By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
On Saturday, a heavily armed lunatic attempted to
gate-crash the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington, D.C.,
Hilton, while the president and most of his senior administration were in
attendance. Cole Allen — the gunman, whose name sounds like a shoe brand from
the racks at Payless — was thankfully tackled by Secret Service agents almost
instantly after he dashed past the first layer of security, and although he
fired several shots, nobody was killed. (One agent was clipped in his bulletproof
vest, but his gear kept him safe.)
A potential atrocity was instantly prevented. The most
memorable image from Saturday’s WHCD will not be one of blood, or tears, or
spectacularly televised violence; it will be that of a naked, hog-tied Cole Allen kissing the carpet as he lies
prone with a Mylar blanket draped over his raggedy hindquarters to hide his
shame. (Police had stripped him to search for weapons.)
I would have let him lie there myself, but then again,
Allen exposed himself in a far funnier way: with his ridiculously cocksure
manifesto, written in eager anticipation of a massacre. Leave aside for a
moment (but only for a moment) the fact that Allen seems to have been deeply
affected by Bluesky-like progressive rhetoric in labeling Trump and his
administration a bunch of Epstein-associated rapist pedophiles. Instead,
breathe a sigh of relief at the fact that this man was undone in the most
Zoomer way possible — by his own unearned and undeserved belief in himself.
I don’t normally like to reprint the crazed words of
would-be mass shooters, but I can make an exception this time because (1)
nobody got seriously hurt and (2) some things simply must be clowned on. Allow
me to quote from what was clearly meant as both a manifesto and a farewell note:
Like, the one thing that I
immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.
I walk in with multiple weapons
and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a
threat.
The security at the event is all
outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one
thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.
Like, this level of incompetence
is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country
gets actually competent leadership again.
Now, go back one more time and enjoy that photograph of
Allen naked and hog-tied on the floor. Savor the superb irony of this premature
victory dance: Allen was so smugly certain that he had “fooled” security and
was going to cause mass slaughter that he took the time to add a lengthy
postscript to his note, lecturing the Secret Service about doing their jobs.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service took him alive and unharmed without a single
casualty. What was that you were saying about “levels of incompetence” again,
Cole?
The Left Remains Averse to Honesty
Jim Geraghty wrote an excellent piece on Monday morning, zeroing in on
the inevitable “narrative wars” sure to be pursued by Democrats in the
aftermath of the shooting: Was it “staged?” What were the shooter’s political
affiliations? Isn’t this really all the fault of Trump or the Republican Party
somehow, despite the fact that they were the targets?
What we do know, however, is that the shooter was a
progressive who hung out at Bluesky, and he seems to have been radicalized into
committing violence by the panic and apocalypticism common in such spaces. In
his manifesto, he accused Trump of being a pedophile — clearly echoing years of
careless Democratic rhetoric — and labeled his administration’s members as
targets. He intended to kill them in order of importance, and it’s fairly
obvious who ranked first. (Only Kash Patel, bizarrely and hilariously, was to
be spared. Patel has enough problems as is and probably didn’t need this
“blessing” from the shooter.)
It is desperately tiresome to watch the left disown the
shooter while it refuses to acknowledge how freely insults and claims like
“Trump may be a pedophile rapist” have flowed from leftists’ mouths. It
has gotten to the point where that specific line — as a phrase of casual abuse
— has simply dissolved into the ocean of political rhetoric in which we float
nowadays. I don’t want to rehash the “stochastic terrorism” debate here: I am a
First Amendment supporter, after all, and find any attempt to criminalize
speech (and politics) to be abhorrent.
But there is little to say in favor of a wild, reckless
lie intended to inflame. There are many out there who, because of the E. Jean
Carroll case, consider it acceptable to call Trump a “rapist.” (I think that
case was a pile of lies, but I’m giving leftists the benefit of the doubt
here.) By contrast, there is not one responsible commentator in America who
believes that Trump is a pedophile. It is simply a term that, when employed by
those who should know better, is done as a nasty little splash of rhetorical
tar, a jab with a sharp stick to bait the bear. Most people who hate Trump know
it isn’t true — it just feels good to hurl such a nasty accusation.
But fringe types — and the nature of online discourse
tends to select for fringe types — take such charges absolutely seriously. And
now we see where that line of rhetoric can lead. It might have seemed like an
easy play to make hay out of the Trump administration’s cack-handed fumbling of
the Epstein files and squeeze whatever possible marginal electoral advantage
out of it — as they say, politics ain’t beanbag. But we should have known that
in the modern era, madmen can be easily stirred with fantasy narratives: How
quickly some have forgotten about Pizzagate.
On the bright side, nobody’s talking about the Strait of
Hormuz anymore.
Russell Brand, Yours in Christ
Russell Brand was once a professional comedian and actor.
Then Russell Brand was criminally accused of the rape and sexual assault of four
women. Now, as he faces the prospect of imprisonment for a life of sexual
misdeeds — on Megyn Kelly’s show earlier this month, he confessed to having slept with a 16-year-old, and that one hasn’t even been
charged — Brand has become a vocal Christian. (People change, after all. To
quote Brand in his own defense: “I did sleep with a 16-year-old when I was 30,
but when I was 30 I was a different person.”)
Why, Brand is so sincere about how Christ has saved his
soul — after a lifetime of proudly hedonistic and aggressively ideological
atheism — that he has written a book about it! It’s published by Tucker
Carlson’s new imprint, surely a trademark of quality if ever there was one,
and it’s called How to Become a Christian in 7 Days. That sounds like a
land speed record to me — my confirmation process took months back when I was a
kid — but, as Samuel Johnson said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a
fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Brand has even begun carrying a Bible around with him to
public appearances, including in court. He has been seen leafing through it
prominently, almost as if he’s doing it for the cameras. Perhaps Brand thinks
he is being observed. (He is. God is watching.)
Do I doubt him? That would be uncharitable of me. I’m
pleased to see Brand’s whirlwind conversion. (One more soul saved — the mission
continues!) But I do hope he catches himself up a bit on the doctrine, and —
especially for a Protestant like me — the Good Book itself. Because it seems he
is as familiar with what it contains as an Andaman
Islander.
Brand was on Piers Morgan’s show Uncensored last
week, appearing in his own self-defense. The sit-down ran for about an hour,
and I can’t imagine subjecting myself to the entire ordeal. But if you have any
capacity for psychological pain (or if you enjoy cringe comedy), you should
watch this two-minute clip, in which Morgan simply asks Brand to open
the Bible he is carrying with him and pick a passage — any passage — that means
something to him. For a full minute and a half, Brand rustles through a
book known for its quotability and comes up blank. Morgan sits there in
silence, letting the scene play out — he glances at the camera once with a
knowing shrug, a bit like Jim Halpert from The Office. (Whoever in the
sound booth mic’ed up those turning pages for maximum “crinkle” effect is a
comic genius.)
I can certainly draw my own conclusions about the depth
and seriousness of Brand’s faith. Others are free to do the same. In the
meantime, I heartily recommend that he get started on those readings! There’s
lots of meaning to be found in those pages. You don’t even have to start with
the Old Testament if you find all that Mosaic law musty and irrelevant. Why,
here’s a real banger from the Gospel of Matthew, just to start: Many
will say to me in that day . . . Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? . .
. And then will I profess unto them: “I never knew you.”
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