We now have the receipts on Cole Allen, the 31-year-old lunatic who opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. His tweets have been released. His social media history is out. And folks, it reads like someone copy-pasted every MSNBC chyron from the last four years directly into this man’s brain and let it marinate until it curdled into bullets.
But sure, let’s all pretend this came out of nowhere. Let’s act stunned. Let’s do the thing where Democrats spend five straight years calling a sitting president Hitler, a fascist, an existential threat to democracy, the literal Antichrist — and then when some deranged follower of theirs takes them at their word, they furrow their brows and say, “We never could have predicted this.” You predicted it. You *prescribed* it.
Cole Allen was a proud Kamala Harris supporter. That’s not speculation — it’s on his timeline. He was a card-carrying member of the “Wide Awakes,” that radical leftist group that thinks they’re modern-day revolutionaries because they own a screenprinting machine and read too much Howard Zinn. He called Donald Trump the “Antichrist” — not in some edgy, ironic way, but in the way a person talks when they’ve genuinely convinced themselves they’re saving civilization by picking up a firearm.
And where do you suppose he got that idea?
Let’s walk through the timeline, because it matters. Over the last several years, Cole Allen’s social media feed was a greatest hits compilation of mainstream Democratic rhetoric. “Trump is a dictator.” “Trump will end democracy.” “Trump is coming for your rights.” “If we don’t stop him, people will die.” Sound familiar? It should. You’ve heard it from Joe Biden. You’ve heard it from Kamala Harris. You’ve heard it from every anchor on CNN, every blue-check on Twitter, every Hollywood actor who thinks their SAG card doubles as a political science degree.
They built this. Tweet by tweet. Broadcast by broadcast. Fundraising email by fundraising email.
You want to know how radicalization works? It doesn’t happen in a cave somewhere. It happens on your couch. It happens when you turn on cable news and the people in suits with nice hair and expensive microphones tell you — every single day, without pause — that the President of the United States is an existential threat who must be stopped “by any means necessary.” Remember that phrase? They loved that phrase. They put it on t-shirts. They hashtagged it. They made it a rallying cry.
Well, Cole Allen heard the rally. He just showed up with a different kind of sign.
His tweets from the months before the attack are chilling not because they’re unusual, but because they’re *indistinguishable* from what you’d find on any mainstream progressive’s timeline. “This man is a threat to everything we stand for.” “He will destroy this country if we let him.” “We are running out of time.” That’s not fringe rhetoric. That’s a stump speech. That’s a CNN panel. That’s the opening paragraph of an email from ActBlue asking you for $27.
The only difference between Cole Allen and the average Democratic donor is that Allen decided to do something about it.
And here’s the part that should make every American furious: not a single person in Democratic leadership is going to take an ounce of responsibility for this. Not one. They will pivot immediately to gun control. They will talk about “access to firearms.” They will do their rehearsed sad faces and their moment-of-silence performances and their carefully worded statements that manage to express sympathy without ever once acknowledging that their own words lit the match.
We’ve seen this playbook before. When a Bernie Sanders volunteer shot up a congressional baseball practice and nearly killed Steve Scalise, the media gave it about 48 hours of coverage and then memory-holed it so fast you’d think it was a Hunter Biden laptop. Nobody asked whether years of “Republicans want you to die” rhetoric had anything to do with it. Nobody demanded that Bernie Sanders answer for his supporter. The story just… vanished.
They want this one to vanish too. Already, the coverage is shifting. Already, the framing is moving from “radicalized leftist attempts mass murder” to “gun violence at public event.” Watch the language. They’ll strip the politics out of it like a chop shop strips a stolen car.
But we’re not letting this one go.
Cole Allen didn’t radicalize himself in a vacuum. He was radicalized by a political establishment and a media machine that told him — every day, in terms that left no room for nuance — that Donald Trump was going to end the world. They told him democracy was dying. They told him his rights were being stolen. They told him this was the fight of his life.
He believed them.
The shooter’s manifesto and social media are out there for anyone to read. And when you read them, you won’t find QAnon. You won’t find 4chan. You won’t find some shadowy underground network. You’ll find CNN talking points. You’ll find Democratic Party messaging. You’ll find the exact same words that come out of Chuck Schumer’s mouth every Tuesday.
That’s the scandal. Not that a crazy person did a crazy thing. But that the “crazy” thing he believed was exactly what the most powerful people in the country told him to believe.
We don’t have a gun problem. We have a propaganda problem. And until the people who spent years screaming “fire” in a crowded theater are held accountable for the stampede, this won’t be the last time we see their words turn into someone else’s bullets.
Sleep tight, America. The people who built this guy are already workshopping their next fundraising email.