Monday’s arraignment of 31-year old Cole Tomas Allen, a California man who is charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump over the weekend, opened legal proceedings that many extremism experts will be watching closely.
Allen, a high school tutor with a background in mechanical engineering and computer science, allegedly attempted to storm the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner on Saturday night, where Trump and other high-level administration officials were gathered with the Washington press corps. He was stopped by federal law enforcement officers before getting close to his presumed targets.
According to a White House official, Allen’s sister told the Secret Service and local law enforcement that her brother was known to make “radical” statements. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and NPR has not confirmed this with Allen’s family members. But this characterization has puzzled some experts who track extremism, who say that it does not align with writings and social media activity that are believed to link to the defendant.
“You look at the social media profiles that have been attributed to this suspect and they’re really not that radical,” said Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a company that tracks online threats and narratives. “Oftentimes it’s like quite centrist, pretty moderate left wing, if anything.”
An affidavit filed by an FBI agent in support of the charges claims that Allen sent an email to members of his family moments before initiating the attack. The email specifies some grievances against Trump administration officials and policies.
“I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration,” the letter states. The letter appears to reference a range of issues from immigration detentions under the Trump administration, U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran and the Epstein scandal.
In an apparent reference to Trump, the letter also says “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
But Holt and others say these views, however pointed some of the terminology may be, fall within a modern mainstream left. He and others say it is very unclear what may have tipped the individual from such widely held views into an alleged violent plot.
“That’s part of what’s troubling, is when you start to have people who are kind of seemingly normal, law-abiding members of society feeling like violence is the solution,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director and chief vision officer at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, or PERIL, at American University.
“I think there’s a little bit of nihilism reflected here,” Miller-Idriss said. “This idea that there is no more solution, violence is the answer, nothing else is going to change, nothing else is going to be effective.”
The alleged assassination attempt is the latest high-profile data point in a growing environment of political violence in the U.S. over the last decade. While most of that is attributed to the far right, there is alarm about rising violence from the left. Even amidst this backdrop, however, Holt and Miller-Idriss both note that the weekend incident at the Washington Hilton hotel stands out.
For starters, Holt said he’s seen no indication that the defendant was steeped in conspiratorial thinking. He said that more typically, people behind acts of violent extremism are nursing grievances fed by false narratives.
“If you were to just kind of randomly bump into one of these people on the street, you might get the sense that something was a little off,” Holt said. “Whereas this seems — just looking at, you know, this BlueSky profile that’s been attributed to the suspect and this document that’s been attributed to the suspect – I’m not getting that same kind of read.”
In addition, Miller-Idriss said the defendant’s presumed writings suggest that he felt personally responsible for not having taken action sooner against the administration. She said they do not appear intended to incite others to take similar action, or to spread a particular ideological message. The tone is one of “defeatism,” Miller-Idriss said, which contrasts with a more typical pattern of political violence, particularly from the far right.
“I don’t think you usually see the defeatism on the far right, [which is] more of a mobilization of martyrdom, of wanting attention, of wanting to launch a movement, to be a firestarter, that kind of thing,” she said. “This is like a much more hopeless kind of language and rhetoric being used.”
Holt said this tone is troubling, not simply because of how it may connect to the violence that Allen is alleged to have been planning. But also because it may signal that on the left, there may be a growing perception that the levers of democracy can no longer work to effect change.
“That is a bleak point for an individual to get to,” Holt said. “But I also think that people are getting to that point now should be cause for reflection for people who work in politics or who work in advocacy, or whatever it may be, that [with] the many problems that we’re up against today, there is a subset of the American population that’s losing hope and is having a hard time imagining a way out of it.”
Transcript:
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Today federal law enforcement officials arraigned a 31-year-old man on charges that he attempted to assassinate President Trump. The incident took place at the Washington Hilton Hotel on Saturday night, where top administration officials were gathered with journalists for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef has more. Hi, Odette.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: So what are we finding? And what are you finding as you’ve looked into the suspect?
YOUSEF: So the defendant was an educator. He worked with high school kids in Torrance, California. And, you know, Scott, there have been news reports quoting members of his family who say that he was a radical leftist. NPR has not independently confirmed these reports. But these claims were also circulating on social media platforms. And Jared Holt says there’s some dissonance there. He’s with Open Measures, which is a company that tracks online threats and narratives.
JARED HOLT: You know, you’ve seen some of the typical, well, it’s the radical left and their rhetoric. That’s – they need to cool it down. But then you look at the social media profiles that have been attributed to the suspect, and they’re really not that radical.
YOUSEF: You know, also, Scott, you know, President Trump also said on Saturday that some of the writings that the defendant supposedly sent to family members just before the incident revealed that he was, quote, “anti-Christian.” You know, I read these writings and I spoke with others who had, and there’s nothing in it that appears anti-Christian. I think, you know, more surprising to me is that there’s also nothing we found that seems overtly conspiracist.
DETROW: I mean, all of that is kind of alarming in its own way. Tell me more about that.
YOUSEF: Yeah. I mean, many acts of political violence that we’ve seen in this country tie to false narratives, where the conspiracies sometimes push people to act violently by creating a sense of urgency around some supposed crisis. This wasn’t that. You know, yes, he was using terms like rapist or pedophile in reference to the president. But honestly, his content falls into a kind of mainstream left now, Scott. You know, it didn’t show any sign that he might be swimming in radical leftist waters or fixated on violence as a solution to his grievances.
DETROW: How does this latest incident fit with the wider climate we are seeing of political violence in the U.S.?
YOUSEF: Well, over the last decade, Scott, political violence has been increasing, and there’s this question now of how much of it is attributed to the left. The data show that political violence from the left has increased in the last year, but that is from a very low baseline over the last 10 years. And in the last decade, political violence has overwhelmingly been associated with the far right. But look, you know, often perpetrators of political violence actually do not have a coherent political agenda or world view. You know, what’s more usual, Scott, is that they were in the middle of some kind of personal crisis or difficulty.
DETROW: So is there any evidence at this point, at least, of that here?
YOUSEF: We just don’t know yet. You know, I think what’s most troubling about this one, from the people I’ve interviewed, is just this person’s admittedly thin online presence and writings paint a picture of a pretty normal guy with views that are quite common in America. You know, it doesn’t appear that there was any so-called radicalization. And so I think, you know, through the court case, many will be looking for indications of what could have tipped him into an alleged, you know, plan for violence.
DETROW: That is NPR’s Odette Yousef. Thanks so much.
YOUSEF: Thank you.
