At first glance, two isolated acts of political violence were totally separate. Dig one layer deeper, and a chilling pattern emerges: both angry young men were reportedly immersed in the furry subculture – the online world of anthropomorphic animal avatars, “fursonas,” and erotic role-play that has become a gateway drug for some of the internet’s darkest corners. Crooks left behind accounts tied to extreme sexual furry art and role-play servers. Robinson went by the handle “craftin247” on FurAffinity and Steam, owned explicit furry dating sims, followed artists notorious for underage animal porn, and even etched the infamous furry meme “Notices bulge OwO” onto the casing of the bullet that killed Kirk. Crooks, according to the New York Post, had an account on furry-favorite site DeviantArt.
This isn’t about kink-shaming. This is about recognizing a pipeline: from social isolation catalyzed by Covid, to algorithmic sexual escalation, to radical politics, to real-world murder. And the fuel that keeps that pipeline flowing at full pressure? The targeted economic and cultural dispossession of young white men – the one demographic that has experienced the most dramatic downward mobility in modern American history.
The rest of the crisis isn’t just “young men.” It’s specifically young white men who have experienced the sharpest, most psychologically disorienting fall from grace in modern American history—and that precipitous drop is the single biggest driver of the online perversion-to-political-violence pipeline we’re watching in real time.
Go back to 1970. A white man with only a high school diploma had a 75–80 % chance of earning more (inflation-adjusted) than his father. By 2020, that number had collapsed to barely 50 %—the worst intergenerational decline of any demographic group in the country. White men without college degrees saw their real wages fall 15 % from 1979 to 2022, while every other major racial/gender group either held steady or gained. The labor-force participation rate for prime-age white men (25–54) has cratered from 97 % in 1960 to 88 % today—the lowest of any racial group. Suicide rates, opioid deaths, and “deaths of despair” are overwhelmingly concentrated among working-class white males.
At the same time, every elite institution—from corporate HR to university admissions to government contracting—openly implements policies that discriminate against them. Affirmative action, DEI quotas, “diversity hires,” and the endless media drumbeat that “white men are the problem” tell them in a thousand ways that the system no longer has a place for them—unless they apologize for existing.
That combination—economic dispossession plus institutionalized blame—is uniquely corrosive. Black and Hispanic young men face real economic hurdles, but they are at least told their struggle is systemic injustice and that powerful institutions are on their side. Young white men are told the opposite: your grandfather had it easy, you’re privileged, and now the bill is due. The result is a profound sense of betrayed birthright, of promises broken not by personal failure but by deliberate design.
That betrayal is rocket fuel for the doom loop. A young white man who can’t get a construction job because the federal contract went to a “minority-owned” firm, who can’t move out of his parents’ basement because zoning laws and mass immigration keep housing unaffordable, who gets passed over for promotion because of DEI targets—he doesn’t just feel stuck. He feels targeted. The shame is existential: “I was supposed to inherit the country my ancestors built, and instead I’m being told I’m the villain for even existing.”
So he retreats online, where the algorithm serves endless content telling him the system is rigged against white men—interspersed with ever-more-extreme porn to numb the pain. The same message board that hosts “furry” threads also hosts threads about “dismantling white supremacy.” The same Discord server trading furry cub art is where Antifa plans real-world violence. Sexual humiliation and racial/political humiliation become indistinguishable.
Crooks and Robinson both fit this profile perfectly: socially isolated, downwardly mobile young white men from middle or working-class suburbs, radicalized in the exact online spaces where economic resentment, racial grievance, and sexual deviancy all converge.
This is a demographic that went from running the country to being told they’re the original sin of the country in a single lifetime—while having the economic ladder yanked away at the exact same moment. No other group has experienced that velocity of combined economic and status loss. And no other group is producing these lone-wolf political assassins and trans shooters at anywhere near the same rate. Other groups produce different kinds of violence, but not direct political assassinations.
Ignore this targeted downward mobility, and you guarantee more Crookses and Robinsons. Restore real economic opportunity, kill the anti-white discrimination baked into every institution, and give these men a stake in the future again—and you can pull the fuse out of the bomb.
Jack Posobiec is a former Navy Intelligence officer, senior editor at Human Events, and host of Human Events Daily. Follow him on X @JackPosobiec.
