The Patriot Post® · Would-Be Assassin Manifests Leftism's Bone-Deep Illness

By Joshua Arnold

Many mass shooters are psychopaths, loners, or severely mentally ill. But the shooter who attacked the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) on Saturday night, a 31-year-old software developer with a master’s degree, intellectual talents, and a functional family, stands out for seeming normal. Yet his normality proves to be more disturbing than any abnormality would be, since it precludes any attempt to dismiss the ideology that motivated him. As with other recent political assassins — Luigi Mangion, Tyler Robinson — Cole Allen was deeply committed to leftist ideals, which are their own malady.

In a short manifesto shared with his family (and, later, the media), Allen explained his reasons for attempting to assassinate the president, “On to why I did any of this: I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Thus, Allen invokes a sense of civic responsibility, American patriotism, and moral propriety in a coherent appeal laden with Christian themes. Yet his reasoning led to a bizarre conclusion: that he, as a U.S. citizen, had a moral duty to assassinate the U.S. president. How can this be?

Before the weekend was out, online sleuths had already unearthed Allen’s left-leaning political preferences. In 2024, he donated $25 to ActBlue that was “Earmarked for Harris for President,” he wrote in the memo line. More recently, he attended the “No Kings” protests, which promoted the theme, “The Trump Fascist Regime must go now!!!”

Even more tellingly, Allen actively participated in political conversations on BlueSky, a social media platform to which committed progressives exiled themselves when they wanted to feel safe from encountering the contrary opinions available on X. Under the BlueSky handle “ColdForce,” Allen excoriated Trump as the Antichrist, a sociopathic mob boss, and a traitor beholden to Vladimir Putin (a throwback to the headier days of the Russia collusion hoax). Allen reportedly taught for a private tutoring and test-prep company, C2 Education.

According to his manifesto, Allen felt torn between the logical conclusion of his leftist political leanings and his obligations to other relationships in life. He spent the first six paragraphs “apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused.” The list moves outward from apologies for lies he told his parents, colleagues, and students about his whereabouts — suggesting he was not entirely a “loner” — to apologies to his fellow travelers and “non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near.”

His crisis of conscience intensified until the end of the post-script, written at the hotel, when Allen confessed, “if anyone is curious how doing something like this feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done. Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.”

The concluding attempt at jocularity goes over like a lead bullet, since staying in school may have been part of Allen’s problem.

Perhaps the reason why Allen felt so torn about the logical outcomes of his leftism is that he also had significant exposure to Christianity — and not just because he came from a Christian family. While studying at Cal Tech, Allen helped coordinate a Christian Bible study. He also reportedly attended a church in Pasadena affiliated with the United Reformed Churches in North America (URCNA), a conservative offshoot from the Christian Reformed Church, one of the classic seven mainline denominations.

In fact, Allen’s manifesto suggests that he considers himself to be a Christian. Deep in the letter, he considered and answered several objections to the foul deed he contemplated, beginning with, “Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek. Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.”

Allen could have answered the objection, “But I’m not a Christian. I don’t believe in that stuff anymore.” Instead, he appealed to the duty to protect the innocent. Allen seemed to think of himself as a sort of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His greatest error seems to be in placing President Trump in the role of Hitler.

Allen also declared his “expected rules of engagement,” by which he meant clarifying his targets and under what conditions he would shoot at people. “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest,” he listed. “Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible.” He added, “I hope they’re wearing body armor.”

Allen declared hotel security, Capitol Police, and the National Guard “not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)” and said hotel employees and guests were “not targets at all.” However, he added that he “would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets … on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit.”

Allen’s categories of targets may seem arbitrary and outrageous. Certainly, he expressed the delusion that he, as a private citizen, had the authority to determine which members of the government lived or died. Yet it is also interesting that Allen chose to use “buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)” in order “to minimize casualties.” Very few mass shooters attempt to “minimize casualties.” Allen’s attempt to define his own rules of engagement — however misguided — leaves us with the uncomfortable conclusion that he believed his actions to be morally right — even morally necessary.

The discomfort is most acute among Allen’s fellow leftists, who share his political worldview, his hatred of Trump, and at least most of the logic that led him to contemplate mass murder. Some leftists retreated into instant deflection. On Sunday morning, feminist author Amy Siskind claimed it was “unclear if Trump was even the target,” although Allen’s manifesto was already public. On Sunday evening, former President Barack Obama still claimed that “we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting.” Overall, on Sunday, The New York Times identified some 359,000 posts on X using the keyword “staged.”

On the other hand, other leftists merely wished that Allen had succeeded. As the WHCD proceeded, demonstrators outside the hotel held signs declaring, “Death to tyrants,” “Death to all of them,” and “Yes, they deserve to die, and I hope they burn in hell.” LibsofTikTok caught an apparent teacher, Andrea Hovis Burris, posting a prayer “for better aim.” Meanwhile, TikTok account “dotherevolution” ranted, “I wake up each morning hoping he has died. I go to bed hoping, by the time I get up in the morning, that he has died. I am convinced that we can’t even begin fixing any of our problems until he has died. For the love of all things good, just [censored] die!”

The wish for Trump’s death is not a one-off. Back in January, Minocqua Brewing Company promised, “free beer, all day long, the day he dies. Show us this post when it happens in a few months and we’ll make good on that promise.” That shows flippantly casual confidence that the president of the United States would not live out the remainder of his term. Sure enough, “a few months” later, there was already another attempt on Trump’s life — the third serious assassination attempt in less than two years.

These various reactions suggest that the Left has a serious violence problem, and their wiser heads seem to know it but don’t want to admit it. Not only are attempted political assassinations becoming all too frequent, but they are no longer met with universal condemnation. Now, a growing slice of the U.S. political spectrum either cheers on the assassination or at least sniggers at it, loudly whispering that the target (or intended target) really does deserve to die.

Admirable though it may be to declare that there is no place for political violence in America, the sad reality is that our country does have a place for political violence, and it is on the Left. In a YouGov poll conducted after the assassination of Charlie Kirk (by another leftist), 26% of liberals under 45 years old agreed that political violence can sometimes be justified, compared to 11% of the nation at large.

There are multiple reasons for this. One major reason is the worldview of critical theory, which overemphasizes group responsibility and diminishes individual responsibility, thus relativizing a person’s individual wrongs if committed for what is believed to be a sufficiently good cause. Political violence is also the natural corollary of attempts to redefine speech as violence; once speech is labelled as violence, it is not that much of a leap to consider actual violence as a proportionate response to allegedly violent speech.

A third reason for political violence is the contours of the Left’s political religion. Leftists would not describe their ideology as a religion, but it functions in many ways like a heretical Christian sect. It preaches a gospel of deliverance. It elevates certain institutions and spokespersons like so many churches and preachers to function as the organ of its gospel proclamation. It proclaims its own code of moral obedience and exhorts its followers to follow this code with increasing purity.

Of course, the key difference between leftist political religion and Christianity is that the gospel of the Left is a gospel of works in the here and now; its only hope of salvation is through strenuous labor in the immediate present. But when their efforts do not yield the political results their gospel holds out as inevitable, the only hope leftists have is to work harder, with more fury and fewer restrictions. As House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a press conference last Wednesday, “We are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

At best, this is exhausting slavery to a false gospel; at worst, it drives adherents to desperation, provoking them to extreme acts such as assassination. Leftist political religion has no mechanism — such as recalling that a transcendent God controls everything by his providence — to turn down the political temperature.

A fourth reason for political violence is the Left’s loss of faith in the American system. For decades — but especially since the 1619 Project — there has been a concerted effort to vilify the U.S. constitutional framework as systemically unjust, a system that serves entrenched powers at the expense of the people. This provides a moral rationale for seeking justice outside the system rather than inside it. If Allen believed in the American system, then he would have channeled his frustration at Trump into seeing the Republicans removed from office in the next election; instead, he resorted to the assassin’s bullet.

Allen saw his actions differently. “Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” concluded the objection-and-response section of his manifesto. “Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.”

There are seeds of truth here — “The United States of America are ruled by the law” — but Allen completely misses the point. Instead of acknowledging the law as the legitimate American authority to which we submit, Allen’s application entirely ignores it. He rightly says there is no requirement to submit to unlawful orders, but he wrongly omits his own actions from those subject to the law. In keeping with the Left’s tendency to redefine justice in their own image, Allen sets himself up as judge, jury, and executioner — exactly what he accuses Trump of doing.

This conclusion underscores the most perplexing aspect of Cole Allen’s would-be mass assassination of Trump administration figures: Allen seemed to simultaneously hold both leftist views and more-or-less conservative Christian ones. These are logically incompatible, so how did an apparently rational, “normal” person get caught between them?

Maybe Allen was never sufficiently taught how the Christian teachings to which he held applied to the culture, politics, or the contradictory ideas coming from the Left. Such an answer seems inadequate, as Allen clearly did engage with Christian teachings that opposed his murderous resolve (although interestingly only from the gospels, not Romans 12-13 or 1 Peter 2). Yet they do stand as a sobering reminder to Christian teachers that they must not only teach the word of God in the abstract but use it to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5) — including ideas that are popular in the culture.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

This article originally appeared here.