He Wasn’t Crazy. That’s the Problem.
The man who tried to kill the President at the WHCA dinner wrote a manifesto. It’s not what you’d expect. And that’s what should worry you.
Cole Tomas Allen’s manifesto opened with apologies. Not the hit list. The apologies. To his parents for lying about an “interview.” To his students for saying he had a personal emergency. To the hotel workers who handled his luggage. To the people he traveled next to.
He closed with a jab at the Secret Service. He called them incompetent and said he hoped they’d get it together by the time the country had “competent leadership again.”
Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.
Actually insane.
When something like this happens, the image that forms in your head is a radicalized, blue-haired ANTIFA type screaming through a megaphone. That’s not Allen. He graduated from Caltech in 2017 with a mechanical engineering degree and picked up a master’s in computer science from Cal State Dominguez Hills last year. A high school teammate called him “borderline genius” and “super stable.” A college professor described him as soft-spoken and polite, the kid who sat in the front row. He was named Teacher of the Month for December 2024 at C2 Education, where he worked part-time.
He was also, by his own LinkedIn profile, a member of the Caltech Christian Fellowship.
The media and the President have described the manifesto as anti-Christian. After reading it, I’d argue the opposite. Allen didn’t reject his faith to do this. He recruited it. He leaned on the same narratives that the left and Democrat politicians have been repeating for years.
The Reasoning
The manifesto isn’t a rant. That’s the first thing that hits you. It’s structured. He wrote it as a series of objections and rebuttals, the way you’d format a debate brief. He thought through what people would say to talk him out of it, and then he answered.
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.
Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.
He cited none of these. They are the talking points you've heard on every cable panel and in every viral thread for the past year, treated as established fact.
Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
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.
Convenient, that. He’d done the work to give himself permission.
His targets were ranked by seniority. Administration officials first, highest to lowest. Secret Service only if necessary, and only with non-lethal force if possible. Hotel staff and guests not at all. He’d use buckshot rather than slugs to minimize collateral damage. He even noted, almost apologetically, that he’d go through anyone in his way to reach the targets, on the grounds that anyone who chose to attend a speech by a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” was complicit.
That’s the line that should stop you. Complicit because they chose to attend. Categorical guilt by association. Once you accept that frame, there’s no innocent person left in the room.
He reasoned his way there.
Where Does Someone Learn To Think Like This?
You don’t have to draw a straight line from any single pundit to Allen. You can’t, and you don’t need to. What you can do is name the pattern.
“I would never, but I understand why.” Hasan Piker said a version of it about Luigi Mangione. Mainstream Democrats have been echoing softer versions of it for years now. Whole stretches of the online left treat the moral question of political violence as a sliding scale. It depends on who, it depends on why, it depends on how bad they are. Not the wall it used to be.
The pattern works because it does two things at once. I would never keeps the speaker’s hands clean. I understand why hands the listener a permission slip.
Allen reads like a man who took the permission slip seriously. He didn’t need a podcast host telling him to do it. He needed a culture that told him a thoughtful, churchgoing, soft-spoken guy in the front row of his classes could do it and still be a thoughtful, churchgoing, soft-spoken guy. The rhetoric does that work. It’s been doing it for years. It doesn’t matter whether the person saying it means it literally. What matters is that someone, somewhere, is going to.
His sister apparently saw it coming. She’d told family members he had a tendency to make radical statements, that he kept referencing a plan to do “something” to fix the world. He sent his writings to family about ten minutes before the attack. One of them called the police. They didn’t get there in time.
That’s the part the people insisting this kind of language is just venting need to sit with.
The Cover, Not the Faith
Here’s what needs to be said plainly. Allen’s reasoning isn’t Christian. It’s a counterfeit wearing Christian language as a costume.
Real Christianity teaches the opposite of what his manifesto concludes. Turn the other cheek doesn’t have an asterisk for political violence. Love your enemies isn’t a suggestion with carve-outs. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord is unambiguous about who’s authorized to deal it out, and it isn’t a 31-year-old with a shotgun who decided his fellow citizens were complicit. Allen didn’t reach his conclusion by reading the text. He reached it by importing a political worldview and decorating it with scripture afterward.
This counterfeit Christianity is everywhere now, and it crosses partisan lines.
Tucker Carlson runs a version of it. He’ll post that “Muslims love Jesus” and simp for Islam in ways that would have gotten him laughed off the air ten years ago. He’s treating Christianity less as a faith with content and more as a tribal identity that can be flexibly redefined to fit whatever argument he’s making this week. That’s not Christianity. That’s a man using Christianity as set dressing.
The progressive-activist version is more cynical. People who don’t actually believe any of it deploy a self-edited Christianity as a rhetorical weapon, almost exclusively against conservative Christians. Jesus was a refugee. Jesus was a socialist. Jesus would have wanted whatever they already wanted. Stolen-valor Christianity from people who would never set foot in a pew on a Sunday, lecturing actual Christians about what Jesus would have wanted.
When an actual believer marinates in that culture long enough, surrounded by people calling his political opponents fascists, traitors, criminals, using moral language stripped of any moral foundation, eventually some of them will start to think the cover story is the real thing. They’ll act against their own faith and call it Christianity.
Over the last few years, the verbal barbs have crossed the spectrum. The bullets don't. Charlie Kirk was murdered. President Trump has survived three assassination attempts and a string of thwarted plots. The pattern isn't symmetrical, and pretending it is has become its own kind of dishonesty.
The same people who have spent years warning about Christian Nationalism as the rising domestic threat just produced a Christian assassin who did it for them. They will pretend not to notice. They will probably try to make his Christianity the problem.
It isn’t. The problem is what they handed him to call Christianity in the first place.
The Quiet Version
The shooter is the loud version of all this. The quiet version is happening at dinner tables.
Permission structures don’t usually produce gunmen. Most of the time, they produce a country that’s slowly forgotten how to be one country. Estranged siblings. Parents who haven’t spoken to a kid in two years. Friendships that ended over an election. Churches that split. Holiday tables with empty chairs that didn’t used to be empty.
That is the byproduct. The shooter is the headline. The fractures are a collective story.
Cole Allen thanked his church family in his goodbye letter. He apologized to his students. He used buckshot to minimize the harm to people he didn’t intend to kill. He thought he was the good guy. He was a Christian.
People who do terrible things while believing they’re the good guy don’t get there alone. They get there because somebody, a lot of somebodies, kept moving the line and kept telling them the line had always been there.
The next one is already reading. We should be very careful what we hand him.
as someone whose family has an empty chair during the holidays, this situation hits home.
December 2024 is not 4 months ago, it’s 16 months ago.