Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon explores the factors motivating the suspect in the White House correspondents dinner assassination attempt.
Cole Tomas Allen, the gunman who tried to murder President Donald Trump and other senior officials at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday, is the latest would-be assassin whose radicalization owes less to the juvenile rantings of left-wing influencers than to the everyday rhetoric of mainstream Democrats and media figures.
Many have pointed out that just days before the failed assassination, the New York Times hosted a roundtable discussion in which radical left-wing pundits Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino endorsed shoplifting and other crimes while expressing sympathy for Luigi Mangione, the gunman accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Piker is a beefcake moron who hates America and routinely justifies Islamic terrorism and other forms of political violence, but he does not appear to have inspired Allen to take a shot at Trump. On April 22, Allen promoted a post on his Bluesky account (@coldforce) criticizing Piker’s defense of petty crime. …
… On April 11, he promoted a Bluesky post from Sam Deutsch, the Jeopardy! National College Championship champion turned liberal policy wonk, who wrote, “I do not listen to any streamers because streamers are dumb.”
A review of Allen’s archived posts on Bluesky—his account is currently suspended, for obvious reasons—suggests that the alleged gunman was primarily drawn to mainstream “resistance” figures. Allen’s favorite accounts included Democratic activist Will Stancil, Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse, Democratic propagandist Aaron Rupar, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, and Sarah Jeong, the former Times editorial board member who kept her job in 2018 after social media users discovered her racist tweets from years past. …
… Allen, who donated to Kamala Harris in 2024, appears to have been particularly outraged about the Trump administration’s lack of support for Ukraine and NATO, a popular sentiment among #Resistance Democrats and #NeverTrump former Republicans.
