The right immediately leapt to the obvious explanation that the shooter was a radical leftist hopped up on existential hatred. The left responded with “you started it,” until it turned out that the kid was a registered Republican, whereupon there was dancing in the streets of hipsterville. The FBI announced it was still investigating the motive, even though there wasn’t much left to investigate.

In the face of this complete lack of information to explain why Thomas Matthew Crooks (because all presidential assassins, attempted of otherwise, are required to be known by three names) shot at Donald John Trump, MIchelle Goldberg seized the opportunity to blame the sad plight of young men.

The reporting that has emerged so far describes him as an outcast, not an activist. A classmate told CBS News that he was bullied relentlessly. Another told The Wall Street Journal, “People would say he was the student who would shoot up high school.” He appears to have had a passion for gun culture; he reportedly wore camouflage or hunting gear to school and wanted to join the rifle team, though he was rejected as a bad shot. He joined a local gun club, and when he was killed on Saturday, he was wearing a T-shirt for Demolition Ranch, a gun-nut YouTube channel.

Some who study terrorism and violent extremism find the shooter’s history of humiliation and obsession with firearms familiar. “We are starting to see some of the key markers we see in individuals that have committed acts of targeted violence,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. In such people, ideology can be secondary to the desire to wreak havoc and win notoriety.

Or maybe he just wanted a date with Jodie Foster? But I digress.

Last year, Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a  report called “The Third Generation of Online Extremism,” describing how online radicalization has changed over time. At first, he wrote, the internet simply allowed movements that existed in the real world to broadcast their propaganda and communicate covertly. Then came the advent of social media in the mid-2000s. “In this new online environment, radicalizing extremists would congregate in so-called echo chambers — closed spaces where alternative viewpoints are not dismissed with erudite arguments but with a simple click of an ‘unfriend’ or ‘unfollow’ button,” Ware wrote.

There being no indication of why Crooks acted, so why not seize upon an obscure report that posits online radicalization is to blame? Could it be that some cohort is particularly susceptible to this propaganized extremism? And who would this cohort be?

The rise of post-ideological terror is clearly a political issue, stemming from social isolation, hopelessness and anomie among young men, coupled with the easy availability of guns. But it’s an issue that our politics is proving wholly unable to reckon with.

Young men. Guns. Nihilism. Is that faint odor the smell of “toxic masculinity”?

In her new book “Black Pill,” the journalist Elle Reeve described the miserable men who congregate in the darkest corners of the internet, talking themselves and one another into apocalyptic action. “You can’t go on like this forever,” she wrote. “It hurts too much. You need some relief from the unrelenting doom. You start to imagine what comes after this system fails. That’s the world you need to prepare for, not this one.

A woman writing about how horrible miserable men are? Of course. But then, there is still absolutely nothing to inform us what motivated Crooks, the actual guy who actually pulled the trigger, to commit such an act. And yet, that doesn’t stop Goldberg from filling the vacuum with her personal demons, men and guns, while leaving herself an out for the sake of plausible deniability.

We don’t yet know if Crooks was one of these men. But so far, the absence of a clear rationale for his hideous and history-making act has been uncanny, and Ware’s framework offers a way to understand this disturbing lacuna.

Never let ignorance get in the way of a good rant against the things and people you hate, for which there is no basis other than the disturbing voices whispering inside your head.