner, who is Jewish, manipulating Trump or Trump working in cooperation with "the Jews", however they want to frame it, to sell out America to the "the Jews" and "the Arabs." They see America as a place that should be only white people, which apparently now includes Hispanic whites and not just anglo/germanic whites (crazy developments are emerging in Nazi ideology), and has no Jews, they belong in Israel, which the US should have no role in supporting (or killing the Jews outright, again, depending on the relative insanity), no black people, brown skinned Hispanic, Latino, no indigenous, no Asians... you get get gist. Typical Nazi stuff.
  But yeah the hangup with them specifically is Trump/US support of Israel and their deep racist hatred of Jews. It's basically like if the racist republicans were fully ideologically consistent in their racism... you get a groyper who wants absolutely nothing to do with Jews or anything even associated with Judaism.
  Some of them do hesitantly, lightly support Trump btw. I believe Fuentes has been on record as supporting Trump as sort of a means to an end transitional figure. He said something like "we elect Trump twice and then we have no more elections" like he will form an actual empire, dissolve the republic, Rome style, and then the next person will be a "based anti-Jewish groyper." Or whatever.
  Now I must go shower.

Rabidly pro-Ukraine?
Wanted to kickstart helterskelter?
Trump was too left for his tastes?
Trump was too right for this Romneyite?
Gamer just wanted to get a Wikipedia page?
- Trump was too right for this Romneyite?
  The militant Mormon uprising has begun. Salt Lake City will stand for 1000 years.
  
  HAIL THE WHITE PHAROAH
  
  I thiunk he was a few inches too left.
- Gamer just wanted to get a Wikipedia page?
  almost certainly this one, you miss 100% of the shots you...do take apparently

the "Chinese shooter" revealed to be...
white guy in demolition ranch merch

cool, thanks for that NYPost

I'm revising my guess at motivations to being more like a school shooter but against a cool target.
- this is where i was sitting at yesterday
- It's 100% gonna be Epstein/Save the Children/QAnon. There was a story (apparently fake, but only
  -types say so) going around a few weeks ago about Trump being reinvestigated for Epstein behavior. I think it was only Pinocchio'd a few days ago, so I could definitely see the deboonking not having filtered into the Q space before this heroic moron bought a ticket to the cool zone.
- This is my take as well. If this were at all politically motivated, we would be reading his manifesto right now. Or at least his unhinged posts on 4chan/facebook. The fact that there are none of those things leads me to believe that this is just a guy who wanted to be epic. The target was irrelevant, if it was Genocide Joe on that stage he would have still taken the shot.

“Open source intelligence analysts”
- "Redditors and Twitter users" just doesn't have the same ring to it, y'know?
- That's just how you say "hack journalists who googled 'Thomas Matthew Crooks Facebook' for five minutes" when you've watched too much Mr. Robot.

It's super cool how the US is so depoliticized that this guy is just some random 20 year old groyper who yelled "hold my beer" and thnere's no revolutionary cells or organized falandrists or anything.
- depoliticized
  Bluntened... as to make their teeth and guns less injurious....

Discord servers are restricted ring-fenced sections of the internet. They are often used by gaming groups and communities as secure chat rooms but are also used by fringe organisations to push their ideologies and discuss wild conspiracy theories and plots.
Fuck, they know about our discord where we push for a Protracted People's War in the United SStates of AmeriKKKa.
- as secure chat rooms
  Nobody is using a Discord server as a "secure" chat room. What is that even supposed to mean?
  
  "The gunman's Discord server mod refused to send me an invite link. Their security is un-breachable."
  
  Some people are just deeply unserious and think Discord is encrypted (it isn't).
  
  It's to make tech illiterate boomers angry
  
  its not secure but it is "private" enough for chatting/gaming with randoms (if your standards are low for data harvesting)

Crook’s father told CNN he was trying to find out “what the hell” was going on but that he would talk to law enforcement before speaking about his son.
Mr Carriker reposted the photo of members of the US security forces standing over Crooks’ dead body, wearing the grey Demolition Ranch t-shirt.
“What the hell?” he wrote underneath the photo.

On one side I am totally unsurprised, but on the other side I was hoping this was going to be the worlds first instance of a lib with a spine. I don't know why I got my hopes up
- There can only be one liberal driller
  
  the liberal driller wouldn't have missed

The Republican party is full of, and run by, crazies. Trying to find a coherent motive for this assassination attempt might not be possible.
- Incoherence has never stopped them from finding scapegoats before, so why now?
  
  The incoherence of the inaccuracy

where's the archive link
- Forgive me comrade!

The bit about Discord is weird, it's not like it's some decentralized service, the company has access to everything on their servers if they want to.
- I think they're using a lot of words to say, "things said in a discord channel aren't meant to be spread around to other internet services."
  
  how spooky scary!
- open source intelligence is just a fancy word for PI's. So I'm sure the feds have access, but they aren't giving it to the media

Of course the photo of him is from his school yearbook. He's white after all

He was a G*mer.

- two things he could've worked to improve upon.. neither of which he did

Maybe he was trying to restore the Habsburg throne

T-shirt says "Kollege Kidd"
Confirmed Maoist?
- Klanner that thought being orange was not allowed either
  Or is that too lib a joke

Basically the telegraph and all other rags have been trying to use his Facebook profile or other social media for free stories and photos they can use, but came up with fuck all. Excellent

and absolutely horrible shot, from that distance you shouldn't even need optics
- The cut was from plexiglass, could it have stopped the bullet but spalled?
  
  This is my guess
  
  I mean it probably at least knocked it off course, you know? But he fired multiple shots

New video on r/crazyfuckingvideos purportedly shows him screaming about killing fascists. It does kinda look like him, but the video has about 7 pixels so who fuckin knows. Doesn't matter either way, they're never gonna get it pinned on anyone but libs, whether he was a registered Republican or not

inb4 they wojak that photo of him

I still think he was definitely some kind of corporate neo-liberal "centrist" Democrat. He could have just registered Republican to vote for nuclear warmonger Nikki Haley against Trump in the primaries.
Here's an interesting snip from the Wikipedia article on him:
"On January 20, 2021, at the age of 17, he donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a liberal voter turnout group, through the Democratic Party donation platform ActBlue."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Matthew_Crooks
Apparently a former friend also described him as "right-leaning," but that could easily describe any neo-liberal, Clintonite DNC hack.
- Normal Americans don't describe Clintonites or liberals as "right leaning"
  
  Disagree. I consider myself normal and call out the Clintonites for being right-wing assholes all the freaking time. ;-)
- He was living in a pro trump household. Maybe he was rebelling when he donated, maybe he was pressured to register Republican, its a toss up for me.
  
  I can't find any evidence of his family supporting Trump. Their local city councilor, a Democrat who recalled speaking with his parents, stated that the mother is a Democrat and the father is a Libertarian. He also stated the parents were pleasant and open to hearing his platform. Doesn't sound pro-Trump at all.

Otherwise known as Tom Crooks or Thomas Crooks

106 comments