Was Thomas Crooks A Trans-Obsessed Furry?

It has now been confirmed that attempted Trump assassin Thomas Crooks used they/them pronouns, had a deep interest in furries, and was exploring gender identity.

Add it to the list:

- Charlie Kirk’s assassin Tyler Robinson had a furry obsession and lived with transgender… pic.twitter.com/JyAK9qO8ix

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 17, 2025

The idea that Thomas Crooks, the Butler, PA shooter, was trans isn't new. Just as I started a web search, Google AI hastened to set me straight:

The person identified by the FBI as the shooter in the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump was Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old cisgender man who was a registered Republican.

Following the shooting, a false online conspiracy theory spread rapidly, claiming the shooter was transgender. This was based on a misidentification using a photo of an unrelated transgender woman named Rose, an artist who was falsely targeted in the smear campaign. Fact-checking organizations, including Reuters and AFP, have confirmed that the claims identifying the shooter as trans are false.

I'm sure glad that's settled, huh? Thank goodness for fact-checking organizations! But now, more than a year later, we have Trump shooter Thomas Crooks's disturbing trans 'furry' fantasies revealed:

Donald Trump's would-be assassin appears to have used 'they/them' pronouns on a website known for hosting pornographic 'furry' material.

Thomas Crooks, who shot Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, at the height of the presidential campaign in 2024, is linked to the accounts 'epicmicrowave' and 'theepicmicrowave' on the website DeviantArt.

The website hosts sexually explicit images of 'furries' - human-like animal characters.

The accounts linked to Crooks used 'they/them' pronouns used by the transgender community and his activity suggested an interest in cartoon characters with ripped male physiques and female heads.

It comes amid renewed scrutiny on Crooks after Tucker Carlson carried out a forensic examination of his online footprint, including his violent statements, as well as his political journey from Trump supporter to rabid leftist.

Prior to Tucker's reporting, very little was known about Crooks, to the extent that the FBI was accused of a cover-up, which has fueled various conspiracy theories - including that the shooter may have been backed by a foreign government.

According to the New York Post,

[FBI Director Christopher] 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.”

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.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 problem appears to be that you can pick and choose pretty much anything Crooks posted as an adolescent and prove he was anywhere on the polirical and psychological spectrum -- as you can with any adolescent -- but then you have to add that he went completely silent at age 17, three years before he did the shooting. Here's also a CBS News investigation from this past July, before the latest story broke:

His habits started to rapidly shift that fall [2023]. To his professors, he still appeared focused on getting straight A's and preparing to apply to the engineering programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Robert Morris University. But his online activity suggests his attention was elsewhere. He began to more frequently use an encrypted email service called Mailfence and a virtual private network called Mullvad. Both would shield his online life from anyone who might pry.

An analysis by CBS News of Crooks' internet routines shows he developed an increasing interest in news, explosives and ammo, and secrecy. The records include nearly a year of Crooks' activity on his college's wireless internet network. They show hundreds of visits to websites ranging from his academic email account and discussion boards, to his bank, news sites, gaming platforms, social media, weapons blogs and Steelers fan sites.

Logs of Crooks' on-campus internet activity, which CBS News obtained through a public records request, indicate that in the last months of his life, he became increasingly rigid about secrecy, shrouding his activities through encrypted services.

. . . In December 2023, a month before Crooks' final semester started, his life began to split in two. He was focused on his college applications, and at the same time fixated on mass violence. One day, he emailed himself to review his personal statement for his application; on another, he emailed customer service to complain that the explosive fuel he ordered had not yet shipped. Investigators later concluded he would have been able to engineer bombs in his bedroom without his parents knowing.

Around this time, some in Crooks' life did notice erratic behavior.

. . . "Crooks' father explained that within the last year he observed several instances of his son dancing in his bedroom throughout the night," a Pennsylvania investigator wrote. "He would occasionally see Crooks talking to himself with his hands moving, which he expressed as uncommon and had become more prevalent after he had finished his last semester."

But according to the Post story, he'd already gone dark in 2020; his 2023 secrecy was nothing new, and the CBS story indicates that he'd been solitary and unsocial all his life. He was teased and bullied about his body odor. Some of these characteristics might be consistent with the onset of schizophrenia in late adolescence or early adulthood, but not necessarily.

On the other hand, much of the story suggests that, although he was secretive in his habits, he was disorganized: he took homemade bombs with him in his car, along with remote detonators, but he doesn't seem to have had a fully developed plan to detonate them once he arrived at the Butler site. He doesn't seem to have been able to interact especially well with others, which would make him a poor co-conspirator. All of these qualities made him similar to Lee Harvey Oswald, to the extent that the Soviets never took Oswald seriously as a potential agent.

Does the FBI still have competent profilers? Maybe we should be hearing from them. The bottom line is that we still don't know enough about Crooks, and posts he may have made at 16 don't tell us much about him at 20. But so far, nothing indicates to me that he didn't work alone.