The Atlantic published a story today connecting would-be assassin Cole Allen to Luigi Mangione and Tyler Robinson. All of them, according to the author, are “normie extremists,” a new trend made up of people whose actions seem more extreme than their ideology, at least at first glance.
On Saturday night, after Cole Tomas Allen’s alleged attempt to assassinate President Trump and administration officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a familiar ritual began on the internet: compiling a portrait of the shooter, based on the digital breadcrumbs of his online life…
On what appears to be Allen’s Bluesky account, the posts that he has liked tend to be from run-of-the-mill liberal accounts, such as the activist Will Stancil, the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, and the satirical-news website The Onion. He reposted criticism of Hasan Piker, an influential socialist commentator. Many liberals dislike Piker for his positions against Israel, his praise of Chinese-style communism, his remark that “America deserved 9/11” (he later said that he should have used more “precise” language), and his support for petty theft from large corporations…
A former colleague of Allen’s described him to me as a “normal-ass dude, like anyone else,” who was well liked at the tutoring company where they worked and had exceedingly quotidian interests—chiefly anime and the popular video game Super Smash Bros.—and was an “animal lover.” The former colleague, who asked to remain anonymous over concerns of professional reprisal, said the two of them never talked about politics.
Allen, in other words, is a “normie”—internet slang for someone with conventional and widely held beliefs—but also an extremist who was willing to kill for those beliefs. In this sense, he represents the relatively new phenomenon of normie extremism, in which people who hold otherwise mainstream political views carry out acts of political violence.
He goes on to say that Tyler Robinson seems like a similar normie extremist.
Robinson himself didn’t appear to be particularly radical prior to the shooting but was chiefly concerned about protecting gay and trans rights, according to his mother’s reported statements to investigators and published text messages that he had exchanged with his roommate.
I’ll confess that after reading all of this my conclusion is that the author is probably missing the truth of this by a wide margin. Granted, some elements of Cole Allen’s background (and that of Tyler Robinson’s) seem pretty normal. Allen went to Cal Tech, suggesting he was fairly brilliant and a very good student, for instance. He wasn’t someone left behind by society. He was someone who got into a school that is harder to get into that Harvard.
Where I think the author misses it is in the fact that both Allen and Robinson seem to have sunk into an extremist internet-based culture which is not at all normal. For instance, he cites Will Stancil’s Bluesky as a “run-of-the-mill” liberal account, but doesn’t mention the kind of thing that Stancil embraces there routinely.
This is a small sample of violent rhetoric by Will Stancil, who was reportedly one of the most closely followed accounts by alleged WHCD shooter Cole Allen. pic.twitter.com/KqBChtE09F
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) April 29, 2026
And here’s the thing, maybe that is normal now. It’s certainly acceptable and even admirable to a lot of people on the left these days. The people who cheered for Luigi Mangione and the ones who cheered the murder of Charlie Kirk and the ones who lament that yet another assassin failed to kill Trump. They are the same ones who cheered when Andy Ngo got beaten in the street by masked Antifa goons.
These people are still a minority of the left, but they post these comments on social media because they (correctly) believe there is an audience for them. And critically, it’s not hard to slide from normie Democrat to Will Stancil fan online. There’s no boundary there, especially not on Bluesky.
So I’m going to suggest that normie extremism is probably more accurately described as normies radicalized by rampant extremism on the left.
Finally, Steven Crowder posted this video after the attack in London yesterday. He suggests that there is a kind of looming violence which threatens to break out at any time because people are engaging in extreme forms of altruistic punishment and motivated reasoning online. He doesn’t use those phrases but it’s exactly what he’s talking about, i.e. people feel good about acting like monsters based on nothing but vibes. For instance, the Candace Owens fans who take joy in bashing Erika Kirk aren’t much different from the left-wingers who celebrated Kirk’s death, both are convinced they are right to feel good about what they are doing.
Taking joy in actual murder or mob harassment shouldn’t be as popular as it is, but that also seems to be increasingly normal and potentially dangerous as some people think “Egyptian planes” make sense of it all. It’s a recipe for disaster. As Crowder puts it, something bad is going to happen.
Something bad is going to happen. pic.twitter.com/tPiLvpUIji
— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) April 29, 2026
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