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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   24869 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Updated news: nobody is dead, one Secret Service agent was wounded and taken to hospital but is okay. Shooter Cole Thomas (I've also seen it spelled 'Tomas') Allen, maybe biracial or mixed race by this photo, allegedly a school teacher in Los Angeles.

Fun part here is that he donated a (very small) amount to Kamala Harris' campaign. I don't think this says anything in particular about Harris, but the shoe is on the other foot here for Democrats.

His work history lists roles as a mechanical engineer at IJK Controls and a teaching assistant at Caltech. He has also worked as a part-time teacher for C2 Education, a company that offers admissions counseling and test preparation services to aspiring college students. A 2024 post on the company's Facebook page listed Allen as the company's teacher of the month. In 2014, Allen participated in a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Allen also posted that he had developed a video game for the Steam platform based on molecular chemistry. A post under Allen's name said he was working to develop a new "top-down shooter" combat game set in outer space.

Allen is also described as a self-employed indie game developer who created games such as "Bohrdom" and "First Law."

Allen contributed $25 to a Democratic Party political action committee in support of Kamala Harris for president in 2024, according to federal campaign finance records.

The attempt seems to be a mixture of well-planned and pure stupid. He checked in as a guest of the hotel, managed to smuggle in guns and knives, then just... charged the security checkpoints with a rifle or shotgun?

Interesting to compare him to the standard psycho political shooter profile of the last few years: smart, weird in an autistic-coded way (whether or not diagnosed), goes to a university of a tier well below his IQ level and doesn't do well there, fails to launch into a PMC career, no female girlfriend.

If he is mixed-race, he is politically Black and eligible for affirmative action on that basis, so the information to date is consistent with "this is a Thomas Crooks type smart autistic loser, except he was affirmative actioned into Caltech so he failed out of life later than Crooks did." His CV looks like a series of short stints at the kind of jobs that Caltech would love to affirmative action a black kid into, consistent with him failing out repeatedly and being given too many second chances.

Anyone want to make odds on him turning out to have a female girlfriend?

What are the odds he's a Mottizen? He's got all the relevant risk factors, even if the absolute risk is low.

Zero. His social media is full of Abolish ICE and Trump is a Nazi slop. If he found his way here, he'd have flamed out faster than a vampire under the noon sun.

Yeah even the obstinate contrarian kinda-Left posters in here would still get Nazi labels from blue sky

Shooter was supposedly active on BlueSky, and frequently replied to Will Stancil. No word yet if he was a supporter of the Stancilwaffen, or one of the people calling Herr Stancil a fascist.

Here's the alleged profile snapshot archived in late March. If that is his profile he seems a fairly average 'resist lib' type on Bluesky with a higher than average (though not unusual) interest in pro-Ukraine messaging for 2026. He recently reposted several Stancil posts without any commentary. Overall his account does not give the impression of someone especially radical when compared to the other million active users on that site.

That's two out of three Trump assassins who were oddly fixated on Ukraine.

Ideas?

If you radically oppose Trump to the point of assassination you probably support Ukraine is the simplest answer. Notable that this guy didn't mention Ukraine as a point of contention in his goodbye letter.

My recollection is the Golf Course guy was was a lifelong criminal and a middle-aged mess who basically went all-in on Ukraine. To such an extent he claimed he was a recruiter for the Foreign Legion which was (contemporaneously?) contested. Unless you subscribe to Ukrainian or CIA approved assassination attempt, in which case they chose him for these qualities. I don't find it at all implausible that a high stakes a major European War provides meaning for an individual such as Golf Course guy-- he'd been draping political identity over himself for well over a decade. Although, he also seems so obviously the type to be susceptible to spooky persuasion that I don't really blame the conspiracists, other than the fact that were Trump to find out we'd definitely hear about it.

For Cole, I don't find his interest as an odd fixation. Lots of people support Ukraine, including myself. Cole's old enough to have absorbed the Russia Collusion brain worms, and apparently politically isolated enough to indulge in them. Ezra Klein types were savvy enough to reconcile with and distance themselves from the Russia Collusion when the Time to Move On came. A 31 year old California blue-geek, along with the rest of Bluesky for that matter, don't have to reconcile anything. They go on living in perpetual 2017. It is not good.

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