Thoughts on Cole Allen

Depending on what you have read about Cole Allen, the attempted shooter at the White House Correspondents Dinner, you may or may not know that he held very "normie" political beliefs. He wasn't extremely left-wing or right-wing. If anything, he was anti-left, anti-socialist, in the kinds of things he posted and reposted in social media. He believed in capitalism, but that things had gone wrong under Republicans and particularly Donald Trump.

BlueSky posters who have read his "manifesto" say things like:

I love that the New York Post calls it “sprawling” and “crazed” when it’s barely 1,000 words and sane. I disagree strongly with his decision to try a mass shooting, but this is the sanest explanation by a mass shooter ever.
@dwilliamesq.bsky.social

He doesn't want anyone to follow his example because he doesn't want them to be hurt or punished. His objective was to stop the extreme actions of this regime. He doesn't even talk about avenging what's already happened or punishing anyone. He just wanted it to stop, which is the moderate position.
@antifunk.bsky.social

The point at which a sane, morally principled award-winning teacher who is angry about school shootings picks up a gun and thinks it’s the only way to make a difference is a bad place to be in. Dismissing him as a crazy person and blaming Dems is disingenuous and dishonest.
Elizabeth Spiers

Yep. I described it to my husband as reasoned, rational and a very, very bad sign.
BratKnits

That someone like Allen would do what he did is a very bad sign: that is a recurring statement on BlueSky.  

Allen, it appears, grew up in a family that was part of an evangelical church that had splintered from the Christan Reformed Church in North America — the arch-conservative sect that's home to Betsy Devos — because the CRC was too liberal. (Local news story on his family here.) Given his current politics, Kathryn Brightbill, a writer on the religious right, speculated that Allen may be part of the ex-evangelical wave, where it's common for peoples' politics to have changed but their underlying comfort with violence has not.

She wrote:

I've been worried about something like this for quite a while now, because you can't flirt with the idea of justifiable violence as much as conservative Reformed culture does, even as they're condemning it on the surface, and not end up with people who rationalize their way to doing violence.

Someone else said that Allen sounds depressed and that his writings are a suicide note. I can see that. It makes me think of people who have self-imolated as protest.