The Era of Normie Extremism Is Here

On Saturday night, after Cole Tomas Allen’s alleged attempt to assassinate President Trump and administration officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a familiar ritual began on the internet: compiling a portrait of the shooter, based on the digital breadcrumbs of his online life. Over the past decade, this trail has frequently led to a similar place. The suspect in many cases turned out to be a white man radicalized by spending time in the internet’s dark crevices. Payton Gendron, who killed 10 people in 2022 at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, posted a manifesto that quickly circulated on 4chan, in which he included neo-Nazi imagery and described himself as an “ethno-nationalist.” Before Robert Bowers shot and killed 11 people in 2018 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, he posted bigoted content on the far-right social-media platform Gab.Allen, a tutor who traveled from California to the Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives, according to authorities, does not fit that profile. The 31-year-old had donated $25 to Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. On what appears to be Allen’s Bluesky account, the posts that he has liked tend to be from run-of-the-mill liberal accounts, such as the activist Will Stancil, the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, and the satirical-news website The Onion. He reposted criticism of Hasan Piker, an influential socialist commentator. Many liberals dislike Piker for his positions against Israel, his praise of Chinese-style communism, his remark that “America deserved 9/11” (he later said that he should have used more “precise” language), and his support for petty theft from large corporations.Even Allen’s manifesto, which he reportedly sent to family members before his attack, is a peculiar mix. It includes his stated desire to kill administration officials and potentially anyone who got in his way, which presumably means at least some