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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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An unknown assassin has attempted to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. One person is dead. President Trump is unharmed. The disposition of the assassin is unknown.

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.

could only have been a lurker, he doesn't have the posting style.

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