About 10 minutes before the would-be assassin Cole Tomas Allen from Torrance, California, tried to get into the White House Correspondents’ banquet and stormed the security at the entrance, he sent a manifesto, a reason why he was going to try to kill the president and Cabinet officers, to his family.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.opens in a new tab
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
We have that now, and it’s been released. And it’s curious. It is a petri dish of all of the conspiracy theories, all the lies, all the rage that’s been promulgated by the Left. And it really is confirmatory evidence that when the Left threatens people and they come up with these crazy ideas and they endorse violence, there are people who are very susceptible to that.
And this shooter was one. And he proves it with his manifesto.
He says he wants to kill President Donald Trump for three reasons: that Donald Trump is a pedophile. There’s no evidence that Donald Trump has ever had sexual relations with any child or anybody under 18. Where does he get that? He gets that from the conspiracy theories of the Left and some on the Right, that the Epstein files were suppressed because Donald Trump was engaging in sexual relations with young girls.
There’s no evidence that he ever did that. In fact, we have testimony from [Jeffrey Epstein’s] consort, Ms. Maxwell, that Donald Trump didn’t do that, and other people, young women, had said the same thing.
The second thing he said, he is doing this to kill a rapist. Well, he should have remembered that George Stephanopoulos, who used that term falsely, forced ABC to pay a multimillion-dollar damage settlement to Donald Trump. That comes from the trial in which the judge in the E. Jean Carroll trial said that Donald Trump was guilty of sexual assault. And a jury in New York found him guilty, although it was very tenuous evidence.
But they never said that he was guilty of rape. The judge conflated the two and said it was almost the same, but it wasn’t.
They deliberately, despite all the evidence that he had not committed rape because E. Jean Carroll’s testimonies were unreliable and, kind of, outlandish, to tell you the truth. He was never convicted as a rapist. But that was the charge that George Stephanopoulos and much of the network news ran with.
He also said, third, that he’s going to kill Donald Trump because he is a traitor. Well, where would that come from? That couldn’t come from the two-year, three years, actually, the Russian collusion caper, when people such as, I don’t know, James Clapper, former head of the National Intelligence Agency, said that—what—that he’s director of national intelligence. He said that Donald Trump was [Vladimir] Putin’s puppet. And people as diverse as former CIA Director [Michael] Hayden or John Brennan, CIA director, they all said that Donald Trump was basically a captive of Vladimir Putin.
And just to set the record straight, Mr. [Robert] Mueller spent nearly two years and found no actionable evidence that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians. If anybody was hard on Vladimir Putin, it was Donald Trump during his tenure. In his tenure alone, in four of successive presidencies. Putin didn’t dare to go into Ukraine.
He had killed the Wagner Group in Syria. He had OK’ed offensive weapons to Ukraine that had been canceled or put on hold by people like Joe Biden and Barack Obama. He had told the Europeans: Do not deal with Putin on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Please don’t do that. He got out of an asymmetrical deal. I could go on and on. But the idea that he was a traitor is ridiculous.
He said his targets were cabinet officers and Donald Trump only. He wasn’t going to kill the security unless he had to. But he said not Kash Patel. And later on he will mention that he is half black and half white. You get the impression that he feels that maybe Kash Patel is a prominent, as the FBI director, is not identifiable as white.
In other words, he seems to be racially obsessed. And he mentions his race. And we know where that comes from, the saturation of race, race, race. DEI, DEI, DEI.
He also says that he is acting on behalf of all the people who are raped in the detention camps. We know that unaccompanied minors were let in en masse during the Barack Obama and Joe Biden years. And we know that the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump is trying to find these people. There is no mass rape in detention camps.
And if that did happen, it did not happen under the Trump administration. He’s trying to close the border so that trafficking of young girls and boys does not continue, which it did en masse under Biden, but especially under Obama and especially Biden.
He mentions teenage girls again. Well, the teenage girls comes out of the Epstein files. Epstein files. Epstein files.
He comes up with the Marx-Engels social murder defense. In other words, he says, yes, he’s breaking the law, but he’s breaking the law because officials of the law and the system is unlawful.
And so, then he’s redressing that. Where did he get that? That couldn’t be from the Left and the glorification by independent journalists like Taylor Lorenz or, once again, Hasan Piker, lionizing, canonizing—whom? Luigi Mangione, who killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson. Shot him in the back. Murdered him. And then he became a folk hero. They even tried to make an opera about him in San Francisco. He became a folk hero to the Left.
And that sent a message, another message, to people who were unballanced, like Mr. Allen. That if you kill Donald Trump, you will be in the pantheon of leftist heroes. Just like Luigi Mangione is.
And more importantly, you will be in the moral and legal right. Because once you’ve established that, you as God and judge and jury and executioner, can determine who is a social enemy of the people, then you can then execute him. And by executing him, you will help the people.
That comes out of the long tradition of Marxist ideology. But more importantly, it’s been revived by the Left lately, who say to all of us, if you commit murder, as Hasan Piker has mentioned with Mangione, or if you assault people or if you steal things, it’s not a crime. You have the right to do all of these things because the system is criminal and has oppressed you.
Let me just finish by saying, obviously, Cole Thomas Allen is unhinged. He’s crazy. He may be bright by graduating from Caltech, but he didn’t seem to be very bright in his manifesto. But what he wrote as an exegesis of why he was doing it is an encapsulation of ideology that’s promulgated by today’s Left.
All of the conspiracy theories, all of the lies, all of the excuses, all of the justification for violence—it’s all there. And it didn’t come out of the head of Zeus. This man was influenced by people who traffic in these lies and these ideologies and these detrimental and very dangerous assumptions, day after day, after day. Even when they’re warned, day after day, after day, that what you’re doing is very dangerous.
And we know how dangerous it is because this is the third attempt to kill Donald Trump within two years. And he has two more years in his tenure. And we should expect at least two more unless the Left doesn’t wise up or find a moral compass and stop what it’s been doing.
