After news broke of a shooter bursting through a security checkpoint outside the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night, the suspect’s profile emerged with a chillingly familiar predictability: a young, highly intelligent male, shaped by a decade of progressive propaganda, convinced he could make history by ridding the world of a modern-day Hitler.
With President Donald Trump and six of the first seven officials in the line of presidential succession gathered in one venue, it was a tempting target indeed.
The accused gunman, Cole Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, identified himself on LinkedIn as a mechanical engineer, computer scientist, independent game developer, and teacher.
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He graduated from the highly competitive California Institute of Technology in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He earned a master’s degree in computer science from California State University in 2025.
According to his LinkedIn page, Allen has been a self-employed independent game developer for nearly eight years as well as a part-time teacher at tutoring company C2 Education, where he was named the December 2024 teacher of the month.
His history on the social media platform Bluesky, along with accounts from his siblings, provided some insight into Allen’s leftist leanings. But the strongest evidence of his radicalism came from a “manifesto” he shared with family members shortly before he opened fire. This document, later published in full by the New York Post, left little doubt why he had crossed the country armed with a rifle, a handgun, and knives.
Allen claimed in his manifesto that he acted because he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
He said he was “targeting Trump administration officials, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” Curiously, he specifically excluded FBI Director Kash Patel as a possible target.
From there, Allen ran through familiar progressive talking points and drew on Marxist rhetoric, framing the problems in America today as a struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed.
He signed the manifesto “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen.”
Fox News reported that Allen’s brother contacted the New London Police Department in Connecticut after the shooting.
According to Fox, his sister, Avriana Allen, informed authorities in Rockville, Maryland, that her brother “had made increasingly radical statements and often spoke about doing ‘something’ to address issues in the world.”
She told investigators he had bought two handguns and a shotgun, which he kept at their parents’ home without their knowledge, and that he regularly practiced at a shooting range. She also said Allen was connected to a group called “The Wide Awakes” and had attended a “No Kings” protest in California.
Although Allen is not affiliated with a political party, Federal Election Commission records show he made a $25 contribution to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s campaign in 2024.
So what would motivate this young man to throw away his future and travel to Washington for the declared purpose of targeting Trump and administration officials?
I imagine he acted for the same reasons as Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who tried to kill Trump at a July 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, or Ryan Routh, who spent hours waiting near Trump’s Florida golf course for the chance to take a shot at him.
These individuals, along with a large swath of the public, have been indoctrinated to believe that Trump is a madman who must be removed from power. They’ve come to regard violence against him and his associates as justified — heroic even. And if their efforts were to succeed, they would be remembered as saviors whose bold actions had altered the course of history.
Here are several recent examples of how Democrats advance and reinforce this dangerous ideology. Last week, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel performed a parody of a correspondents’ dinner speech for his audience. He said, “Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”
In a recent video, Marxist podcaster Hasan Piker, a darling of the Democratic Party, justified the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson because he “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder.” According to the New York Post, Piker was only sorry that Democrats hadn’t exploited Thompson’s execution to push “a unified message toward universal health care.”
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Speaking at a progressive gathering in Barcelona, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) warned, “Donald Trump is trying to end our democracy.” He described the current moment as “the most significant threat to democracy since the Civil War.”
Democrats may tone down their rhetoric for a week or two in the wake of the assassination attempt, but they will return to their same toxic narratives once the story fades from the headlines. They must. The midterm elections are looming, and they’ve got nothing else.