In the months before Cole Allen allegedly attempted to assassinate the president at Saturday evening’s White House Correspondents’ dinner, the 31-year-old teacher and engineer expressed frustration online about the futility of peaceful, left-wing protest and Democratic pushback against Donald Trump.
“Non-violence is going to have to show progress in the very near future,” someone with the username “Coldforce” posted to Bluesky in January, after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal officers in Minneapolis.
In the next post, Coldforce framed political violence as inevitable.
“If I am non-violent, I die, and if I am violent, I die. That’s a dilemma with a Nash equilibrium of violence,” the user posted, referencing a game theory concept of a situation where no individual player can improve their outcome by changing strategy.
Allen maintains social media accounts under the username “Coldforce,” according to the FBI’s criminal indictment. The username also matches the signature the government says Allen attached to an email to family and friends explaining his reasoning for the correspondents’ dinner attack. Biographical details in the posts, including the user’s residence, attendance at two California universities and a background in engineering, also matched Allen’s online resume. The account was removed by Bluesky following the attempted assassination “for violating Bluesky’s policies.” A statement provided by a company spokesperson read in part, “Violence has no place in our public discourse.” The account was first identified by Open Measures, a firm that tracks online threats.
Allen’s ideology, as communicated in the posts, sits firmly on the political left.
Whether he was involved in any leftist organizations remains unclear, but Trump and right-wing media have nonetheless tied Allen’s personal politics to broader, left-wing movements. Asked about a motive following the attempted attack, Trump said peaceful nationwide “No Kings” protests were “the reason you have people like that.” The Justice Department is investigating Allen’s ties to left-wing groups, including “The Wide Awakes,” described by the New York Post as a “shadowy left-wing network,” which his sister reportedly told authorities he was associated with.
Allen’s posts, spanning late 2024 through April 2026, paint a more nuanced and solitary picture of a politically-minded and religious man who supported left-wing causes, but whose faith in peaceful demonstration and mainstream resistance appeared to have collapsed. In nearly a thousand posts, archived by Open Measures and shared with MS NOW, Allen repeatedly named his grievances: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and what he saw as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s control over the Trump administration, the killing of civilians by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the Epstein files, which he treated as proof that Trump was a pedophile.
Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, said Allen’s posts clearly espoused left-wing beliefs, but they lacked a defined extremist ideology.
“He certainly took his cynicism to the logical extreme,” Holt said. “From what it appears, he got more open to the idea that violence was an acceptable — or potentially necessary — form of political engagement.”
In March, Coldforce posted that the war with Iran was an effort to “distract from a pedophile’s incessant crimes,” seemingly referring to Trump.
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That Trump is a pedophile has become a popular — if baseless — narrative for some on the left. On Saturday, Trump responded to those claims in Allen’s alleged writings.
“I’m not a pedophile,” Trump told Norah O’Donnell. “You read that crap from some sick person.”
Saturday’s attack was the third attempt on Trump’s life and the latest in what some researchers have counted as an increase in far-left violence over the past year, including the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Other researchers have disputed the analysis and characterization, noting that the recent uptick in high-profile, left-wing incidents is still dwarfed by decades of plots and attacks motivated by far-right extremism.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has used those examples to justify a broad legal campaign against left-wing organizing, framing protest movements and advocacy groups as terrorist threats, and prosecuting activists and organizations — from loosely defined movements like antifa to established institutions like the Southern Poverty Law Center.
So far, there’s little evidence that Allen was active in any real-world organizations. His sister, Avriana Allen, reportedly told law enforcement officers that her brother attended a “No Kings” protest and was affiliated with “The Wide Awakes.” It’s not clear what group or movement she may have referred to; the abolitionists who marched in support of Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, a more current collective of social-justice-focused artists or events known as noise demonstrations, in which protesters disrupt the sleep and peace of federal agents and officers at hotels in occupied cities.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Monday that they were investigating the reported ties. Trump called Allen “a lone wolf” in an interview on Saturday, but added, “we may find out something else.”
Allen appeared at a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. Monday on charges of attempted assassination of the president, punishable by up to life in prison, and two firearms charges. A detention hearing was set for Thursday.
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.