Cole Tomas Allen — the 31-year-old CalTech grad who dressed in all black, packed a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives into a bag, and tried to shoot his way into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night — wasn’t just some random lunatic. He was a card-carrying member of a far-left activist collective called “The Wide Awakes.” He attended their “No Kings” protests. He used their brown-eye-emoji symbolism on social media. He donated to Kamala Harris. And then he wrote a manifesto about killing Trump administration officials and checked into the Washington Hilton to do it.
But sure, let’s spend another 72 hours talking about his “mental health struggles.” That always seems to be the diagnosis when the shooter votes Democrat.
Here’s what we know about The Wide Awakes — because the media sure isn’t going to tell you.
The group launched in 2020, founded by a crew of progressive artists including Hank Willis Thomas, Eric Gottesman, José Parlá, and someone who goes by “Wildcat Ebony Brown.” (No, we didn’t make that up.) They operate under the umbrella of Amplifier.org, a left-wing activist organization, and their stated mission is mobilizing “thousands of artists, cultural workers, and activists driven by the most urgent social and political issues of our time.”
Translation: they make protest signs and pretend it’s a revolution.
Their official slogan is “Individually we are asleep, together we are awake.” Which is ironic, because they stole their name from an organization that was founded in 1860 to get Abraham Lincoln elected president. The original Wide Awakes were *Republicans* — young men in kepi hats and capes who marched in torchlight parades to support the party that freed the slaves. The modern version co-opted that name and slapped it on a progressive social justice operation that supports people like Raphael Warnock, Jon Ossoff, and Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action.
They literally stole Republican history and rebranded it as leftist activism. Classic.
Now, here’s where it gets interesting. After Allen was identified as the WHCD shooter, Amplifier rushed out a statement claiming he “has never had any affiliation with our organization.” His own sister told law enforcement he was a member and attended their events. His social media was covered in their imagery. But the parent organization says they’ve never heard of him.
Pop quiz: If a member of the Proud Boys had tried to assassinate a room full of journalists and Democratic officials, would the media accept a one-sentence denial from the group’s website and move on? Would CNN shrug and say, “Well, they say they don’t know him, so case closed”?
We all know the answer. Every Proud Boy member from coast to coast would have FBI agents knocking on their doors by Monday morning. There would be congressional hearings scheduled before lunch. Rachel Maddow would be doing a six-part documentary series with dramatic string music.
But a far-left activist group whose member just tried to shoot his way to the President of the United States? Eh. Nothing to see here, folks.
Let’s talk about Cole Allen himself for a second, because his profile is the scariest part of this whole story. This wasn’t some dropout living in a van. The guy had a mechanical engineering degree from CalTech. He interned at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He earned a master’s in computer science in 2025. He worked as a part-time tutor at C2 Education and was honored as “Teacher of the Month” in December 2024.
Teacher. Of. The. Month.
This is the kind of person who had every advantage in life — elite education, prestigious internships, a career in STEM — and still got radicalized into believing that political violence was the answer. He donated $25 to Kamala Harris through ActBlue. He voted for her and publicly urged others to do the same. He attended “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration. And somewhere along the line, he went from making protest signs to writing a manifesto where he called himself a “friendly federal assassin” and described his plans to target Trump officials.
His sister told Secret Service that he “had a tendency to make radical statements and his rhetoric constantly referenced a plan to do ‘something’ to fix the issues with today’s world.” That’s family-speak for “we all knew he was losing it and nobody did anything.”
But the question nobody in the media wants to ask is this: what role did The Wide Awakes play in that radicalization? What happens inside a group that tells its members the president is a “king” who must be opposed? What does it do to an already unstable person when the activist community around him treats resistance to the government as a moral imperative?
We don’t know — because nobody’s investigating.
Imagine for one second that this story was reversed. Imagine a right-wing group called “The Patriots” or “The Minutemen” had a member who donated to Trump, attended MAGA rallies, wrote a manifesto about killing Democratic officials, and then showed up at a Democratic fundraiser with a shotgun and a bag full of knives. Every single member of that group would be doxxed by Tuesday. Their funding would be traced. Their social media accounts would be archived and analyzed on live television. Congress would hold emergency hearings. The Southern Poverty Law Center would add them to every list they’ve got.
But The Wide Awakes? Amplifier.org is still up and running. Their toolkit for organizing protests is still available for download. Nobody’s asking who funded them. Nobody’s asking how many other Cole Allens are sitting in their network right now, marinating in the same ideology, attending the same “No Kings” events, using the same brown-eye-emoji signals on social media.
The media has decided this story is about one troubled individual. It’s not. It’s about a political movement that told its followers the president is an illegitimate tyrant — and then one of them acted on it.
But we’re not supposed to connect those dots. Connecting dots is only allowed when the shooter is wearing a red hat.