What Do All These Political Attacks Have in Common?

A degree proves that you finished something. It doesn't prove that you can think. The cases below make that point better than I ever could. One thing the above shows us is something we already know. Allen was a multi- degree person in highly technical fields. He had mental ability, at least insofar as being able to absorb what he learned. Trouble was what he was taught outside the classroom.

Allen is from Torrance, Calif., just about 20 miles out of Los Angeles. Here’s someone who spent his whole life literally steeped in California's infamously leftist politics. Prior to his initial appearance on the world stage (naked, hogtied, and face down on the carpet of the Washington Hilton), he lived with his parents, using his degree in computer science to write video games, which, as best I can determine, he never sold. He was also a part-time teacher in mechanical engineering, where his work was respected and rewarded. His students reported they saw none of what was apparently going on under the skin. The supposed experts who reviewed his public postings on that platform also claim there was nothing in his postings that they considered “radical." (I don't know. Might we consider that the reason they didn't pick up on the issues he has was that they, too, have spent their lives in the leftist bubble of California?)

Out here in the real world, the postings, the electronic record of his mental demise, that the experts supposedly reviewed and found no problems with, showed a steady march toward violence — comparing Trump to Hitler, urging others to arm themselves, promoting the theory that the Butler, Pa., assassination attempt had been staged. Every line item came straight from the leftist book of holy chants. It seems obvious to me that he was as successful at learning what they were teaching on Bluesky as he was in his computer science classes.

His case to me seems emblematic of something I've long been concerned about. Look at the people who've latched onto left-wing rhetoric hard enough to pick up a weapon and go after Donald Trump. Study them closely. What you'll find, almost without exception, is a common thread — and it isn't ideology. It's mental collapse dressed up as politics. Let's look closely at a few.

Thomas Matthew Crooks was the one on the roof in Butler in July 2024. The FBI initially cleared him of any mental health concerns. That conclusion didn't hold. His father told investigators that he'd watched his son come apart in the months before the shooting — talking to himself, dancing alone in his bedroom in the middle of the night. Crooks had been researching major depressive disorder and the Oxford High School massacre. He kept a photo of that shooter on his phone. Congressional investigators called it a "descent into madness" — a quiet engineering student who became a focused killer by degrees. To this day, no official motive has ever been established. That probably tells you everything. When the mind breaks down this completely, motive isn't really the point, because, of course, there’s a shortage of hats on Mars, it’s killing Martians, and it’s all Donald Trump’s fault. Besides, to assign politics as a motive wouldn't look good, come the next election.

Ryan Wesley Routh also didn't hide his instability. The world simply wasn't paying attention. Routh was the one crouched in the bushes at Trump's West Palm Beach, Fla., golf course, waiting for a clean shot, until the Secret Service spotted his gun barrel sticking out of the bushes. His history made the warning signs impossible to miss — had anyone bothered to look.

Prior to his hiding in the bushes, he showed up in Ukraine with no military experience and promised to deliver armies of foreign recruits. Ukrainian military officers didn't just turn him away. They called his ideas "delusional" and discussed banning him from the country entirely. A travel nurse who encountered him in Ukraine reported him directly to the FBI, calling him "a threat to others" and "a ticking time bomb." The FBI had been warned. It did nothing. When the guilty verdict came in at trial, Routh tried to stab himself with a pen. His own attorney argued for leniency on the basis of his mental state. The system had this man in its crosshairs long before he had Trump in his. But nobody pulled the trigger, so to speak.

Another case: James Thomas Hodgkinson was the one who shot up the congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Va., in June 2017, nearly killing Steve Scalise. Oddly, Scalise was in the audience the other night at the Washington Hilton. Hodgkinson's mental unraveling didn't happen overnight — it was a slow-motion collapse fueled by political obsession, which was in turn fed by a constant flow of leftist dogma.

People who knew him from the Bernie Sanders campaign described him as quiet, mellow, and reserved. Most of you will take working the Sanders campaign as an indicator, and I can't say I blame you. Political correctness, however, prevents us from saying anything when we see such indications.  And then there's the issue I've already raised: The left equally drove the people who surrounded him. 

Then November 2016 happened. The election broke something in him that never healed. By late 2016 he had stopped working, fallen into financial distress, and was telling family members in vague terms that they might not see him again. He spent hours every day marinating in social media. What followed was methodical. 

He took a concealed carry class. Said his goodbyes. Left his wife in Illinois. Drove to Washington supposedly to "protest." Then spent two months casing that baseball field, waiting for his moment. He arrived that morning with a list of six Republican congressmen. Every warning sign was there. Nobody connected the dots.

Related: When Does Speech Become Dangerous?

Then there's Tyler James Robinson — the 22-year-old from Washington, Utah, who murdered Charlie Kirk. Robinson admitted as much to his roommate and romantic partner, Lance Twiggs. I've covered both men before, so I'll keep this brief: a relative described Twiggs and Robinson as exceptionally intelligent, pointing to Twiggs' career as a concert pianist. Like Cole Allen, Twiggs chased a professional gaming career. He also identified as transgender — a pattern I've addressed before in connection with mass killings. The relationship between Twiggs and Robinson is quite revealing, I think. 

Now, let’s address someone else whom a lot of the left praises as a hero: Luigi Mangione. He’s the guy in the masthead picture. He's also the one who considered his murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson to be heroic. People who knew him described him as an "intelligent, reserved, nice kid." He was born into wealth, had access to an elite education, a strong support system, and an upbringing free from the hardships that you might expect would lead to the act of cold-blooded murder. How many times have we heard the cry that poverty causes this level of violence? That wasn’t true here.

He is an Ivy League graduate and high school valedictorian with a seemingly stellar reputation, and yet here he is with a gun in his hand, killing a healthcare CEO. He had been unreachable by family and friends for months. His mother called the police, reporting him as unstable, weeks before the shooting.

Mangione fits the same pattern as the others — outwardly high-functioning, quietly disintegrating, and completely off the radar until the moment where (bang, bang!) he wasn't. The difference is that where Crooks and Routh showed classic signs of mental breakdown, Mangione's collapse was wrapped in an ideology that made millions of people online cheer for him. Forbes Magazine observed at the time that:

Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has become a folk hero to some on social media. Posts have overlooked the fact that Mangione has been accused of killing a husband and father on a Manhattan street.

Since his arrest in Pennsylvania earlier this week, Luigi Mangione has been the subject of memes, which have lionized his physique and appearance. One viral post, which has already received millions of views, showed the late James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano from the hit HBO series with the caption, "In this house, Luigi Mangione is a hero, end of story."

What ties all of these people together? 

By today's standards, every one of them qualifies as a typical left-wing Democrat. Some would call them mainstream Democrats — and I won't argue the point. That alone tells us something damning: As a nation, we're sitting on a mental health crisis that runs far deeper than the handful of names I've cited here. Every one of them was of high intelligence,  but in the end, also had rather large mental issues to match their intelligence. Every one of them fell prey, to one degree or another, to the leftist echo chamber.

In each case, the left went well out of it's way to control the narrative involving these people, either outright defending them, or holding their silence hoping it'll all blow over.

Oh, and don't blame social media or the lapdogs in the legacy media alone. I'd wager that Cole Allen laughed out loud at Jimmy Kimmel's crack about Melania Trump looking like an expectant widow.

One of my axioms is that solving a problem requires proper identification of that problem.

Two things fall out of all of this.

• We're never going to talk them out of their support for the donkey, since you can't talk people out of a political position using logic when, in their insanity, they didn't arrive at that support by logical means in the first place, and
• We're in worse trouble than we realized as a people.