Came back late last night, and I am tired. So this is loaded into the scheduler thingie. LOL
I thought Mr. Wood did a pretty good job 'splaining things. so I shamelessly clipped it off farcebook.
THE MACHINE THAT MADE THEM
Political Violence, the Folk Heroes, the Comments,
and the Record They Don't Want You to Read
From Confusion to Clarity
April 26, 2026
Last night I posted two updates about the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Together they have been shared more than 2,000 times. I have not had time to respond to the many kind and thoughtful comments, and I want to say to those readers first: thank you. You saw something ugly happen to your country and you responded with prayer, with moral clarity, and with the kind of decency that makes me feel encouraged that our great Republic has many Americans who will stand and fight for what is right.
I hope to thank more of you. But first I need to deal with some other comments. Because they are the story.
I also posted a pretty long essay this morning (always fun to read the "TLDR" and "War and Peace" comments) that I will link in the comments here and not rehash here, but the material is rich and the arguments I think are vital to a dangerous moment we are in as Americans.
I want to start with something simple before I get to the manifesto, the video footage my liberal friends swore to me did not exist, the murder that became a cultural celebration, and the data that no one in the mainstream press will assemble for you in one place.
I am raising sons. When they hit each other, I do not accept the justification. Almost every time, one of them has a version of the same argument: he was mocking me. He gave me a mean look. He started it. My answer is always the same. You are responsible for what you chose to do with your hands. A look does not excuse a fist. A word does not excuse a shove. You do not get to transfer the responsibility for your own actions onto the person who provoked you, because the moment you accept that logic there is no floor. Every act of violence becomes defensible as long as you felt sufficiently provoked first.
By the time my boys pass thirteen, they understand this.
My sons also know that murder is wrong. Not, "complicated," wrong. Not situationally wrong depending on whether the target deserved it. Wrong. Full stop. They know that the righteousness of your grievance does not transform what you do with a weapon into something other than what it is. And they know they are responsible for their own choices regardless of what the other person did first.
I want to introduce you to a great many adults who have not gotten there yet.
These appeared under my posts last night. Real names. Real photographs. Employers listed in bios. Children in profile pictures.
Justin Hegedusic: "Cole Tomas Allen is a real american patriot."
Bradley Lozekar: "Hopefully the next one is successful."
Rodney Brisebois: "why cant these shooters shoot better."
Chris Hand: "What a pity he didn't succeed."
Bernardicus Brunet: "Not cheering for assassination, but I admit I've got Champagne in the fridge for that wonderful day when the Grim Reaper comes for this evil man."
Megan Rios: "Unfortunately he is still alive and well."
Rob Gee: "feel sorry for those poor servicemen and women who have to put their lives on the line for that piece of excrement. as for why 3 attempts, trump is now reaping what he sowed."
Then a second group, who did not celebrate but dismissed:
Phil Carlson: "Obviously staged."
Mark Campbell: "Come on Clayton, everyone can see they have all been staged and you have been stooged."
Joey Phillipo: "Another STAGED EVENT........nice try GOP."
Charmaine Belbin: "CAN ANYONE SAY ANOTHER FAKE STAGED."
Sheila Keppler: "Is this just another publicity stunt of Trumps!"
And Mike Fitz, who offered what he believed was a logical argument: "Trump mocks everyone he does not like that have died so who cares if people who don't like Trump mock him?"
I want to respond to these comments seriously, because they deserve a serious answer.
To the celebrators: One Secret Service agent took a real bullet. His vest held. He went home to a real family. The man who fired that weapon wrote a ranked target list before he arrived at the hotel. He designated Cabinet officials as primary targets by seniority. He chose buckshot over slugs to reduce collateral damage to hotel staff he considered innocent. He considered the agent he shot a potential acceptable casualty in a righteous mission.
Cole Tomas Allen is not a patriot. He is a man who was told, by voices with credentials and platforms and Senate seats, that the people in that hotel were not merely wrong but evil, not merely political opponents but existential threats who needed to be eliminated. He took those voices at their word. The distance between the rhetoric and the target list is shorter than the people who built the rhetoric want to acknowledge.
To Bernardicus Brunet specifically: You wrote that you are not cheering for assassination. Then you described the champagne waiting in your refrigerator for the day the President of the United States dies. I want you to sit with that sentence. You have pre celebrated the death of a human being. You have a bottle chilling for it. You do not consider this cheering for assassination because you have decided the target does not qualify for the moral protections you extend to other human beings. That decision, that act of reclassification, is precisely the mechanism that produced Cole Allen's target list. He also decided the people in that hotel had forfeited their moral standing. The only difference between you and him is that he acted on it and you are waiting for someone else to do so.
To Mike Fitz: Your argument is that Trump mocks people who die, so mockery of his near death is acceptable. I raised this argument with my sons when they were in elementary school. It did not survive contact with basic reasoning then either. The standard you apply to others applies to you. If mocking the deaths of political opponents is wrong when Trump does it, it is wrong when you do it. If it is acceptable when you do it, you have just extended that permission to everyone, including people whose targets you care about. The logic has no floor and no loyalty. It will not stay on your side when the power shifts.
To the staged crowd: A Secret Service agent took a real bullet. If the event was staged, the staging required a real bullet, fired at a real agent, who survived because a real vest absorbed it. At what point does the staging theory require you to believe the United States government is shooting its own protective personnel to generate sympathy for a president? The staged argument is not a theory. It is a way of not having to feel anything. It is the same emotional function as the champagne in the fridge, arrived at from the opposite direction. Both groups found a way to be comfortable. Neither group had to reckon with what actually happened.
It also shows just deranged and deluded folks are. A 31 year old in California was in a long con to pretend to kill Trump? He got on bluesky and posted knowing he was part of a glorious plot to get a ballroom built that is already being built? Some folks are exposing their wickedness, but many more are exposing their foolishness.
Before Saturday night, Cole Tomas Allen wrote it down.
He wrote down who he planned to kill, in what order, and why he felt entitled to kill them. He designated Cabinet officials as primary targets, prioritized from highest to lowest rank. He designated Secret Service agents as targets only if necessary, and expressed genuine hope that they were wearing vests, because in his words, center mass with shotguns messes up people who are not. He described the dinner attendees as complicit because they chose to attend a speech by someone he called a pedophile, a rapist, and a traitor.
He thought it through. He prioritized. He showed mercy to hotel employees and guests. He chose buckshot over slugs to reduce penetration through walls.
This was not a man who snapped. This was a man who planned.
Cole Tomas Allen is thirty one years old. He is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology. He is a teacher. He brought a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives to the Washington Hilton, shot a Secret Service agent who survived because of his vest, and was taken into custody.
He will spend a very long time in federal prison.
But Cole Allen did not arrive at that hotel lobby from nowhere. He was formed. And the people who formed him are not in prison. They are on television. They are important political elected officials and leaders. They have tenure.
Part Three: The Video They Said Did Not Exist
I want to address something personal, because it happened in the last six months and it illustrates the broader disease with precision.
Alex Pretti is dead. He was shot by federal agents in Minneapolis, and the circumstances of that shooting remain genuinely contested. I want to be honest about that. Whether the manner of his death was justified is a legitimate legal question that has not been resolved to my satisfaction, and the agents involved were placed on administrative leave. I am a lawyer. I do not make categorical arguments about police or federal shootings.
What I will tell you is what happened before the shooting, because my liberal friends were texting me in real time to assure me it did not happen.
They told me that Alex Pretti was a sheepdog and that ICE were the wolves. That he was a peaceful man, just protecting women with his chivalry.
Video authenticated by the Associated Press, PBS, Snopes, and multiple other outlets shows Alex Pretti at a Minneapolis protest eleven days before his death. He is seen spitting toward the driver's side of a federal vehicle. As it drives away, he delivers two kicks, the second of which shatters the taillight and leaves it dangling. He shouts an expletive at the officers. When agents exit the vehicle and take him to the ground, a handgun is visible in his waistband, though he does not reach for it and agents did not appear to see it.
The first video, my friends told me, only showed him defending a woman who was blowing a whistle in the ears of officers. They did not categorize blowing a whistle directly into someone's ears to cause pain as assault. They called it legitimate protest. Alex Pretti intervening physically and then spitting on the vehicle and kicking out the taillight was, in their telling, a righteous response to federal aggression.
That is not a legal argument. It is not a moral argument. It is the same logic my sons use before I explain to them why it fails. You cannot designate your own provocation threshold as the standard for when violence becomes acceptable. The moment you do, you have handed yourself permission for anything.
The people who told me Pretti did not do what the video shows were wrong. Some of them knew they were wrong. And that willingness to look at authenticated footage and deny it in service of a political narrative is not a minor problem. It is the same mechanism that produces Cole Allen's rules of engagement document. Both require you to have already decided that your side's violence is a different category of act than their side's violence.
Saint Alex Pretti is a fiction that can only exist in the minds of those who are deeply deluded. You can share with me real concerns about his shooting. You cannot say he was murdered for protesting. He was somehow allowed to attack police while armed once, and sadly that seems to have given him boldness to do it again in a way that cost him his life.
Part Four: Luigi Mangione and the Folk Hero Problem
In December 2024, Luigi Mangione shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back outside a Manhattan hotel in the early morning. Thompson was ambushed. He had no chance to respond or flee. Mangione had planned the killing, traveled to execute it, and prepared a manifesto. His diary entries, obtained by prosecutors, show he studied the Unabomber and deliberately chose a target he believed would generate public sympathy rather than revulsion. He was charged with first degree murder.
He was right about the sympathy.
His legal defense fund raised nearly 1.4 million dollars. He received nearly 6,000 letters of support in prison. Billboard trucks in New York City carried the slogan "Free Luigi." Murals appeared in Seattle. UnitedHealthcare was forced to turn off Facebook comments after a post about Thompson's death received more than 36,000 laughing reactions.
The polling on this needs to be stated carefully, because I want to be precise and not overstate it. Overall, Americans view Mangione unfavorably by 43 to 23 percent. But among adults under 30, the numbers reverse: 39 percent view him favorably, 30 percent unfavorably, with a large share having no opinion either way.
Among Americans 65 and older, the split is 5 percent favorable and 63 percent unfavorable. A separate Emerson College poll found that 41 percent of adults under 30 considered the killing of Brian Thompson acceptable, compared to 40 percent who considered it unacceptable. Among Democrats overall, 22 percent found it acceptable, compared to 16 percent of independents and 12 percent of Republicans.
If you are reading this as a Republican and wondering if the woke right, the racists, the incels, the groypers are real? Look at that sentence above again. 12 percent of Republicans in that age range support the cowardly murder of an executive. We need to get them deprogrammed as quickly as possible, and the big tent is not big enough to allow them to stay in it as they are.
Older Americans find this incomprehensible. They are right to. But before they settle too comfortably into that incomprehension, they should remember that some of them were young once and found the Weather Underground romantic rather than criminal or thought the group that kidnapped Patty Hearst was striking a blow for justice.
This is not new. Bill Ayers planted bombs. He told the New York Times on September 11, 2001, that he had no regrets and wished his group had done more. Barack Obama launched his political career in Ayers' living room. The media shrugged. Susan Rosenberg, connected to multiple bombings including of the United States Capitol, had her sentence commuted by Bill Clinton. She later served on the board of a fiscal sponsor connected to Black Lives Matter. Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of murdering a police officer, became a cause for the American left. Che Guevara, a man who participated in mass executions, appears on dorm room posters and college t-shirts without controversy.
The left's relationship with political violence has never fully separated itself from the logic that some violence, directed at the right enemies, is righteous. Mangione is the latest version of a very old pattern. He is a cold blooded murderer. He ambushed and killed a man in the back on a public street. And to a significant and vocal portion of the American population, he is a hero.
What is new is that nobody hides it anymore. There are murals. There is merchandise. There are 6,000 letters. The shame that once made this sentiment private has been removed. And that removal did not happen by accident. It happened through years of telling a generation that certain people have so thoroughly forfeited their moral standing that celebrating what happens to them is not violence. It is accountability.
Cole Allen applied that framework Saturday night with a different target set. The logic was identical.
Part Five: The Protest Record
People can cite surveys all day. I want to talk about what actually happened, with real crowds, in the real world, over real decades.
The March for Life has been held in Washington every year since 1974. It regularly draws hundreds of thousands of participants. I have greatly enjoyed taking part both locally and in DC. Across more than fifty years of marches, the arrest record is effectively zero.
Promise Keepers filled stadiums throughout the 1990s. The 1997 Stand in the Gap assembly brought between 600,000 and one million men to the National Mall. Arrest record: zero.
Tea Party rallies from 2009 through 2012 drew millions of participants across thousands of events nationwide. Tea Party demonstrators were documented leaving venues cleaner than they found them. Local law enforcement in city after city confirmed no significant incident history.
Now look at the other column.
BLM associated protests in the summer of 2020 produced property damage assessed at between one and two billion dollars, making it the costliest period of civil unrest in American insurance history. At least twenty five people died in connection with the unrest. More than two thousand law enforcement officers were injured. In Portland, rioters took to the streets for more than one hundred consecutive nights.
Occupy Wall Street encampments documented assault, rape, and drug distribution within the camps. Multiple cities documented extensive property damage during evictions.
The comparison is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of kind. And the same media that described 2020 as "mostly peaceful protests" applied the word "insurrection" to January 6th, where no protester carried a firearm and no sustained occupation occurred.
If the standard were applied honestly, only one conclusion is possible. It is never applied honestly. That tells you something important about who sets the standard and why.
Part Six: The Data They Won't Put Together for You
In October 2025, liberal commentator Mike Pesca hosted Dartmouth researcher Brendan Nyhan to push back on what they saw as inflated polling numbers about support for political violence. Nyhan's critique of some survey methodologies is legitimate scholarship. Some of the rougher headline numbers deserve skepticism.
But notice what Pesca's corrective conclusion was. After all of it, after examining all the data, his solution was: Democrats should win more at the polls.
That is the corrective. Not: the years of rhetoric calling Trump a fascist war criminal who must be eliminated have produced actual human beings with actual guns. Not: the institutions that normalized calling a sitting president insane, dangerous, and an existential threat to democracy bear examination. The corrective, in his telling, is: Democrats should win more.
He does not see the loop he is standing inside. He is not alone in the pundit and commentary and journalist class.
Here is what the more careful data actually shows.
A PBS/NPR/Marist poll found that nearly a third of Americans believe political violence may be necessary to set the country on track, up from 19 percent just a year and a half prior, with Democrats driving much of the increase.
Brookings Institution researcher Dana Fisher, tracking actual participants at No Kings Day protests, found that support for political violence among left leaning Americans rose nine percentage points to 26 percent, while support among right leaning Americans fell twelve points to 17 percent. Left leaning Americans now show higher support for political violence than right leaning Americans. That is Brookings. It is not a talking point.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that 2025 marks the first time in more than thirty years that left wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right. Those numbers themselves were absurd. They counted all the white prison gangs as "right wing" so they could claim that right wingers were the biggest threat to America. That FBI under Biden with that claim, stopped a total of zero attempts to assassinate him. That followed 8 years of Obama, where zero attempts were made to assassinate him.
And Nyhan's own Bright Line Watch survey found that 2 percent of expert academic respondents described Charlie Kirk's assassination as a benefit to democracy. Fourteen academics, people shaping the minds of American students, looked at a man being shot dead and said: that helped us. That same survey ranked thirteen Trump administration policy actions as greater threats to democracy than Kirk's actual murder.
These are the people forming the next generation. These are the credentialed voices telling young Americans that political opponents are not just wrong but evil, not just mistaken but dangerous, not just people to be defeated at the ballot but existential threats requiring elimination.
Cole Allen was listening. He took them at their word.
Part Seven: The Hat. The Double Standard. The Formation.
A not insignificant number of Americans have now decided that certain symbols worn by private citizens in public constitute a form of provocation serious enough to shift moral responsibility for any resulting violence.
Find me the videos of people attacked for wearing Biden hats. Find me the keyed Subarus. Find me the conservative mobs surrounding cars at intersections because of bumper stickers.
Now find the footage of people attacked, surrounded, and physically beaten for wearing a hat in support of a president who won with over seventy seven million votes. It is not hard. There are hours of it.
If you are a moderate Democrat, a classical liberal (Lockean liberal describes me in many ways) and you think left wing violence is exaggerated by me, I urge you to do some field work. I do not own one, but I bet I can help you find a red MAGA hat without paying for it to wear to a meeting of the left soon. Let me know how that goes for you.
Senator Chris Murphy, who called the President an insane war criminal, posted "Awesome" in response to Iranian propaganda during active American combat operations, and then threatened to use government power to break up media companies for their editorial choices, has faced no censure motion, no front page demands for accountability, no roundtable on whether his rhetoric is producing the Cole Allens of the world.
Trump said to march "peacefully and patriotically". That sentence was buried by nearly every outlet that covered his January 6th speech that was used as the basis for two impeachment proceedings and a federal criminal indictment.
The standard was never about rhetoric. The standard was always about which side was speaking.
Part Eight: The Honest Reckoning
None of this is an argument that there is no violence on the right, or that no Trump supporter has ever done something terrible, or that every conservative comment section is a model of civil discourse.
I said as much in "The Violence Standard" (see comments), and I mean it.
The honest argument is simpler. The comments I showed you at the top of this piece appeared under my posts about the attempted murder of the President of the United States. They appeared under real names. The people who wrote them did not consider it necessary to be anonymous, to be careful, or to soften their language. One of them has champagne chilling. One of them wants to know why the shooters cannot aim better.
That comfort, that openness, that complete absence of shame, is the story. Not the number of people who feel this way. Not the survey percentage. The fact that they do not think they need to hide it.
Someone built that. Someone told them that the targets of their feelings had forfeited the protections that ordinary human beings receive. Someone did it with credentials, with camera time, with Senate seats and years of sustained institutional repetition.
Cole Allen was listening. He took them at their word. He wrote it down and drove to a hotel.
That is the thing that should force circumspection and a moral reckoning. Not that one Caltech graduate from Torrance, California brought three weapons to a hotel lobby. But that the cultural infrastructure which forms men like him, celebrates men like Mangione, watches authenticated video of Alex Pretti kicking a federal vehicle and calls it legitimate protest, and greets each new assassination attempt with either silence or satisfaction, is sitting in full public view, credentialed and verified, and much of America and our moral and political leadership does not treat it as the emergency it is.
Cole Allen is in custody.
Luigi Mangione is awaiting trial.
Alex Pretti is dead.
The machine that made all three of them is still running.
Name it. Link The Violence Standard in your feed. Use your real name when you do. And do not let them change the subject again.
They are right there in the comment section. Under real names. With the champagne already cold.
Clayton Wood
From Confusion to Clarity
April 27, 2026
