Cole Allen, the suspect in the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner shooting Saturday night, had a plan, a target list, and a message for the world. And he sent it out 10 minutes before he opened fire at the Washington Hilton.
Allen sent a rambling, self-righteous manifesto to family members just before the chaos erupted. It reads like the work of a man who had convinced himself that political rage justified mass murder — and who wanted everyone to know exactly why.
The 1,052-word letter opens with a string of apologies — to his parents, his colleagues, his students — but don’t mistake them for remorse. They’re the apologies of a man who had already decided the mission was worth it. He told his parents he had a job interview. His colleagues got a story about a “personal emergency.” Both, of course, were lies.
Then Allen gets to the point.
“I am a citizen of the United States of America,” he wrote. “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.”
Gee, it sounds an awful lot like the unhinged accusations by Democrats in Congress, doesn’t it?
That’s the fuel driving all of this — a man who had so thoroughly marinated in left-wing Trump hatred that he convinced himself violence was not just justified, but obligatory. He even acknowledged he’d felt this way “a long time ago” but called Saturday night “the first real opportunity” to act on it.
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He then laid out a chilling target list with the clinical detachment of someone who’d thought about this for a long time. Administration officials were the top priority, ranked from highest to lowest. Secret Service agents were targets “only if necessary,” and he hoped to incapacitate them non-lethally — noting that “center mass with shotguns messes up people who aren’t” wearing body armor. Hotel security, Capitol Police, and National Guard troops were off-limits unless they fired first. Employees and guests were listed as “not targets at all” — unless, apparently, they got in the way.
He clearly had a well-thought-out plan.
In fact, he put thought into the kind of ammunition he wanted to use.
“In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs,” he wrote, citing less wall penetration.
How thoughtful.
But he made one thing clear about the dinner guests: he considered them “complicit” for showing up. “Most people chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor,” he wrote, “and are thus complicit.” He added that he “really hoped it doesn’t come to that” — but the door was open.
Allen, who described himself as half-black and half-white, anticipated pushback and answered it point by point. To the suggestion that his Christianity should compel him to “turn the other cheek,” he argued that passivity in the face of another person’s suffering isn’t virtue — it’s complicity. To the objection that he “didn’t get them all,” his answer was terse: “Gotta start somewhere.”
The manifesto’s postscript was also alarming. In it, Allen expressed how he couldn’t believe how easy it had been. He walked into the hotel with multiple weapons and described encountering essentially no resistance.
“I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo,” he wrote. “What I got is nothing. No damn security. Not in transport. Not in the hotel. Not in the event.”
He noted that all event security personnel were stationed outside, focused on protesters and arriving guests. No one, apparently, had planned for a threat that checked in the day before.
“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 s**t,” he wrote.
He signed off as Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen — a man who believed his country had failed its people so completely that murder was the logical next step.
This is what years of unrelenting, dehumanizing political rhetoric from the left can produce. Words have consequences. Saturday night was one of them.
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