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Speculation has been rampant as to why Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year old from Bethel Park, PA, attempted to assassinate Donald Trump. Ohio Senator and newly-anointed Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance immediately claimed [ [link removed] ] (without evidence) that hostile rhetoric from the Biden campaign “led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.” In contrast, some commentators on the left pointed to Crooks’ registration as a Republican and suggested [ [link removed] ] he “was a mentally ill groyper [ [link removed] ] activated by Nick Fuentes ranting about Trump being controlled by Jews.”
Check out our latest episode, where I break down the assassination attempt — and how animal rights offers a solution to political violence.
But this all misses the point. We probably will never know with certainty why Thomas Crooks, as an individual, tried to kill Donald Trump. But we can look at broader trends to see why we, as a society, are suffering from increasing political violence [ [link removed] ]. These trends include a steep increase in loneliness, especially among young Americans; the normalization of aggression on both the left and the right; and a steep decrease in trust in virtually all the institutions of modern life. When these trends are combined, they are like a tinder box for political violence. It’s no surprise that figures like Thomas Crooks erupt. 
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What is perhaps more surprising, however, is the possible solution to all of these trends: animal rights. As the great Russian author Leo Tolstoy [ [link removed] ] argued, “As long as there are slaughterhouses there will always be battlefields.” Tolstoy believed that we cannot end violence among humans until we end the war on animals [ [link removed] ]. To unpack why this is the case, let’s look at the three trends driving us towards political violence – and how they can be challenged by a movement for animal rights. 
Increasing loneliness. Perhaps the single factor that unifies all mass shooters is that they are disconnected from the people around them. From Nikolas Cruz [ [link removed] ] to Elliot Rodger [ [link removed] ], the biographies are eerily similar; they were all extreme loners. That is true of Thomas Crooks as well, who was rejected from his high school rifle club [ [link removed] ], and sat alone at lunch [ [link removed] ] in high school. One of his former classmates, in the video below, says Crooks “was bullied almost every day” and describes him as an “outcast.”
Lonely people are more likely to commit violent acts because they think they have nothing to lose. One study found [ [link removed] ] that increasing social connections in a community was associated with a 21% reduction in murders.
That is important because the disconnection that afflicted Cruz, Rodger, and Crooks is increasingly afflicting millions of young Americans. In 2023, the Surgeon General of the United States noted that there has been a shocking 70% decrease [ [link removed] ] in the time that Americans in the 15-24 age range spend in-person with friends over the last two decades. That trend has been supercharged [ [link removed] ] by smartphones, social media, and the lockdowns of COVID-19, and Americans now spend less than 3 hours per week with their close friends. If this continues, the age of social media may soon become the age of violence. 
There is, however, one data point pushing back against this trend: the time that Americans spend with their companion animals. In 2021, the amount of time the average American spent with a non-human animal hit a record high [ [link removed] ]. Perhaps most interesting, however, is who is spending the most time with animals: childless Americans under the age of 40. 
In other words, it is precisely the group of Americans who are growing even more lonely – the young  – who appear to be spending the most time with companion animals. And this fact has political significance. If violence is associated with social isolation, and animals help us with social isolation, then animals can help us stop violence. Anyone who has spent time at an animal sanctuary understands this. There are few connections more restorative and peaceful than the connections we make with animals rescued from abuse. Imagine if Thomas Crooks had a rescue dog he loved; perhaps that connection would have saved him, and his victims, from violence. 
Normalizing aggression. In June 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the nation’s most renowned civil rights organizations, published [ [link removed] ] a poll that examined the extreme views of the American right, including the so-called “replacement theory” that motivated a mass shooter in Buffalo [ [link removed] ]. However, there was one shocking finding of this poll that the SPLC failed to highlight: young Americans of all parties were increasingly open to the use of violence. Indeed, young Democratic men were the most supportive of assassination as a tactic, with 44% indicating they would approve of murdering a political opponent who was “harming the country.”
The results seemed so extreme that I did not believe them when I read them in 2022. But then I started asking people in my network. And I was shocked by what I heard. 
“I mean, yes,” one person told me, when I asked if they’d support assassinating Trump.
“What do you mean by yes? I’m talking about murder.”
“If that’s what it takes. Democracy is at stake.” 
In the days since assassination went from hypothetical to reality, I have seen numerous people in my social network bemoaning the fact that Thomas Crooks’ bullet missed. “Nobody’s been this disappointed by 2 inches since Stormy Daniels,” one post read. And explicit calls for murder are merely the tip of the spear. Aggression towards one’s adversaries, ranging from insults to physical assault, are becoming a normal part of American politics. In 2017, Montana’s Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter and smashed his glasses – then was rewarded by voters in 2020 with the Governor’s office. The audio from the encounter (below) is mind-blowing. 
It should come as no surprise that, in this political backdrop, someone like Thomas Crooks might take things to the next level. Where aggression is normalized, why not move to assassination next? 
But here, too, animal rights offers solutions. The animal rights movement, perhaps more than any other modern movement, has normalized compassion towards even our adversaries as a basic principle of our work. After all, 99% of Americans are participants in the system of animal abuse we are trying to stop; acting with aggression is counterproductive with that backdrop. 
But the animal rights movement’s embrace of compassion towards our adversaries is not just strategic. Leaders within the grassroots movement, from Animal Rising in the UK (which makes “Love” one of its basic values) to Tomma Burar in Sweden (which left a plate of vegan cookies for farmers after performing an open rescue) have embraced nonviolence as an essential part of who we are, not just what we do. This follows in the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the Beloved Community [ [link removed] ], which aims to win over adversaries with the power of love. In this regard, the animals are our teachers [ [link removed] ]. They do not hate those who hurt them, and neither should we. If Thomas Crooks was born into this environment of love, rather than the politics of aggression, then perhaps he would have come to the Trump rally with a box of cookies rather than an AR-15. 
Decreasing trust. The third and most important trend driving political violence, however, is declining trust. I’ve written previously about how trust in American institutions is hitting historic lows [ [link removed] ]. And no institution, from church to media to government, has been spared in this crisis. This is deadly for human civilization, not just because it prevents cooperation [ [link removed] ] but because low-trust societies tend to have high levels of violence [ [link removed] ]. 
Trust, however, is not just a knob that we can adjust. It is the result of the cracks [ [link removed] ] that Americans are seeing in modern systems of “representative democracy.” It turns out these systems are neither representative [ [link removed] ] nor democratic [ [link removed] ]. And when 150,000+ people are dying deaths of despair every year, [ [link removed] ] and tens of millions are one medical bill away from financial ruin [ [link removed] ], it pushes people like Thomas Crooks to a breaking point. The system is no longer working for people. It is preying on them. 
A predatory political system is a destabilizing force in human civilization. And over the long term, if it is not corrected, our entire society will fall apart. I have called this the Law of Social Entropy [ [link removed] ]: to avoid collapse, society must move towards greater equality – including animal rights. Pursuant to this law, providing rights to animals would signal that our society protects even those who are most vulnerable against those who hold the greatest power. That signal, in turns, allows all of us to trust the system to act with integrity when we ourselves are relatively powerless. Like a Jenga tower with missing blocks, a society that fails to support its most vulnerable parts is bound to fall. 
We are seeing the Law of Social Entropy unfold, not just with Thomas Crooks but with violence across the globe. People see the cruelty of the system, towards human beings and animals, and they can’t help but lose trust – and lash out. 
But imagine if Thomas Matthew Crooks looked around and saw a different system, one where our governments and political leaders acted with kindness towards all sentient beings. Imagine Donald Trump railing against gestation crates and high-speed slaughterhouses, rather than immigrants and Democrats. Imagine Joe Biden condemning violence against all animals, rather than just those of his favored species. That is the sort of leadership and system that all of us could trust. In this way, the promise of animal rights is the promise of a better world for us all. And perhaps the only true path to peace is to end the war on animals, once and for all.
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