Manosphere YouTuber and dating coach Rich Cooper might not be a usual source of political and societal commentary, but this morning he and his podcast co-host Chris Moffett covered an interesting topic.

Namely, Thomas Matthew Crooks, the failed assassin who attempted to kill former president Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Cooper picks up immediately on Crooks from those few photographs of him that have been made available to the public and he notes something we’ve been cognizant of for quite some time: Crooks looks – and based on the comments of high-school classmates who’ve talked about him, was – exactly like you’d expect the would-be assassin/mass shooter to look.

Namely, a pasty-faced weakling with an inability to bond or communicate with others and a fast trend toward extreme antisocial behavior.

Cooper and Moffett pick up on the story that Crooks was the last kid in his high school still wearing a COVID mask. The psychology of that doesn’t track perfectly with the assassin/mass shooter, but it isn’t all that far off. To be a teenager or a young adult, for whom COVID would be little more than a bad cold at worst, and to persist in wearing a mask long after the national panic had receded, is a sign not just of having been coddled by helicopter parents.

It’s more than that. It’s hatred of one’s fellow man. It’s evidence that you see other human beings not as peers to communicate or form relationships with but rather as carriers of death.

That COVID mask, long after the panic is gone, is a bitter rejection of humanity. Not all long-persistent mask-wearers are homicidal maniacs, and not all homicidal maniacs are persistent mask-wearers, but it’s not a good look.

Cooper blames what Crooks became on his parents. He might be stretching a bit, as we don’t have enough information, but his instincts might not be wrong. Typically, the best way to bring a young man out of his shell is to challenge him to accomplish difficult things – that accomplishment builds real self-esteem and confidence, which serves as a wellspring for continued success.

What little we know about Crooks suggests that his parents might have made the same mistake with him that the mother of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, also made. Which is to let guns serve as a substitute for masculinity.

There is nothing inherently wrong with firearms. They’re effective tools, no more and no less. And proficiency with firearms is a good thing more often than not. But a socially-outcast young man who’s bullied in school and struggles to earn respect among his peers is a poor candidate to become a gun nut, because now firearms become a tool of revenge against the world rather than a means of protecting oneself and one’s loved ones.

Crooks was not equipped with the skills to successfully navigate life, and his parents were well-off social workers, with the father an academically-published psychiatrist. There is something greatly amiss in this scenario, and while we don’t have enough of the story Cooper seems to have at least some of it correct.

This was a child raised poorly. The shame of his actions, or at least some of it, should fall on the parents who did not mentor him well.

This, of course, does not preclude our other area of speculation; namely, how in the hell did Crooks get on that roof?