From Grammar School to the Pop Culture – What Radicalized Cole Allen?

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

We must begin any discussion of an assassination – whether successful or foiled – with the fundamental point that, of course, the perpetrator is primarily responsible.

In the case of the attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, this means Cole Tomas Allen, a book-smart and apparently sane young tutor who travelled cross-country with intent to commit a mass shooting, with both President Donald Trump and much of his cabinet as intended victims. No matter who or what else radicalized him, in the end, he’s the one who chose to attempt the attack.

It’s terrifying that he got as far as he did, but what is scaring many Americans is that, at first glance, Cole Allen seems so normal.

Cole Allen doesn’t appear to be a foreign-trained communist assassin like Lee Harvey Oswald who might have dreamed that killing JFK would be helpful to the marxist cause, or a delusional superfan like John Hinckley Jr who imagined that killing President Reagan would impress actress Jodie Foster.

By contrast, Cole Allen looks like a reasonably regular young man, a graduate of a prestigious university who never found his way in a career, and was still working as a tutor in his thirties, but who was otherwise unremarkable, certainly not someone who his friends and family would have thought capable of mass murder.

His last-minute email to friends and family – which the press is calling his manifesto – provides the answer.

One sentence in the message should jump out to everyone:

“And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

That’s the reason he gave.

Cole Allen believed he had the right – and perhaps the obligation – to singlehandedly wrest the levers of power away from such a criminal. In his mind, the electoral system had failed by putting President Trump in office, and he should personally put an end to the problem, all by himself.

Why?

There isn’t a single societal problem here; there are many.

Almost everyone born and raised since World War II – in America at least, I can’t speak for other countries – has likely spent some time in school discussing a challenging philosophical and ethical question:

If you had a time machine and could go back to the turn of the century, when Adolf Hitler was just a child, long before he had committed his crimes, would it be right to kill him?

Whether one attended private school or government school, whether it came up in religious ed class or philosophy or history, whether early in one’s academic career or later, in college or grad school – we all got to this question eventually.

It was thought to be a harmless question, because there are no time machines. Outside of the genre of science fiction, where the Tardis and the Continua are well-known tropes, we know that in the real world, there is no such device, so we could safely explore the question. We will never actually have the chance, so it is a completely academic exercise.

The teachers and professors who started this practice, so many years ago, had the best of intentions. Contemplate the nature of crime and punishment. Contemplate the ethics of both law enforcement before apprehension, and the criminal justice system after conviction. Contemplate what kinds of crimes merit a slap on the wrist, which ones merit a heavy prison sentence, and which ones merit the ultimate punishment.

Surely, Adolf Hitler of all people would deserve the ultimate punishment – one he evaded (we believe) by committing suicide before the allies reached his hideout.

So if you COULD go back in time to confront him, before he committed the crimes you knew he eventually would, what would you do?

Over the many decades in which this rhetorical tool was used in our nation’s schools, did our teachers anticipate that we would someday reach a time when one political party would make a literal habit of referring to their political opponents by saying “He’s literally Hitler!”?

For decades, Democrats became accustomed to referring to Republicans as Nazis (almost a laughable allegation, since Democrats are the national socialists, after all), and the rest of us got accustomed to hearing them say it, to the point that we stopped raising an eyebrow at the outrageous charge.

Then the Democrats started referring to Republican politicians as “a Hitler.”

And then finally, during the Trump years, they dropped the “a” and started calling Donald Trump “literally Hitler.”

One hopes that all sane people would understand that such slanders are exaggerations at least, to put it mildly. But that may be too much to expect.

There are still good schools, both public and private – that teach history and philosophy respectfully and truthfully. But they are fewer and fewer every year.

In fact, much of today’s youth has been raised in schools that abandoned the cause of truth a generation ago. Teachers assign textbooks like Howard Zinn’s; they spout leftist fictions like global warming and gender choice as if they were fact.

And they don’t teach the real crimes committed by the socialists of the 20th century at all. Hitler and Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, Castro and the Kims, all ran the same kinds of governments; the differences between their kill ratios were a matter of scale, not of intent.

Too many students are raised to hate Hitler, without being told why. They don’t know that Hitler killed six million, or that Stalin killed millions more, or that Mao’s numbers made them both look like amateurs.

They only know that they’re supposed to hate Hitler; they don’t know why. And they’ve likely never even heard of most of the others.

So when people say of Donald Trump that “he’s literally Hitler” – this isn’t speaking in a void, without context. The charge calls to mind a lifetime of other charges – we’ve heard that Hitler committed genocide, whatever that is. We’ve heard that Hitler was racist somehow, without knowing exactly what kind of racist. We’ve heard that Hitler was some kind of a torturer, and some kind of dictator.

So if some modern politician is “literally Hitler,” then perhaps all those rhetorical ethics discussions from years ago will be called to mind, not for everyone, but for some – perhaps subconsciously, perhaps quite consciously – they will conclude that the right thing to do is to act on their training.

How can one justify shooting up a banquet? Easy. Just be bombarded for years with the belief that the person in question is a monster – one who it would, in fact, be morally right to kill.

It may even be a moral imperative, in the right heavily conditioned mind.

Back to the manifesto. What did Cole Allen believe of President Trump? That he is “a pedophile, a rapist, a traitor.”

We know of course that President Trump is no such thing.

So what on earth are such outrageous allegations based on?

They’re based on real charges – spurious, outlandish, frivolous, sure – but actual charges that have really been filed, nonetheless.

The lawfare that the Democratic Party has unleashed on President Trump over the past decade is unprecedented in American politics. They’ve had partisan hacks file preposterous charges just to get President Trump tied up in court, depending on witnesses no sane jury would believe, with corrupt prosecutors and judges disregarding everything from the rules of evidence to the statutes of limitations, just to get courtroom footage on the front page in the vain hope of using it to defeat him at the polls.

The slings and arrows of the dishonest Left have been flying in Trump’s direction for a decade, and Cole Allen absorbed the message behind them.

Before that, Cole Allen was in school himself, and he clearly absorbed the messages of American academia as well.

Put all that together, and it’s no longer a mystery just what or who radicalized Cole Allen.

It was academia, and the pop culture, and the press, and the Democratic Party, and likely his peer group as well. An entire generation has been steeped in such historical falsehoods, ethical confusion, and violent hatred of conservative politicians, almost from birth. It is no surprise that this poisoned seed will occasionally fall on fertile ground, and the occasional person will indeed be radicalized.

None of this is to absolve Cole Allen of his crimes. He made the personal choice to set out to commit mass murder that night, and he must pay the price; society must prosecute and convict him, and sentence him, for such intended horror.

But we should take note of his environment, and recognize that millions of other Americans have been, and continue to be, raised in that same environment, filled with the same lies, the same bigotry, the same fictional charges.

There is a reason why Democrats have tried to kill President Trump, and a Republican Congressional baseball team, and President Trump’s cabinet members, and members of the Supreme Court.

Their peer group tells them – sometimes in coded language, and sometimes blatantly – that such an attack would be the right thing to do, to save their demographic, or to save their party, or to save the planet, or to save the universe.

The problem isn’t insanity.

The real problems are the modern Left’s systemic abuse of education, their epidemic warping of morality, a pervasive distaste for honesty, and a dangerous acceptance of popular marxism – all coinciding to create here in America these homicidal time bombs, like James Hodgkinson, Thomas Crooks, Ryan Wesley Routh, and now Cole Tomas Allen.

Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo