On Friday afternoon, it was reported that the phone of attempted Donald Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks had been cracked by FBI agents at the bureau’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, Virginia.
There were several revelations on the phone that were, perhaps, to be expected. There was no sign of any radical ideology, although Crooks had made several searches of both Trump and President Joe Biden.
In addition, he had looked up members of the British royal family. He also searched for information about Ethan Crumbley, the 2021 Michigan school shooter who killed four. Crumbley who was sentenced last year to life without parole. His parents were sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in prison for failing to secure the handgun he used to commit murder.
In terms of instant messages, there were texts from Crumbley’s parents asking where he and the AR-style rifle he had taken from the home were. They told investigators they thought he might have taken it to a shooting range he frequented. The texts began at about 1 p.m.; Crooks was dead shortly after 6 p.m. after being taken out by Secret Service agents.
There’s still more work to be done, including an inspection of the gunman’s laptop and his hard drives. However, one detail from the shooter’s smartphone did stick out. One of his final searches was for the same thing that other shooters and Islamic terrorists are known to have on their devices when they’re found.
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It’s a strange, insidious tie that binds the violent and depraved — even though we’ve been told, for years, that it’s mostly harmless. In fact, it’s arguably one of the most common vices among all of us, period.
The last searches before Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to kill Donald Trump — an act that almost certainly assured Crooks himself would die, too, given the nature of the act — were for pornography.
And, according to an FBI source, this is hardly shocking to the bureau.
“The discovery of searches for pornography did not surprise law enforcement,” The Daily Beast reported.
Is pornography destroying our society?
“’It’s not unusual,’ the source said, noting that Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooter Adam Lanza had images of child abuse on his phone and that numerous al-Qaida terrorists have been found to have searched for extreme pornography along with tracts for Islamist purity.
“But it will add to the picture FBI profilers are building of Crooks, who lived with his parents 40 miles from the Trump rally venue. He had graduated community college and was working in a skilled nursing and rehabilitation center near his home.”
Thomas Matthew Crooks’ final cellphone search was for porn before shooting former President Donald Trump, according to a report.https://t.co/qxrZkNDIVV
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) July 19, 2024
He had not been diagnosed with any mental illness nor displayed signs of one, but the nature of the searches reveal a great deal about the mind of the alleged perpetrator.
Pornography isn’t just a personal vice or even just an epidemic with measurable negative psychological and cognitive externalities. It’s one of the most profitable vices in the history of humanity.
“The porn industry generates more income than the combined revenues of ABC, NBC, and CBS and more than the combined revenues of NFL, NBA, and MLB,” Christian organization LifePlan estimated in 2021.
“In the USA, the porn industry generates between $15 billion – $97 billion a year. Every second, $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography.”
In 2016, 4.6 billion hours of pornography were viewed at 42 million different pornographic websites, according to LifePlan. That’s more than video on Netflix and Amazon combined. Over 90 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls will be exposed to porn before the age of 18.
But ask companies like PornHub to institute age-verification measures and they balk as if they have an unquestioned right to disseminate smut to whoever clicks on a button avouching that they’re of the age of majority.
The damage this has wrought is wholly measurable. Fertility rates are way down, and pornography likely plays a key role in this.
Surveys show that over 60 percent of men under 30 in the United States report being single, meanwhile. Why bother looking for a mate or companionship, after all, when you have a screen and a drug to take their place?
And make no mistake, pornography is a drug, meant to addict and with all the ruinous effects other addictive substances bring along with them: Destructive behavior, an outlook that’s self-centered in the extreme, and utter nihilism.
Absent a political motivation (assuming a political motivation is absent), those are prerequisites for a man bent on assassination.
But then there’s the immeasurable psychological damage to the society at large, something that will take decades to fully quantify. Remember, we’re only a quarter of a century into the broadband internet age, and smartphones didn’t become readily available and usable until the iPhone dropped in 2007.
What specifically drove Crooks to his actions on July 13, 2024, might never be known, but with the revelations reported Friday, another piece fell into place in the bigger picture: Porn is eating away at young men, who are then engaging in actions that eat away at society.
When the attempted Trump assassin, the Sandy Hook shooter and al-Qaida terrorists all have one vice in common — a vice that, given the fact the first party was readying himself to kill a former president and the third parties are extreme religious zealots, seem awfully unusual — it’s time to stop lying to ourselves about the harms caused by Big Porn and its enablers in Big Tech.
