On Sunday, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham said that the blame for the assassination attempt on President Trump falls upon the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks. True, but I’d like to add to that indictment that our culture is also to blame.

What I know of the 20-year-old Crooks is what you know of him, and while it’s tempting to say that nothing we’ve heard can be trusted to be true, we can at least assemble a picture of who he was—and wasn’t.

Crooks did an evil thing, but we can point to a lot of societal forces that may have pushed him there. His short, at times troubled life didn’t provide the experience necessary to grow up. This condition plagues our society at present, particularly among young men and especially for personality types such as his.

We know Crooks didn’t fit in. He was bullied, which these days is a catch-all to describe any human-derived struggle people, particularly children, encounter. He was likely forced by his parents, or at least influenced by them and the worthless mainstream media, to wear a useless mask well after the COVID-19 hysteria had passed. This alone made him—and his generation—stand out as being poorly adapted to normalcy.

Image by AI.

Crooks was good at math and computers but not so much at sports. In Crooks’ case, that’s especially debilitating because the Pittsburgh area (which I know well) is dominated by sports culture. He was arguably unattractive in a world that prizes beauty and seemingly fragile in a region that prizes ruggedness, toughness, and fitness.

Into this mix we can pour the weaknesses endemic to our times, particularly within our younger demographic. Campaigns arising from the pathetic culture that has developed over the last half-century—things like the often overwrought “anti-bullying” and “participation trophy” mindsets—have created a generation of perpetual also-rans who never learn to handle adversity or defeat. Our youth are over-indulged, over-babied, and over-sensitive, resulting in an ever-growing mass of decidedly underwhelming screwballs. A brief glance at TikTok, Snapchat, or YouTube amply illustrates this.

Crooks was a product of this leftist freak show, which permeates everything from the classrooms he attended to the movies he watched. This indoctrination intentionally destroys gender roles, faith, family, and (especially) masculinity and consistently blurs the line between right and wrong in an ever-increasing frenzy of top-to-bottom confusion and, more importantly, purposeful ignorance. In fact, Crooks was not only a product of this wickedness but perhaps may ultimately prove to be a poster child for it.

What’s worrying is that Crooks’ life experiences aren’t unique to him. This is why any condemnations we have for a boy who climbed to the roof of a building that ought to have been better guarded—presumably hoping to attain the “hero” status he’d been brainwashed into believing would result from attacking Trump—should extend to the culture that created him. Our insipid culture affects everything, especially our own children. We’d like to believe we’ve taught them right from wrong and that the lessons “took.” However, I suspect that Thomas Crooks’ parents thought they did that job, too.

So, Sen. Graham only got part of the way there. Our horrendous culture creates immature men like Crooks while flame-throwing politicians and media talking heads program them to commit heinous acts. The cultural actors know exactly what they are doing, placing Crooks on that rooftop as surely as a child plops a tiny green plastic soldier atop a Lincoln Log fortress. We need to worry that there are thousands more just like him, waiting for their chance to climb onto a rooftop and into the history books.

Thomas Crooks’ finger may have been on the trigger, but Nancy Pelosi pulled it when she tore up Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech on live national television. Joe Biden pulled it when he “put Trump in the bullseye” and repeatedly said he is an existential threat to America. Benny Thompson pulled it when he tried to have the former President’s Secret Service protection removed, amply demonstrating exactly what he and his cohort wanted to see—a dead Donald Trump.

These monsters aren’t finished, not by a long shot. There are still cities to burn, a nation to fundamentally transform, and opposition political leaders to persecute, prosecute, and eliminate so they may retain power. Assuming that God continues to protect Donald Trump, we’ll see him returned to the White House where he belongs, in just a few short months. But the leftists would rather burn America down and rule over the ashes than allow We the People to preserve and guide it as we see fit, with the leader of our choosing.

Based upon the glimpses we have of him, Thomas Matthew Crooks was an immature social outcast whose evil act must be seen against the backdrop of the larger culture. Ultimately, he was a tool. The responsibility for his actions rests properly upon the shoulders of the society that created him and those who wound him up and sent him marching off to do their bidding.

Jackson P. Chamberlain is a pseudonym. You can find him on X.