Cole Tomas Allen, the man suspected of opening fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington D.C. on Saturday, April 26, had previously used social media to encourage transgender individuals to purchase firearms — posting a CNN article about the Trump DOJ’s investigation into the link between transgenderism and mass violence, with the caption urging followers that the time to buy a gun was “today.”
Allen, a 2017 mechanical engineering graduate of the California Institute of Technology, sent an anti-Trump manifesto to a family member in the minutes before the shooting. The manifesto mocked Christianity — specifically the concept of “turning the other cheek” — framing political violence as a justified response to perceived oppression. Allen wrote that passivity in the face of injustice done to others is “not Christian behavior” but rather “complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”
The CNN article Allen had shared on Bluesky was published in September 2025 and discussed the DOJ’s examination of potential measures to restrict firearm ownership by transgender-identifying individuals following a mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic church carried out by a transgender-identifying 23-year-old. The Trump administration had already flagged a pattern of transgender-connected mass violence incidents as warranting federal investigation.
The pattern here is impossible to dismiss. The Trump administration began investigating a documented link between transgender ideology and mass violence. A man steeped in transgender activism responded by encouraging his followers to arm themselves and then allegedly showed up with a gun outside one of Washington’s most high-profile events. The left spent years insisting there was no connection between radical gender ideology and violence. This latest shooting dispels this falsehood once and for all.
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