My thoughts exactly.
For a job like this they pick the neighborhood nerd?
No worries, I completely missed your counter argument here. Also, hope all is well with you and yours.
As far as the kid, yeah, this is the exact type they want. Not as an actual assassin, but as a scrawny putz to larp assassin so they, the FBI, can swoop down, nab him, and be the hero at the presser.
If they used MK Ultra the neighborhood nerd may be most likely to have the necessary psychological profile. According to a Raytheon whistleblower who says he has personally observed the phenomenon, the Deep State has technology that allows them to communicate directly to someone’s brain so that it sounds like it is the victim’s own voice speaking. Most people would talk themselves down if they heard their own voice telling them to do something heinous but people with a particular psychological profile would be vulnerable to that. Data-mining allows the Deep State to easily find those people.
Crooks was already well on the road to being an assassin, if his former classmate was accurate when he said that Crooks and his circle of friends were the type to make terroristic threats - and that the rumor at the school was that Crooks actually did threaten to shoot up the school and missed school for a few days after the threat. After Crooks learned of the rumors he stopped expressing his “superior” political views.