WHCD Shooter’s Social Media Posts, Manifesto Show Hatred of Trump as Media Search for ‘Motive’
Plus, Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed’s longtime spokeswoman savaged ‘white Ann Arbor’ people who questioned why she defended looting of American cities
The alleged shooter who succeeded in shutting down Saturday evening’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Cole Tomas Allen, recently shared posts on the left-wing social media platform Bluesky arguing that President Trump should be “tried for high crimes,” that ICE should be abolished, and that Trump ally Elon Musk is “a Nazi,” the Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson scooped. Furthermore, in a manifesto first described by the New York Post, Allen said he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Sunday morning that top Trump administration officials were the target of the attempted shooting rampage.
So it’s only natural that several mainstream media outlets are still in “search” of a motive they describe as “unclear.” A banner New York Times headline that led the so-called newspaper of record’s website past 10 a.m. on Sunday—nearly two hours after our report on Allen’s social media posts—read “Search for Motive of Gunman Who Charged Press Gala.” An NBC News headline read “Gunman in custody after charging gala with Trump attending; motive unclear.”
If there were any uncertainties about Allen’s motivations—he voted for Kamala Harris and contributed to her presidential campaign—the release of his manifesto put them to bed. It refers to “the many criminals in this administration” and is signed “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen.” “ColdForce” is the gamer name that Allen, a 31-year-old teacher and video game enthusiast from Southern California, used on social media platforms including Bluesky and the gamer-friendly streaming site Twitch, on which Allen posted videos of the game Super Smash Bros as recently as 2023.
A week before the dinner, Allen boosted a social media post criticizing a “Freedom of the Press” pocket square that many journalists donned at the event as “a white flag that no one can read unless you pull it out and wave it in defeat,” suggesting he preferred more forceful opposition to the president.
READ MORE: Suspected WHCD Shooter Boosted Bluesky Posts Saying Trump Should Be ‘Tried For High Crimes’
The left-wing insurgent who’s now the leading candidate in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Abdul El-Sayed, tried to scrub the internet of his attacks on the police. His communications director, Roxie Richner, didn’t even bother. Richner, our Jessica Costescu reports, “defended the looting of American cities in 2020 and shared social media posts calling to defund systemically ‘racist’ police departments, lashing out at ‘white Ann Arbor’ people who pressed her on those views.”
The posts remain live. In one of them, Richner, a longtime El-Sayed aide who worked on the Democrat’s failed 2018 gubernatorial campaign, characterized the riots and looting that plagued U.S. cities in the summer of 2020 as “people [who] are responding” to “the police … instigating violence across the country.” When Richner’s followers pushed back, she threatened to doxx them.
“If one more white ann arbor person dms me asking why i’m ‘dEFeNdiNG LoOtiNG’ i’m seriously gonna explode. your racism is showing. check yourselves. I’m not holding back on this shit anymore, i’m dropping names if u keep it up,” Richner wrote on X on June 3, 2020.
Ann Arbor, home of the diversity-obsessed University of Michigan and ground zero of the Midwest’s (largely white) liberal elite, clearly wasn’t liberal enough for Richner.
She also boosted social media posts arguing that the New York City and Los Angeles police departments are “the biggest gangs in America,” that racism is “a systemic virus plaguing police departments across the US,” and that “racist violence and police murder are inherent to capitalism.”
“Richner’s posts add a new layer to her boss’s history of denouncing law enforcement and calling to defund the police—rhetoric El-Sayed has sought to distance himself from amid a competitive Democratic primary race against state senator Mallory McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens,” Costescu writes. “El-Sayed has deleted tweets describing police departments as ‘standing armies’ and suggesting that left-wing activists should rebrand the ‘#defund’ movement to the ‘#REfund’ movement and ‘demand a refund on all tax dollars to fund military police & brutality.’ Richner shared the latter post to X.”
As the specter of political violence becomes a fact of daily life in the Trump era, the Democratic party does not appear to be trying to tame its extremists. See above. Then there’s the New Jersey plastic surgeon now running for Congress with Ilhan Omar’s endorsement in a tight Democratic primary who worked at a hospital in Gaza that functioned as a Hamas command center—and (shocker) dismissed reports that there were terror tunnels located underneath the hospital before Hamas boss Mohammed Sinwar was killed in a tunnel directly under its emergency department, our Jon Levine reports.
Dr. Adam Hamawy—who leads the field of 13 candidates running in New Jersey’s blue 12th Congressional District in fundraising and who has secured endorsements from far-left figures like Omar—worked at Gaza’s European Hospital in May 2024, staying for roughly three weeks amid a period of intense fighting between Israel and Hamas. When he returned to the United States, he became a go-to “expert” for left-wing media outlets seeking to rebut reports that Hamas terrorists used hospitals as command centers and operated terror tunnels underneath them. “I saw no fighters at all. … There were definitely no tunnels underground,” Hamawy told Rowan University’s student newspaper, the Whit, in October 2024. “This was a completely benign civilian hospital with no tunnels underneath it,” he added in an interview with socialist magazine Jacobin. Uh-huh.
“A year after Hamawy’s visit, in May 2025, Hamas leader Sinwar, a mastermind of the Oct. 7 terror attack, was killed in a tunnel directly under the hospital emergency department, where he was leading a high-level meeting with senior Hamas terrorists,” Levine writes. “In addition to Sinwar, Hamas’s Rafah Brigade commander, Mohammad Shabana, was killed in the strike, as was South Khan Younis Battalion commander Mahdi Quara, the Times of Israel reported. The New York Times was given a tour of the bombed-out terror hideout a month later, publishing a piece headlined ‘The Tunnel That Leads Underneath a Hospital in Southern Gaza.’” Imagine that.
Additional reading:
President Donald Trump opted to keep his top negotiators in the United States rather than sending them to Pakistan for peace talks with the Iranian regime, saying, “They can call us anytime they want, but you’re not going to be making any more 18-hour flights to sit around talking about nothing.” Meanwhile, the U.S. blockade and “Maximum Pressure” campaign continues and the Treasury Department on Friday imposed new sanctions on Iranian “shadow fleet” vessels tied to China.
The Texas Tribune reported a sob story about an “Egyptian family of six believed to be the longest held” at an immigration processing facility in South Texas who were “redetained Saturday after federal judges this week ordered their release.” It took 17 paragraphs for the outlet to note why the family was in custody: The father is Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the man who threw Molotov cocktails at Jewish demonstrators in Colorado who were marching in support of Israeli hostages last June. An 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, Karen Diamond, died weeks later when she succumbed to injuries sustained in the attack. She is not named in the story.
Former Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Eugene Kontorovich has joined Mike Pence’s nonprofit Advancing American Freedom, making him the 19th former Heritage employee to leave the think tank for AAF since Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a video attacking critics of podcaster Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
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Democrats continually want to restrict firearms to lower gun violence! It’s apparent that if they restrict firearms from Democrats, gun violence would practically be eliminated!
Always appreciate the actual reporting that you bring to this update. Enjoy listening to you on commentary magazine podcast.