Thomas Matthew Crooks, the DNA-identified shooter at the Pennsylvania Trump rally on July 13th, is known to have been a registered Republican.

I hate that this is one of the first things we check when something terrible happens. I hate that we look either for motive or excuses without the details of the case right away.

But we live in the information age, and the average person can find out anything on the internet. Sometimes they get it in the right context; more often, they don’t.

A long time ago, when Jeff Bezos was first starting out with Amazon going global, he was hearing that wait times for customer service were abysmal. But the data he was given by his team showed that people were waiting an average of one minute to be spoken to.

He said that when there’s a discrepancy between data and anecdotes, the anecdotes are usually right. So he called a meeting with his team and everyone sat in complete silence as he put the phone on speaker and dialed customer service. For ten minutes.

In the case of Thomas Crooks, the only records I can find for donations in that name on the Federal Elections Commission website (publicly searchable) are from a guy by that name in California. If it were the 20-year-old that matched the “receipt” that’s been floating around the internet, he would have been 17 when the donation was made.

Instead, let’s look at the anecdotal evidence.

All of his classmates say he was an arch-conservative. He sat alone in the lunchroom, he wore camouflage, he tried out for the junior varsity shooting squad (and didn’t make the team).

Describing a debate in history class, one of his schoolmates, Max Smith, remembered Crooks holding the conservative line:

“The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side. That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”

Others echoed Smith’s view.

So when the anecdotes don’t match the data, Bezos told his team way back then, you figure out what the correct way of looking at the situation is, what you’re getting wrong about the answer you’re looking for.

I have a theory. Crooks WAS a Republican, and maybe he DID make a one-time $15 donation to a left-leaning PAC. Maybe, Thomas Crooks just really didn’t care for Donald Trump.

And it gets worst for the MAGAs who are convinced Crooks is a “leftist”. Neighbors of the man who allegedly shot Trump said that they spotted campaign signs for the former president outside his home in recent years. WPXI first reported Monday that law enforcement officers had interviewed the neighbors of Thomas Matthew Crooks, who Secret Service snipers killed following the assassination attempt.

“Records show he is a registered Republican and neighbors today told us that they’ve actually seen Trump signs outside of the home over the course of the last few years now,” she added.