Cole Allen, the 31-year-old who opened fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, had a BlueSky account under the handle “c0ldF0rce” where he spent months calling President Trump a “known traitor” and a “sociopathic mob boss.” He posted violent GIFs. He fantasized about political violence. He told the entire internet exactly who he was becoming.
And BlueSky said nothing. Did nothing. Suspended the account *after* the bullets flew. Heroic stuff.
See, this is the part that drives us absolutely nuts. Every single time one of these lunatics snaps, we find out they left a trail of breadcrumbs the size of billboards. Allen’s bio literally said he was picking his own “battlefields.” He posted a GIF of someone getting smacked in the face in response to Trump content. He shared a rifle-pumping animation when Trump criticized Democrat-run cities. This wasn’t subtle, folks. This was a guy waving red flags like he was directing traffic at a parade.
But nobody on the “No Kings” side of the internet thought that was concerning. Because on BlueSky — the platform that markets itself as the enlightened alternative to X — calling the President a fascist mob boss and sharing violent imagery is just Tuesday afternoon content.
Allen was a mechanical engineering grad from Caltech. Worked part-time at a tutoring company called C2 Education, where he was apparently “Teacher of the Month” back in December 2024. So we’re not talking about some off-the-grid drifter living in a van. We’re talking about an educated guy from Torrance, California, with a computer science degree and a day job helping kids with homework.
And in his spare time? He was posting obsessively about Ukraine, ranting about JD Vance, and marinating in the exact same rhetoric that Rachel Maddow and her friends serve up every single night on cable television. The progression is right there in his posts — frustration, then rage, then violent imagery, then real bullets.
“I’m surprised by this administration’s incompetence in fascism,” Allen wrote. He literally said he expected “actual fighting to have started much earlier.”
Read that again. He was *disappointed* the political violence hadn’t started sooner. And he decided to get the party started himself.
Now here’s what nobody in the corporate media wants to touch with a ten-foot pole. Allen wasn’t radicalized by some dark web forum or an underground militia chat room. He was radicalized by mainstream liberal talking points. Every single thing on his BlueSky account — Trump is a fascist, Trump is a mob boss, Trump is a traitor, Vance is destroying Ukraine — is something you can hear on MSNBC before your morning coffee gets cold.
The “No Kings” crowd has been screaming for months that Trump is a dictator who must be stopped “by any means necessary.” They’ve been staging protests, blocking streets, and calling anyone who voted for the guy a Nazi sympathizer. And then one of their guys picks up a weapon and acts on exactly what they’ve been preaching, and suddenly it’s “we don’t condone violence” and “this was a lone wolf.”
Baloney.
This wasn’t a lone wolf. This was a guy who swam in the same pool as every other BlueSky activist, absorbed the same apocalyptic language, watched the same hysterical cable news segments, and came to the logical conclusion that his side keeps dancing around but never quite says out loud: if Trump is *really* Hitler, then somebody should do something about it.
Well, Cole Allen did something about it. And the people who wound him up like a clock are going to spend the next two weeks pretending they had nothing to do with it.
The radicalization pipeline isn’t 4chan. It isn’t some shadowy Telegram group. It’s BlueSky. It’s MSNBC. It’s “The View.” It’s every mainstream liberal platform that tells its audience, day after day, that the President of the United States is a fascist dictator — and then acts shocked when somebody takes them seriously.
Maybe — and this is just a wild thought — if you don’t want people to commit political violence, you should stop telling them every single day that a democratically elected president is an existential threat to their survival.
But what do we know? We’re just the people who saw this coming.