It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: White House Correspondents Shooting, Voting Rights Act

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

The gang discuss the attempted assassination at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, confusion over who shot a Secret Service agent, the politics of the alleged shooter, and the conspiracy theories about the attack. Also, news of the Supreme Court's undermining of the Voting Rights Act, and a 2nd Circuit Court ruling against ICE mandatory detention. Sources: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28083136/allen.pdf  https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/04/29/congress/section-702-passes-house-00899071 https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/atf-launches-new-era-reform https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-indicts-former-fbi-director-james-comey-threats-harm-president-trump https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/28/media/fcc-kimmel-disney-abc-trump-licenses https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/business/media/david-ellison-trump-cbs-news.html https://www.maine.gov/governor/mills/news/governor-mills-announces-decision-ld-307-2026-04-24 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp846668401o https://www.ukmto.org/recent-incidents#fae0af84-bd4a-4a4d-86d0-cb7166ef4691 https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/lithium-eastern-states-could-replace-imports-a-century-or-more https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116474434041424846 https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/governor-sinaloa-and-nine-other-current-and-former-mexican-officials-charged-drug https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf https://www.npr.org/2026/04/30/nx-s1-5805050/supreme-court-voting-rights-congressional-black-caucus https://www.linkedin.com/in/cole-allen-003804b7/ https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_name=cole+allen&contributor_zip=90501 https://x.com/MAGAVoice/status/2048180791356821988?s=20 https://www.timemachine.eu/study-on-quality-in-3d-digitisation-of-tangible-cultural-heritage/ https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150004067 https://x.com/infolibnews/status/2048222643237601457?s=20 https://x.com/aishahhasnie/status/2048274579043336397 https://x.com/TheRealJChubby/status/2048513664286924938?s=20 https://x.com/BonkDaCarnivore/status/2048220342678597688?s=20 https://ww3.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/OPN/25-3141_complete_opn.pdf https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/02/17/2026-02994/determination-pursuant-to-section-102-of-the-illegal-immigration-reform-and-immigrant-responsibility  https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/c5d05c7ba737452f85f7b9ee4b2ea99a#data_s=id%3AdataSource_4-59220b9613c647f49771f495924d5772%3A973  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28051570-friends-of-the-ruidosa-church-v-secretary-markwayne-mullin-april-2026/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild. It was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins.

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I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of April 22nd, April 30th. Anything, anything interesting happened this week? Very little, not much news. Oh, not much. I mean, Garrison, you've joined the ranks of the vaccine injured, right? Yeah, yeah.

Also joining us of four live vaccines inside Garrison's body. Yes, thank you. Thank you for having me and my four live vaccines, which have obliterated my body. body in mind this week as I scrambled to finish the Mamdani piece. But news happens whether or not I feel bad. So let's get to it. In fact, I think to happen a lot when we feel. They does seem to happen. Sometimes conspires that way. Now, we will talk about the thing, obviously. We'll talk about the thing. But first, some smaller news items to start. Congress has

voted to end the 76 day DHS shut down without funding for ICE or Border Patrol. The bill now goes to Trump today, and if he signs it, the shutdown will be over. The House voted to reauthorize FISA Section 702, the warrantless surveillance authority. 42 House Democrats voted to reauthorize 22 Republicans voted against. The bill's expected to be stalled in the Senate, at least this version of the bill, as it included an amendment about digital currency, which the Senate will fight over. The ATF released a new list of proposed reforms and regulations, repealing the Biden pistol brace rule, as well as requiring, quote-unquote, biological sex be used on ATF forms. The State Department is releasing a limited edition passport for the United States 250th anniversary, featuring a portrait of President Trump superimposed on the Declaration of Independence and an American flag with his golden signature below.

Google Trump golden signature for more. Look, I'm just going to say if we have any foreign border control agents listening, you have to detain anybody who's see with that passport. It is now possible for Nikki Minaj and only Nikki Minaj to assemble the most unique collection of United States government documents in history if she become the citizen. Because she is apparently the only recipient of the gold card. The golden visa? Yeah. Yeah. So she could really get a unique, you know,

Pokemon combination here of, I guess it would be, she'd have to advance pretty quickly from, she would. I'm not clear how one goes from Gold Card citizenship, and the only way we'll find out is by closely following Nikki Minaj. The DOJ indicted former FBI Dr. James Comey for the second time, this time, for posting an Instagram image with the numbers 8647. Yeah.

Once again, Trump's FCC is going after Disney's, ABC licenses by directing Disney to file an early renewal order. After Jimmy Kimmel made a joke a few days before the White House correspondent's dinner about First Lady Melania Trump having the, quote, glow of an expectant widow. It pains me to say critical support to Jimmy Kimmel. President Trump, David Allison, Todd Blanche, Stephen Miller, Barry Weiss, Paramount's chief legal officer, and several CBS journalists met in a closed-door dinner in Washington, D.C. last week as the paramount buyout of Warner Brothers and CNN progresses. Nightmare blunt rotation.

Main Governor Janet Mills vetoed the state's 18-month data center moratorium, the first of its kind in the country. Days later, Mills dropped out of the Senate race paving the way for populist candidate Graham Platner to receive the Democratic nomination and go up against Susan Collins in the midterms. Most of the Dem seemed to already be behind him a sort of post from the Democrats account, Patriot Graham. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how the Democratic Party kind of falls in line behind this guy, given the fairly unique degree of controversy over the Nazi tattoo and a couple of other things that have come up.

But this has been in general the gap between kind of how random progressives and Democrats online talk about Platner and how people in Maine feel about him has been massive from the jump. And I think a lot of it has to do just with the fact that this guy went about campaign campaigning in a very dedicated way. He visited basically every county that like he could. And it goes to show that the consensus that builds online around candidates will never matter as much as like what they're out there actually doing in the world. And it's useful to get a reminder of that, whether or not you think this is a tremendous disaster, just the degree to which all of the talk about this guy

online had no impact on his ability to actually like win. Now, this is a unique case. There aren't a whole lot of seats that are like the seat that he's going to be taking, right? In terms of like both the weakness of your primary rival and the weakness of the other party, if you should happen to win the primary. Like this is not every congressional district, but it's still kind of an interesting case study. Maine is also like it's not California, you know, like a Californian, so discourse happens online because we're a vast state and, you know, these big cities and such. And Maine is different. Like he has good ground game and that matters.

more there, it seems. And this signifies, like, a rejection of Democratic establishment politicians. Like a hunger for change. Yep. And the fact that someone with all the controversies that come with Platner was able to beat the democratic establishment, I think, shows how hungry, how hungry people are to upseat these bloodsucking monsters. Yeah, we'll keep reporting on that.

I'm kind of interested in this race. Yes, no, absolutely. I mean, Susan Collins plays a unique role in the Senate right now. Mm-hmm. Finally for me, on Saturday, a car bomb exploded at a police station in Dunmary, Northern Ireland, outside Belfast, a group calling itself the quote-unquote New IRA claimed responsibility and a 66-year-old man has been arrested. Yeah. New IRA, 66-year-old man. Well, the new IRA is a, it grows out of the real IRA, right? Was it the new IRA who killed that journalist a few years back in Belfast?

You know what? I don't know. The new IRA, yep, admitted responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. That's the new IRA as well. Lara McKee is the name of the journalist who was killed. I think just out of negligence and incompetence during an action these people were a part of. Yeah, this is like just before COVID times. Yeah. Vaguely remember. So two large vessels, including a tanker, have been seized by pirates off Somalia. Another attempted hijacking by pirates was prevented.

I'm just going to quote the UKMTO here. Quote, the master of a cargo vessel was approached by two small fishing vessels with armed person support. One vessel approached within 600 metres. Warning shots were fired and the suspicious craft returned fire. The suspicious boat moved away and they cleared the vessel. All crew are safe and accounted for. Vessels are advised to transit with caution and report any suspicious activities to UKMTO. Authorities are investigated.

I saw another incident where a ship had fired a flare, people who were allegedly attempting to board it, right, that it seems like there has been an uptick in instance, especially as ships generally are having a hard time right now. The United States has also been boarding a number of vessels to inspect them as part of its blockade on Iran and Iranian goods. Secondly, JNIM, that's JOMA M, that's JOMA, Nostrat al-Islam, while Muslimin, and the Azwa al-Libirati. Front in Mali launched a shock offensive this week that saw them sweep into Mali's capital, assassinate the defense minister and force the military hunter and its allied Russian forces to abandon whole cities. They also abandoned a number of bases, right? The J&I have captured like massive amounts of Russian Africa core material. This is a pretty ground-shaking offensive since this is a big change for Mali. The hunter in Myanmar, I think I'm going to still keep calling

them that they've rebranded themselves as a civilian government. They're not. No. Min Anhalang gets retired as a general and just become president. It chains close and done the same shit. Like the Hunter reclaimed Falam this week, which is in Chin State. It's capital of Chin State. Fighting has been happening there for months. I've been talking to people pretty regularly who are taking part in the battle there.

They're obviously, you know, they lost friends in the battle. They are not happy about this, but I think it's fair. to say that spirits among their resistance generally remain pretty high, and they hope that they'll return to Falam soon enough. Doug Bergam has announced a United States geographic, is it geographical or geological survey? USGS, geological survey. Yeah.

I know that because of the film evolution starring David DuCovina. Not familiar. This is an important piece of news for the listeners. There was a brief period of time in between X-Files and Californication where we thought that David Docoveny might have a career as a comedic actor, and no, he did not. That he might have a career. He's had a great career.

He's had a great career, just not as a comedic actor. Okay, so Doug Bergam has announced that the United States Geological Survey found enough lithium to replace three centuries of imports in Appalachia. Enough left the end to do that or make one American small town normal for a weekend. I want to read from this because it's kind of interesting, quote,

the Southern Appalachians hold an estimated 1.43 million metric tons of lithium oxide, concentrated in the Carolinas, and the Northern Appalachians hold an estimated 900,000 metric tons, concentrated in Maine and New Hampshire, according to estimates in a new USGS scientific paper. That is like, I guess, big Appalachia, like going up into Maine there, leaving that aside, lithium mining is incredibly disruptive to the environment, right?

Generally, there's two ways you could do it, you can extract it from brine like they do in Chile, and I think other places, they're trying to do that in California. Otherwise, it's open pit mining. The water use, energy use, ecological damage will be huge. The potential for disasters is not zero,

and the people of Appalachia should be more than familiar with how this tends to go. Right. This is a long history of mining and mining disasters. Moving on, Donald Trump has reposted a tweet about changing the name of ICE to Nice. Nice agents. They should do this. I want them to do this. Yeah, it would be absolutely disastrous for audio journalism. It's, it'd be like, look, we understand, you know, it's 1943, people have a lot of issues with the Gestapo. We're going to call them the Funstapo now. Yeah, the nice stuff.

Bo. Yeah, the great Stalbo. SS now stands for super sweet, actually. The White House account and

the DHS account have posted nice images or hype videos since this as well. Yeah, we have to consider there's like a 40%

chance this happens at least. Yeah, no, this might happen. This could very much happen. Like, we're laughing,

but this could be the future. Yeah. What does the end stand for? National. National. It's just what they call a backroning.

I know Garrison, with these guys, the inn could have stood for a couple of things. A few things. Yeah, sure. Trump truth, great idea, do it. That is how policy is made these days. This is how government policy works now via the truth. Yeah.

This has made something clear to me that I was kind of dancing around for all, which is that I am in support in general of any policy that just pulls the wool off of people's eyes. like this is one of those things where it's now should be clearer to even the really stupid people where we are as a country when we do when something like this happens. Yeah. And so I'm supportive of it. Like we can't have any artifice.

The more you dress things up, the more people get deranged. So at least this, everyone knows what's happening. Yeah. It's really clear. I'm also Germany in favor of like they have a budget. It is vast, but it is fixed. And if they want to spend it all rewrapping their vehicles to say nice. Yeah, fine.

Also, it's going to make them feel lame. Are they going to do that by? buying N stickers or do they have to get the whole new sticker, do you think?

Right? I don't just slap the end on there. I hope they just slap it in. I don't know if we want to open the

door to them having stickers with N on, but yeah, who knows, Garrison? They had previously spent quite a lot

of money wrapping vehicles, so it's not beyond them to get. Maybe they'll get a whole rebrand. Maybe it'll be nice and a picture of someone like

holding cake or they got to find some way to spend the seven bajillion dollars that they have. Either that or,

you know, when we get someone better in, we could keep the name, but just create like a brand partnership with the city of Nice in France. I was going to say that. Yeah. It's like, and turn them into advertising. Instead of pulling people away from their families, they can tell people about all of the new deals on airfare to France that are available right now. We don't even need to abolish nice. We can just perform it. Yeah. We could just, we could just reform it to a, a tourism agency for one city in France. There is a type of biscuit in Britain, which I suspect maybe comes from Nice, but it's generally referred to as a nice biscuit because it has nice stamped on the biscuit. Sure.

So perhaps we could instead of guns, give them biscuits and they can hand those out. Think of how much better it'll be. Some guy shows up for his, like, you know, immigration court meeting, and he finishes that. And on his way out, there's a delegation of guys from, from Nice, just being like, you want to go on vacation? What of France's top five or six cities? I assume. The Nisois, cops.

Yeah, they give you, like, one of those special. balance they make there with, yeah. So many. Yeah, it could be great. Hit us up. This could be it. This could work. Yeah, if you're the mayor of Nice, we can introduce you.

Yeah. Finally, the United States has indicted the governor of Sinaloa on drug trafficking charges, which is a pretty significant thing. Well, that's not as funny. Yeah, no. No. No. Well, they're not going to be rebranding at Sinaloa.

Clearly, are they? Speaking of not being funny, let's actually talk about the bad news this week. Yeah. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana voting map as a, quote, unconstitutional racial gerrymander, unquote, that effectively created a black voting district. The ruling was split 6'3 on ideological lines. Alito wrote the majority opinion, saying that the district violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The new ruling substantially undermines the 1965 Voting Rights Act,

reinterpreting Section 2 provisions against racial discrimination to require evidence of intentional racial discrimination, not just discrimination as the effect. So in the future, proving discriminatory motives may be needed in order to win legal challenges against gerrymandering by citing the Voting Rights Act. This ruling specifically depowers black voters while enabling Republican gerrymandering to continue.

Republicans in the South will now be able to redraw House district maps that lean Democrat that have a high number of black voters. NPR estimates at least 15 House districts are now at risk of elimination. In the dissent, Justice Alana Kagan wrote, that court's decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity, unquote. Yeah, this is bad. This is possibly the worst escalation of the continued undermining of the Voting Rights Act.

Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah, I mean, this is, arguably the most important thing going on this week, even with the shooting that we haven't talked about, like, the gutting of this act that people died for. Like, the Voting Rights Act has a body count attached to it. Yeah. The court has to be packed the next, like, if there's ever. another democratic or left of center administration, and they don't pack the court. There's simply no chance of improving or fixing any of the problems this country has.

Like, it's a necessary prerequisite. It's no coming back from this. DC and Puerto Rico also need to become states and have their own congressional representation. Any future opposition administration has to go completely gloves off. Yeah, and we have to imprison a bunch of the people currently running things. Yeah, like there's a lot of stuff that has to happen. But one of those is the Supreme Court needs to get packed because by God, these people are not going to approve of anything that isn't insane. It's unclear if this ruling will have immediate impacts on the upcoming midterms, but by 2028, it will certainly have impacts.

Yeah. Yeah, they had filed for an emergency decision on redistricting or I guess not redistricting, like pre-districted. I don't know what you would call that, but to get this in effect before the midterms, basically. Yeah. The Supreme Court also sent this to a lower court to work out more details. It's going to obviously be ongoing litigation about it, just as there will be about Florida's redistricting measure that they are trying to finalize before the midterms as well. Yeah. And indeed, California, as I think there have been some arguments made, like, now that this decision has been made by the Supreme Court, right, like, other states will have to consider this in their redistricting. Should we take a break? We shall. And then we can talk about the dinner. Canadian women are looking for more.

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Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hardway with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Kear Games. And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking, Tript Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. And we're still chasing it.

And we don't know when we've done enough. because people scoreboard watch. Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross, because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on earth? Are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different intentions, bro.

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Open your free, our heart radio app, Search Learn the Hard Way and listen now. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tap Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim? Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam J.

And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about cracking the ails. To be clear, 84 is big to me not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack all day, but just so you all know. I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack.

So I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now. Thank you for finishing that sentence. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in someone, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what?

their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg Alesbian and Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap.

Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we are back. Let's talk about the dinner. Let's talk about the shooting that happened at the dinner, the thing that everyone else has been talking about for the past five, six days.

So, yeah, on April 25th, during the White House Correspondence dinner, everyone's favorite event. It's a shame we weren't there. It is unfortunate that we were not there to point our vertical video at our face as the news happens in front of us. Oh, I would have been filming just your face, Garrison, and just like really tight in, like to the point where it's difficult for you to get up and move. I keep watching, no, Garrison, face the camera, come on. The people need to see this. I'd be assuming the war fighter posture. You're going to get up like Hank Steph and storm around.

I would also be a shield. holding myself behind Stephen Miller's wife. Hey, that could have been either way. He could have been protecting the wife. I know it could have been either way. It's funny. It's funny. At least Miller wasn't getting cucked,

unlike the FBI director. Yeah. That is funny that he abandoned his wife. Girlfriend. Girlfriend. I guess we should just go. Let's recap the events for people who live under a rock.

So shortly before 830 people, PM, the alleged shooter approached the Secret Service security screening checkpoint located on the terrorist level of the hotel. This was the level above the ballroom level where the actual dinner was taking place. James, we should probably just read from the court document. Yeah, I think I'm just going to read this straight from the government's DFJ statement in the court. Right. Before the dependent approached a checkpoint, he discarded a long black coat that can sealed a 12-gauge pump-action shock. The defendant then sprinted through one of the magnetometers at the checkpoint and ran in the direction of the stairs leading to the ballroom where the president

and members of his family and cabinet were located. As the defendant did so, he held a shotgun in both hands in a raised position parallel to the ground. A United States Secret Service officer observed the defendant to fire the shotgun in the direction of the stairs leading down to the ballroom. The Secret Service officer and others at the checkpoint heard the gunshot. The Secret Service officer drew his service weapon and fired five times the defendant. The defendant fell to the ground and was restrained by law enforcement and was placed under arrest. The defendant suffered a minor injury to his knee, but was not shot. We can in a second talk about whether he shot the Secret Service officer. Yeah, because there's an interesting Washington Post review that's

out too now. Yeah, and a couple of court documents just filed today. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the just circumstances is this, right? This person had purchased, according to court documents, he purchased two weapons from separate firearm dealers in California buying the shotgun on or about August 17th, 2025, and the pistol on or about October 6th, 2023. He had the pistol for a while, the shotgun was more of a recent purchase. Yeah, yeah. The pistol is a fascinating choice. Amazing choice. 38 super. Yeah, I have never seen. a 38 super handgun outside of them. They're very common in Mexico because they have a certain cachet and cultural value.

Every 38 super handgun that I have personally held was embossed in gold and silver. Yeah, yeah. And usually a Mexican flag, but not exclusively. Yeah, or like some sort of heraldry that denotes that is associated sometimes with organized crime. Like, I'm not, when I say associated with organized crime, a few weeks ago, right, I talked about a material support for terrorism case, which centered on a firearms dealer who was selling grips for 38 super pistols with images that are associated with cartels. Like, when you buy a 38 super, someone at the ATF gets an email, I bet.

Like, these things are very rare and they have a certain consumer base. Now, obviously, there are normal 38 super pistols that exist. They're just like today most people buy it because it's a weird moon round too. There's not a normal, like, it's not a, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not a round that's commonly carried. It's expensive. It's primarily something that has like cashé for drug dealers. But I guess also, my interpretation, and I guess we're, I know, maybe this is getting too much into my side of things. But I do have a theory as to why he would have picked this gun and the shotgun that he picked.

But we can talk about that later if you want. We'll get that in a sec, yeah. He also had a, I believe, two knives and four daggers. Yeah, six bladed weapons. Really want to see pictures of those bladed weapons. They are in the court documents, buddy. Oh, have you. Let me just find those for you.

We have an enhanced image of some of them too. Yeah, so we should talk about this. The government submitted a quote-unquote enhanced image in the court case. Mr. Allen took a picture of himself at about 803 p.m. So about half an hour before he rushed past a magnetometer there. In the picture, we can see he is wearing black suit pants. He is wearing a black shirt. He has a red tie, which inexplicably is tucked into his pants.

He has a shoulder holster and a large K-by knife in a downwards draw configuration. He is carrying a pair of pliers and a pair of wire cutters in a holster on his left side. On his right side, he is carrying a small leather bag, which allegedly contained more shotgun rounds. And the 1911 is in a cruster or shoulder holster, right? None of this screams highly trained. The quote-unquote enhanced image was basically a zoomed-in copy of this photo that if I were to guess, the word enhanced means that they use some kind of sharpening or AI image sharpening tool. Yes.

None of which are real in terms of like none of which are actually enhancing or sharpening. The details that you are seeing should not be allowed to be like viewed in court. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The AI is guessing. There's not extra data in the photo that the AI is uncovering. Like the AI is basically attempting to clean up an image, which is fine if you have like a blurry photo of you and like your wife when you got your first department together that you went cleaned up. Yeah. But that's not, it's not valid.

not be important or should not be. Yeah. I'm sure we'll see the defense challenges and I'll be interested to know like what AI they used. Yeah. Did they ask for various iterations of the enhancement or did they, you know, like this will be interesting. I don't think it materially inserted anything. We can see the same Samsung phone. I can see the handle of the knife in both images.

I can see the handle of the hang gun. This is more of like a principle thing. Yeah. Then like did this specifically affect the photo in this case in any way that would. lead to the evidence being more useful. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. This is a bad, slippery slope.

So talking of his phone, he kept it with him as he traveled across the country on a train, taking notes about the landscape as he went. Amtrak. Yeah, yeah. He took Amtrak, and he was enchanted by the deserts and the... He liked Chicago.

He thought the woods on the East Coast were great. He kept like a journal where he wrote about the trip. Yeah, in the notes app of his phone. Yeah. And then the day of his attempted shooting, He used open sources to track the president's movements. Should we move on to did he fire his gun? Yeah, that's a big, because that is a big question right now.

That's one half of the question. The other half is, did he shoot a Secret Service agent, which... Right. Did he shoot anybody? Mm-hmm. The DOJ is saying he fired a gun. The DOJ claims that. But is not really affirmatively saying that he shot an agent.

Yeah. No, they've said a kind of. couple of different things. They've said that an agent was struck by gunfire. They've said that it was not friendly fire, but they have not said that he was struck by the assailant shotgun, by the gunman's actual weapon. And that's partly because there's not hard evidence yet that the gunman actually fired his shotgun. Let me read to you what they filed in court today. Yeah. The evidence gathered and analyzed to date establishes that your client fired his Mosberg 12-gauge pump action shotgun at least one time as he ran past some magnetometers on the terrace level of the Washington

Hilton on April 25, 2026. When the weapon was recovered, it had one spent cartridge case in the chamber, which has been identified as having been fired in the Mossburg shotgun. The government's preliminary ballistics video analysis showed that your client fired his shotgun in the direction of Secret Service Officer VG, which Officer VG observed. Additionally, at least one fragment was recovered from the crime scene that was physically consistent with a single buckshot pellet. That fragment was recovered from a location at the scene, consistent with your client firing his shotgun in the direction of Officer VG. The government is aware of no physical evidence, digital video evidence,

or witness statements that are inconsistent with the theory that your client fired a shotgun in the direction of Officer VG, or the Officer VG was indeed shot once in the chest while wearing a ballistic vest. They go on them further to say the government also recovered five spent nine-millimeter Luger cartridge cases, each of which was. was determined to have been fired from Officer VG's service weapon. The government also identified five separate bullet holes in the walls opposite from Officer VG, consistent with the direction.

So Officer VG fired his service weapon. That's like the most, yeah, that's the most detail that we've seen from them of their case, right? His defense had previously suggested that because of some of the public statements Attorney General Blanche had made, the government may have exculpatory evidence, either that he didn't fire his gun or that he didn't shoot the secret service agent in question. Which administration officials have gone on the news to say that the secret service agent did not shoot himself, which is not saying that another secret service agent did not shoot him, though. Yeah. Yeah.

And it doesn't seem like he shot into like a plasterboard wall, it seems, right? So he didn't maybe get splash back, which is... No, the only holes we were... seen look like they came from pistols, and that's something the Washington Post actually did look into. Because there's at least one, there's a couple, I think, of live stream videos that showed like holes from a bullet in the wall. But the post talked to Rick Vasquez, a firearms consultant and former chief of the firearms technology branch at the ATF, or what was then the ATF, who said that the holes were consistent with handgun rounds. Now, that's not like a firearms

technology. There's a lot of woo there, but it's also pretty easy to. I mean, sometimes it could be kind of messy because, like, the balls and like a double-a-buck shot shell are kind of similar in size to 9mm, right? Somewhere in a 30-caliber range, right? But they don't tend to hit with the same kinds of patterns, right? Like, it does, there does tend to be a significant difference, especially that kind of range. The night of the shooting, or within a few hours of it, Trump posted security camera footage, and the post got a hold of a higher resolution copy of that footage, and they went,

through like a frame-by-frame analysis of it. Because as you noted, James, they claim that Cole discharged his shotgun while he was passing through the magnometers, the magnetometers, right? They didn't say it happened to elsewhere. They said it, like, as he was going through that checkpoint, that you can watch him sprint through like he's fucking Naruto running his way into the correspondence dinner. And in their frame-by-frame analysis, the post only found evidence of four muzzle flashes, all of them from the agent who was allegedly struck by something's weapon, right?

So first, I mean, and you can hear in other footage, you can clearly hear more shots than that. Like, I don't doubt that there were, that he discharged five shots, but the video only shows four. And crucially, it does not show Cole's shotgun firing. And the video follows him until he goes off screen. So maybe whoever wrote that out should have written after passing through the magnetometers. But they seem to pretty clearly be saying it was while he was in that little security area. And there's not evidence in the footage. of him firing.

We don't see anything that looks like firing like nobody reacts as if he has fired. Like there's just no evidence that he shot. And, you know, they're hinging a lot

on the fact that there's a spent cartridge in the chamber of his 12 gauge. But number one, that's actually not an uncommon way to store that kind of 12-gauge shotgun with a spent shell

in the breach because it makes it easy. If something were to happen, it makes it easier to basically get a fresh round in without needing to have a chambered round at all times, which a lot of people, most people don't like to do.

Yeah. And they're not drop safe either. Like, it's a bad idea to do that. You don't want to do that with a shotgun. You know, is it possible that he was storing it that way? Is it possible that he loaded an empty round in there intentionally because he didn't actually, he was hoping to do a suicide by cop and he didn't intend to actually shoot anybody? Is it possible he just fucked up?

It's also perfectly possible he fired later. But it's really weird that. they wrote it out that way, if that's what they're alleging, because we see him when he's at the security checkpoint at the magnometer, and he doesn't fire in the footage that we have. Yeah. There's been a lot of press statements that are sort of talking around exactly, not making the explicit statement, he fired his shotgun and he shot the officer in the chest. Right.

And certainly, like, I don't, I'm not sure about the distance we're talking about. And then thus the spread that would happen with... It would be minimal spread, even with a sod off, in a narrow corridor like that. Yeah, I mean, you go by an inch per yard, right? Like, that's the amount that it generally spreads. And so if you hit this person once, assuming this person has a chest at 20 inches wide, that doesn't line up, right? Yeah.

Might be different with bugshot. I mean, obviously, if they had evidence that the secret certification was shot by Mr. Allen... We'd have seen it. be running with that. That's the fact that they do not have evidence that the agent was shot by Allen is shown in the way that they're like talking about this. Like he was shot. Yeah. And the guy discharged a shotgun. Separate statements. Exactly. Two two separate statements. Yep. They're still affirming that the agent did not shoot himself, which does not mean that he was not shot by another agent. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a in that Washington Post article, uh, they talk to a acting attorney general

Todd Blanche and asked him to explain, like, why are you guys never willing to say, like, where the round that hit the officer came from, right? They asked him the question that we've been asking, and Blanche answered, we want to get that right. We're still looking at that. There you go. Right. And that is a big change, as the post notes, a day earlier, he told ABC that officials believe the gunman had shot the officer. So he has pulled back, which leads me to think maybe this guy didn't shoot at all, or maybe he fired later, maybe even totally by accident, Maybe when he was falling down, he liked discharged. But if so, also, you would think there'd be a photo somewhere of where he discharged the shotgun.

It's surprisingly easy for bullets to get lost, right? And by that, I mean, just get so destroyed and whatnot by impact that there's not really much of anything to find. That happens all the time. It's really rare, and I would argue, impossible to discharge a 12-gauge shotgun with any kind of shot shell in a fucking hotel like this. and not have there be some sign of what you hit. They make holes in things. That's what they're for. They make multiple holes.

Unless it's a slug, but then they make a really big hole. And Cole had specifically written that he was not intending to use slugs. In his manifesto, suicide, no, whatever you want to call it, he specifically stated that he was using a 12-gauge loaded with buckshot because he wanted to reduce the chances of overpenetration and of injuring or killing someone he did not intend to hit. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about his background.

a few other things from that manifesto. I know, Robert, you've done some digging into that. I did the normal thing that at least one of us does. Generally, all of us do in some form, after every kind of mass shooting or, like, publicly notable terror attack or whatever, and just found myself looking through a stranger social media. Yeah.

There's been a couple of good articles out about him now. Most of, like, the first things that we knew about this guy, like the very first fact is when his name came out, there were two different guys who kind of lived in the tolerance area who were immediately like there were responses under Cole Thomas Allen, or Cole Allen. And one of them was like some fucking white dude who worked at, I think it was a consulting firm or something. I don't know.

It wasn't very, but he just looked like he might have been 30. And the other was Cole Thomas Allen. And it was him winning a Teacher of the Year award at the, he worked at a company that was basically doing like college test prep tutoring, right? Yeah. So he was a teacher. Some people got really angry at the description of him as a teacher because they're being like he's trying to like badmouth public school teachers. He's not a public school teacher.

But there are other kinds of teachers. He was the teacher of the month at the tutoring academy that he worked at. Yeah. Yeah. I had found by the time I got there, which is like 20 minutes after the name started spreading, the Facebook page of the school that he worked or of the tutoring academy, whatever that he worked at, which I'm not going to name. But it was hundreds of posts already being like, good to see this is. who's teaching your kids, you know, like, you hired a terrorist, all this kind of, like. Yeah. Yeah. It's bleak. It's the normal thing that happens, you know, with anything related to this.

In this case, right after that, Trump posted a picture of the detained and stripped mostly naked gunman that was obviously the Cole Allen who had won the teacher of the month, like immediately visible. Like, you could, it was a positive ID was very quick. Yeah. From that point on. So, at that point a couple other things started coming out because, you know, I had looked through from that Facebook page. I had found a couple other posts about Cole Thomas Allen or different places where he had accounts, which made a couple other details of his background obvious. He was a mechanical engineering student in Caltech, kind of during the first Trump administration. Yep. You know, that was honestly like most of what was like immediately obvious. Is that like he'd been an

engineering student at Caltech. He'd worked as a teacher, and he'd been a part of, in his LinkedIn, you can see that he'd been a part of Caltech's Christian Fellowship and the Nerf Club, right? Yeah. Now, Ken Klippenstein talked to one of his co-f fellow peers during this period of time, who knew that while he was at Nerf Club, Cal had like kind of led, there was like a conflict within the club over people modifying and otherwise altering their Nerf guns to make them more resemble real weapons, as Nerf has also come out with more guns that look like real guns over the years. And he was really against this. Like he was very against the idea of like Nerf guns that were modified to look like real guns or just like people playing with things that look like real guns.

Now, fast forward to the actual day of the shooting. His blue sky account got found fairly quickly alongside the LinkedIn. Obviously, that got deleted in very short order, but it was archived, thankfully, by a very nice person who realized that it was probably be useful to have actual documentation about what this guy was doing online rather than rely on a bunch of different articles making claims. So I went through all of that, you know, as soon as it came out. He had about 500 followers who was following about 114 people. He did not post often on his own, but when he did in like the two different occasions I could find of him like posting on his own in this incomplete archive of his blue sky. One of them was him posting in, like, sympathy and solidarity with Ukraine,

which is something that was very consistent. He reposted a ton of different fundraisers from different Ukrainian military units. That was in his user bio as well, support for Ukraine. Yeah, he was massively supportive of Ukraine. Yeah. And very angry at the Trump administration's failure to, like, follow through with U.S. obligations in that regard. And the only other post of his that was like him writing something that I saw, was him basically critiquing an article about using AI in the classroom and like people who were advocated

of the use of AI in the classroom. He's very much against that. He was a reposter, though. He was a reposter. And we'll talk about some of the things he reposted. His bio read, Hi, I'm a random Californian guy with posts about American politics,

support for Ukraine, and observations of small creatures. And then he includes a quote, I choose my own battlefields, not through my blood, but with my heart. I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want. So that is, I like type that quote in, and that is a quote from an anime, the same anime that his profile picture was also from this like specific anime, which is Kaguura. I don't know how that's pronounced. I think the character that he had is PFP of was Kigura. It's this like red haired lady with these weird like ball things on either side of her hair. Like I don't fully know how to describe this lady's hairstyle. It's kind of like vaguely Princess Leia-esque. And that it

appears to be who his PFP photo is. Okay. The series is called Gintama. I don't know much about this. I've heard people online being like, oh, he was a fan of like this anime. That means something or other. But like I don't actually understand enough about the anime to much of an analysis of that. I think it's just people being like because of the character he likes.

It makes sense that he's a guy who would do something very extreme. I don't know enough about the anime to say how relevant that is. but the quote kind of does sound relevant to what he actually did. Like, I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want. And you can read stuff like that in his manifesto. Yeah, and you can read stuff like that in his manifesto, which we'll talk about. His actual reposts are very normal lib-poted.

Yeah, he's a liberal. Hugely supportive of Ukraine. Nothing about Palestine in there. Nothing about Israel in there. A photo has since come out that appears to be legitimate of him wearing like an IDF shirt some time ago. Yeah. He doesn't say anything.

Again, in the limited, we don't also have, we don't have his whole blue sky in here. In the limited archive, we have, I don't see anything of him, like, him talking at all about Israel. So, like, I don't have enough to say that, like, he was strongly supportive, but he certainly there's a real discrepancy between how he talks about Ukraine and him mentioning anything at all about what's happening in Gaza, right? Yeah. What is believed to be his Twitter account has also been scraped and not as well archived, but there's screenshots of reposts.

on Twitter reposting Brianna Wu with some criticism of pro-Palestine protesters or things that are critical of Palestine and in a nominal way supportive of Israel. Yeah, and it's kind of hard to tell was he just more quiet about this online because he wanted to avoid, you know, getting dogpiled or is this just something

that as the genocide got worse and worse, he became less willing to talk about? I don't know, but it's kind of, it's just noteworthy how much, like, how absent that kind of discussion is next to how often he talks about. Next to the Ukraine stuff, yeah. Yeah. He also reposted a bunch of very normal posts.

There was one from a user, you know, if you guys remember like a week or so ago, the New York Times published an interview with Hassan Piker, the streamer. And the article was titled, The Rich Don't Play by the Rules. So Why Should I? Why Petty Thft might be the new political protest. It's where Hassan tried to introduce the term micro-looting to the discourse, which I don't support at all. But it was like a pro shoplifting kind of like, kind of like a casual and jokey pro shoplifting argument, right?

I don't want to. People have blown this out of proportion. But it's interesting that he came down against Hassan's side on that. He was basically reposting someone who was like, hey, I've been a lot of, I've spent a lot of time in countries where graft and grifting are like normal. And it's really bad for that to happen. You don't want that to happen to your country. So he's certainly not like on the far left, like direct action is good. I love committing crimes anarchist side of things.

He is not at all that kind of guy. Yeah. He's a liberal. He is a Will Stancelite. He is a lot of Will Stancel reposts. A lot of Will Stancel posts. Yeah. Yeah.

He reposted me a couple of times. He posted me like talking about like the Pope, right? Like, because making fun of Trump for calling the Pope soft on crime. Like not any of my like spicy takes, right? Yeah. Just like viral posts on blue sky. He didn't do a lot of spicy takes. He reposted a lot of normal viral stuff you'd expect.

He was really angry about COVID-19. He hates Elon Musk. He reposted a lot of like, you know, Elon Musk wants poor African children to die, like kind of content talking about that after some of the more recent articles about how many people died as a result of like the American like aid cuts that Musk was a major pardon. He was very angry about that. He reposted Bill Crystal saying abolish ice. Okay. And there's a couple of different posts that he shared. about or from people who were criticizing the White House Correspondence Dinner.

And particularly, like, when Jake Tapper fucking made a post about, like, here's the napkins that we've got that have, like, freedom of the press, you know, the First Amendment stuff on it, that, like, it was supposed to be like, this is our protest against the president, right? Like, we've got these monogram napkins. And he made fun of that, like a lot of people did. He was generally critical of anyone who would be at the correspondence dinner, which was reflected in his manifesto where he said that like the journalists and other people at the event

who are not in the administration aren't my targets. And, you know, he said he didn't want to hit them. But also, he was, quote, I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary on the basis that most people chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor and are thus complicit. But I really hope it doesn't come to that, right? Yeah. Another interesting bit from this manifesto is, quote, administration officials, not including Mr. Patel, they are targets prioritized from highest ranking to lowest. Yeah.

Interesting. Interesting parenthetical. I wonder if that's just because some people were joking after that article came out about how Cash Patel, they had to like break down his door because he was too drunk to reach. People were joking like maybe it's best of Cash stays in office because he's so, I wonder if that was the joke he was making. Unclear what he meant by that. But he doesn't give us any reason to believe.

And he doesn't share any jokes like that, right? So that is kind of legitimately baffling. No, most of the manifesto is like apologizing to people he knows. Yep. For how this will be like disruptive. Yeah. And then talking about his own rules of engagement. Yes.

Which he says, quote, probably in a terrible format, but I'm not military. So too bad, unquote. Yeah. And it's interesting because he had also shared at least one post on Blue Sky that was like kind of pro gun control that was like talking about how it's bad to have. have a gun basically, like it increases the danger that you're in, which it did for this guy. But it is interesting in terms of the firearms he chose, because this is clearly a guy who supports more gun control. He seems to find it distasteful, certainly, to, like, celebrate guns,

right? And celebrate, like, military-style weapons. I kind of wonder if he picked the firearms he picked because they did not look like, the pistol didn't look like a Glock or like the standard police guns that he sees people owning. And a shotgun doesn't look. like an AR-15. Like an AR-15. Yeah, I kind of wonder, although he says it was to minimize penetration, so maybe that's more likely.

Other thing I want to mention is because the shotgun was purchased in August, and he does make a few references in the manifesto to, like thinking of having done something like this for quite a while, but this was his first opportunity that he saw that seemed semi-possible. Yeah. And I also had the thought that,

well, when he bought the shotgun, because he specifically states that he wants to use a shotgun to minimize, like casualties, then the date at which he bought the shotgun might be the date at which he decided he was going to do this, right? Or it might be the point at which he started taking actions. Yeah. It would make sense that maybe that would be around when he had started planning to do this. And, you know, there's so much different shit happened around August of 2025. It's kind of impossible to say this is definitely it. I did notice that August 25th, 2025 is when Trump issued his additional measures to address the crime emergency in the District of Columbia executive order?

Yeah, the military occupation of D.C. Yeah. Okay. So, and this is when Trump is really, and a bunch of, there's a bunch of different news stories around Trump trying to deploy the National Guard in U.S. cities. And I kind of wonder if that's when he, but that's purely theoretical. There was a lot of other bad stuff happening. You know?

Yeah. So who's to say? He also seems to be angry about our war against Iran, like the fact, like the war of choice that Trump launched against Iran. He didn't get a post a lot about it. But there are some references in the manifesto that kind of make me feel like that may have also been like a major thing that helped push him to make this decision. Because he specifically stated that I'm at a citizen of the United States of America,

what my representatives do reflects me. And I am no longer one to permit a pedophile rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes, right? Like there's some reasons to believe that that probably played into it as well. Interestingly, he does sign the manifesto with his blue sky username. He sure does. Cold Force. Yeah, he thought that was cool.

Yeah. Perhaps that was a name he used, I don't know, in his nerthing activities or like it was maybe that meant something to him. Another thing that's probably worth talking about, because Trump has made the claim several times as this guy was anti-Christian, that hatred of Christianity is what drove him. Yeah. As I said before in Caltech, he was a member of the Christian group. I'll talk about that in a second. but in his manifesto, he specifically justifies what he's doing as a Christian.

There is a segment in there where he's going through like some objections he knows people in his life will have and kind of rebutting them. An objection one is, as a Christian, you should turn the other cheek. Rebuttal, turn the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I'm not the person raped in a detention camp. I'm not the fisherman executed without trial. I'm not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Right.

So he specifically is justifying this as a Christian. On Christian grounds. He thanks his church, which seems to have been a major part of his life. So there's a quote from Ken Clippenstein's article about his time at Caltech. He was pretty prominent at the Caltech Christian Fellowship, pretty Christian and Mellow. If I didn't see his face eating carpet, I would have never believed it. And then I found a Christianity Today piece that just came up a few hours ago. And a line from that is Allen's father, Thomas Allen was.

listed as an elder at Grace United Reformed Church and Torrance and an evangelical congregation that describes itself as preaching a gospel that is Christ-centered, covenantal, and confessional. The church's leadership page, and social media pages have been pulled down. And, yeah, it's fucked up. They had to have, like, security guards, armed guards, like escort worshippers inside it out this weekend just because of, like, all of the press around this. Elizabeth Terlinden, who also knew him at the time, told the New York Times, he was definitely a strong believer in evangelical Christianity at the time that I'm.

knew him. She was in the Caltech Christian fellowship with him. So this guy appears to have been like a very strong evangelical Christian, like a liberal Christian. We don't exactly know was he always, was his Christianity always like progressive and like liberal tinted or was he kind of, you know, more conservative at a different point in his life. Yeah. We do know that within the last couple of years, he got involved in left-wing activism in Los Angeles. His sister told law enforcement that after he got more involved in left-wing activism, particularly a group who called themselves the White Awakes, which was referencing an anti-slavery protest in the 1860s. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Right? Like, these were some of the people who like back Lincoln. So he joined some group in Alicahs called the White Awakes for some period of time. He starts talking more radically, starts showing up to more protests. And I think he's helping with a couple of different kinds of things, with a couple of different groups. But that's when his sister says he starts making like a lot more radical statements and maybe

sometimes aggressive statements. And that lines up with when he buys a gun. and he starts training after 2023. So this may have just been a thing where he didn't have a full plan at that point, but he accepted the possibility that he might need to do violence in order to support, you know, his ideals. We don't really know, but that's all we've got in terms of a journey. Yeah. In October of 2024, he did make one donation to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign via Act Blue.

$25. Yeah. But not a lot of, not a long. history of donations to the party, not a long history of like volunteering for the Democratic Party specifically. Seems to have been a pretty loyal voter. But this is a guy who I think really during like the, it would be during the Biden years gets more involved in like left wing protests and organizing. He becomes angrier. And then after 2024, he gets really, really angry at Trump. And eventually, probably sometime late last year, decides to take action and for whatever reason picks the

correspondence dinner to do it. It's probably also worth noting, that he sends this manifesto thing out right before he carries out the attack. Like, he's staying in the hotel for a couple of days before all this happens. He bugs two nights. We actually get him to reflect a little on the security that he's experienced while he's been there. And that's a really interesting part of this. He says, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got, who knows, maybe they're pranking me is nothing.

No damn security, not in transport, not in the hotel, not in the event. like the one thing that I immediately noticed walking to the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat. Crazy stuff. Most of the security seemed to be isolated around the actual ballroom and the levels immediately above and below. And again, he doesn't get anywhere close to the president or any other like important person, right? So you could argue the security did its job. He was just in the same hotel.

But yeah, crazy stuff. I don't know. I don't have anything else. Let's go on ad break and then return to briefly discuss some of the conspiracy theories that have spawned after this alleged shooting. Love it. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart.

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Okay, we are back. Immediately after. the event took place. Tons of conspiracy theories. Started cropping up, obviously piggybacking off of the Butler, Pennsylvania ones. This was not helped by the confusion

in early reports, because once you get every journalist in D.C. in one room, and then an event happens, that means every journalist has a kind of different version of the event that gets immediately blasted out

online and on the news. So there was not a clear sequence of events in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. There was reports that maybe was just dishes being dropped, eventually it was clear that, no, there was an actual shooting,

and Wolf Blitzer did lose a shoe in the course of the events. He sure did. Poor Wolf. Now, also not helping things. Trump was basically live-truthing this investigation on the night of the shooting. Uh-huh.

And it was not clear to many people that the shooting did not happen on the ballroom level. Yeah. And that the shooter did not get close to the targets. Well, also, the people in the main room, we're still very scared because, like, they had no real context on what was happening, and everyone around them just started freaking out.

Yeah. Because there's the military running around, Secret Service running around, they heard gunshots. Yeah, it is a frightening thing. You're seeing JD Vance get pulled off stage, Trump's ducking down. What I do feel is kind of interesting about this is you've got this whole DC class of, like, press and other important people who are not in power themselves, but are close to it. And they do a lot of the things that they do because they like. being close to power. And there's this illusion that comes with that, I think, for a lot of

of these people of importance, that gets ripped away when the Secret Service pulls all of the people who are important out of the room, and you're just left wondering if you're in danger? Like, that's what it'll be like if there's a nuclear war. All of these people will suddenly have the few folks who have a detail get ripped out of the room, and then you'll just hear the sirens start and have nothing, no idea what's happening, and realize that your whole life in pursuit of being close to power has brought you no security. Crazy stuff, wild times. Anyway, Garrison.

One of the core pieces of quote-unquote evidence that was used to assert that the shooting was some kind of false flag or sciop was a comment made by press secretary Carolyn Levitt shortly before the dinner. This speech tonight will be classic Donald J. Trump. It'll be funny. It'll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the road. Great stuff. Poor choice of words there on behalf of the press secretary. Excellent choice of words.

Also, though, like, it's not a Dan Brown novel. When people are actually plotting conspiracy, they don't go around leaving the little Easter eggs for you to find. Of course. Yeah, why else would the deep state orchestrate, like, a top, a top-level secret, secret sci-op, and not decide to leave little clues beforehand? Yeah.

They have to leave little clues, Garrison. Haven't you listen to Alex Jones? that's part of the deal they make with the demons is that they have to leave little clues for the evil that they're doing while they're doing it. They call that the Riddler's Law. Uh-huh, that's right. Now, another thing that got amplified

in the conspiratorial milieu was a Twitter account with a Pepe profile picture wearing the same outfit as President Trump, the night of the dinner, who tweeted the alleged shooter's name about two and a half years ago. This post is the account's only visible post.

The banner image of the account is a bunch of streaks of color, but if you overlay the image of Trump holding his fist up in the air at Butler, the color streaks and the darkened areas line up with the Trump Butler photo. What? Now, the alleged shooter also had an undergraduate research fellowship at NASA for the summer of 2014, and the name of this Twitter account matches the name of someone at Lockheed Martin who published a NASA paper at the same time, that the shooter was at NASA.

And the shooter worked for the jet propulsion lab, the same labs that those scientists who have gone missing also have been working out of... Garrison, you want to get out of the pegboard? When I saw this, I started feeling a little bit scared because I thought I was getting too close. Too close to the truth. I don't know.

I was afraid. Too close to needing help. But that's not all. Because the Pepe, the Pepe Twitter account... was also connected to a time travel study because the color streak banner photo was traced to a website on how to build a time machine and this photo was used on the web page

for the time machine study. So what's really going on here? First of all, this quote-unquote time machine website is actually a Europe-based project for quote 3D digitalization of cultural heritage scanning like artifacts and uploading them online as like 3D models. Yeah. That's their quote unquote time machine is preserving cultural heritage.

Yes, an archive. And actually this color streak image has actually been floating around the internet for a long time. I've found versions of it since at least 2018. There are hundreds of people named Cole Allen in the U.S. on data broker sites, right? Now, the first archive of this Pepe Twitter account, whose profile picture only matches Trump's because it's a tuxedo, one of the most common outfits for men at events like this. Yes, it is the same outfit that Trump was wearing at the dinner. It's also the same outfit Trump has worn at every dinner because it's what you wear at dinners if you're the president. Tuxedo.

But the first archive of this post is from after the shooting. So we don't know what this account looked like prior to the shooting. Now, this account could have tweeted tons of random names and then deleted all the other posts to pull a stunt like this. Or people at Twitter, like X the Everything app, the people who work there, could have backdated the account and the post to boost engagement on the platform. Now, those aren't any more likely than just a simple coincidence, but there are other explanations other than gesturing vaguely towards a pre-planned sciop. Spreading images of this Twitter account isn't necessarily putting forward a specific conspiracy

theory, he just gets used as a data point among other unconnected data points to sow public mistrust and undermine reality, inferring meaning from odd coincidences, right? This is seeing patterns that aren't there, and literally in the case of seeing the butler photo in a splash of colors. And again, like, why would quote unquote they drop hints beforehand, right? Is this, is this predictive programming? But predictive programming isn't really necessary to get the public to accept an event like an attempted assassination, in fact, that would only sow suspicion.

Dropping these little hints, just sow suspicion for an event like this, it doesn't actually make it more acceptable, right? The whole idea of predictive programming is sowing seeds to get the public to accept an otherwise unacceptable thing. And that's not necessary for a presidential assassination.

Yeah. Now, there was some other things that propped up in this conspiratorial shenanigans in the wake of the shooting. A Fox News reporter was calling in to report her experience at the dinner and suddenly cut out when she started talking about something that Carolyn Levitt's husband said to her. He kind of leaned over and said, you know, I watched you on TV. You're a great job. You need to be very safe. And he was very serious when he said that to me. And he kind of looked around the room and he said, you know, there are some.

Sounds like we lost Aisha's phone there. Well, well, well. What? So her audio actually cuts out at different points during this televised call. The anchor said that she was having cell service issues and later on X, this reporter, posted that she was about to say that Carolyn Levitt's husband was, quote, telling me to be careful with my own safety because the world is crazy, unquote. But it does make for a funny moment.

A funny moment of television. That's a good moment. That's an incredible time for your call to cut out. like just awesome stuff there's other viral posts spreading video of the military storming past the red carpet

or people in military fatigues storming past the red carpet after the shooting with one person writing law enforcement doesn't act like this neither does the military this is a staged event with a shitty script and pre-positioned cameras the cameras are there

because they're there to film the red carpet They're pre-positioned. Yeah, because this is an organization where all the press gathers. Because this is a press event. That's why there's pre-positioned cameras. Yeah, it's how you do, you know, the White House correspondence dinner. Yeah.

Also, you're going to see some types of cops that you have never previously seen when someone tries to assassinate the president. Oh, yeah. There are a whole lot of people whose job it is to stop that happening. Lots of them aren't necessarily uniformed officers who you see every day in the Secret Service. Yeah. Other people also thought it was odd that Trump has skipped every correspondent dinner across his two terms, except for this one. And then all of a sudden there's a shooter in the lobby.

How did the shooter know that Trump would go to this one? Because the shooter planned this since early April. How would the shooter know this? Well, that's actually quite simple. Because Trump announced he was attending this dinner in early March. And according to court documents, Cole Allen started searching for information about this dinner. in early April, a month later, before then booking two nights at the Washington Hilton.

Trump already announced that he was going to be attending the dinner. The oddest aspect of the conspiracy system post-this event is that Trump needed to stage this, not for any national security reasons or to seize more power, but to construct the White House ballroom, which has been the main thing that people on the right have been talking about after the shooting. The people on the right have not been using this shooting to like go after liberal terrorists, but have been talking nonstop about how this security breach demonstrates the

need to construct Trump's massive ballroom. And that's the main thing they're talking about. It's so funny. The idea that they would stage, that the deep state is going to stage a false flag just to push for the ballroom. Yeah. Is to me, frankly, very funny. Yeah, we don't get an enabling act in our new fascist. we just get a fucking ballroom. Yeah, yeah, right. Like, okay. I mean, I guess I prefer this.

Yeah. The Reichs take fire to construct a nice, a nice dance floor. Yeah. Yeah. Just, yeah. I mean, a lot of this was like centered on the safety and security exemption, which was provided in the injunction against the building of the new ballroom, right? The issue here is that the Trump administration already filed on the third of April,

a claim that the entire building was a contiguous hole. They couldn't do the security part without doing the fancy dance floor part, right? And like, yes. Trump has also truceed about this previous to this event. This wouldn't have really added anything. They did try and get the National Trust for Historical Preservation to withdraw their court case, which they didn't. Like, get subsequently to the events of the White House correspondence, you know.

So, yeah, that's most of what I have. have on the conspiracy stuff. There's certainly more, but that's... Oh, there's more. Yeah, we're going to leave it. There's always going to be more, right? Like, that's the way how it is. We don't have good data on, like, the widespread belief of this theory. There was, there was a poll that circulated that said, like, something like 47% of Democrats thought the attempted assassination was staged. But this poll, which is from the Manhattan Institute, so take that with a grain of fascism, This poll is actually pulling the butler shooting, not this recent one, and people did not acknowledge that when they were spreading this poll around. So we don't know how many people actually believe that this shooting was staged.

But you can certainly see a lot of people asserting as such on the internet. Shall we move on to a couple of other topics in there we need to cover? Yes. This will be a super, super-sized episode, but it is one of this. Yeah, let's go. Talking of people talking about things on the internet, I think some people got this one. Deadlyle carried away. A's 3-0 decision of a panel of Second Circuit Court judges has rejected ICE's mandatory detention of people

seeking to deport with a few exceptions. The opinion was written by Judge Bianco, who is a Trump appointee, and it stated that, quote, Petitioner entered the United States unlawfully in 2004 or 2005 and has resided here ever since. He is therefore deemed to be an applicant for admission by Section 1225A, that he is not, quote, seeking admission because he is not requesting lawful entry into the United States after inspection and authorization. The government's attempt to muddy these textually clear waters defies the statute's context, structure, history and purpose, contradicts the Supreme Court's dictator in Jennings and longstanding executive branch practice and its interpretation of this statute raises serious constitutional questions

that should be avoided, even if the statutory language were ambiguous. The statute in question here is the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, and specifically the fact that it has a mandatory detainer for people, quote, unquote, seeking admission to the USA. Now, this ruling puts the Second Circuit in agreement with over 370 judges across a nation, but notably at odds with the Fifth and Eighth Circuit, right? Judge Bianco, in a really incredibly New York analogy here for seeking admission, wrote, If someone sneaks into Yankee Stadium at the start of the game with no ticket for admission

and no intention of ever paying, and he is later found by security in a seat in the seventh inning, no one would consider that to be seeking admission to the game. So hopefully that's that. They explain to people that the argument that the government is making here is that someone who has been in the country for a long period of time is still seeking admission, right? The Trump administrations place itself at odds with other administrations, right? This has been law since 1996.

As Bianca wrote, quote, for five presidential administrations over nearly three decades, it did consistently release detainees on bond, whom the government now argues are covered by Section 1225B2A. Even in President Trump's first term and the first few months of his second, the agency adhered to the decades-old understanding and the relative scopes of Sections 1-225 and 1-2-26. Under these circumstances, the fact that no President has ever found such power in the statute

is strong evidence that it does not exist. That pretty much explains itself, right? What I have not been able to work out is whether this pertains to people who are detained as in who are arrested in the Second Circuit or people who are held in the Second Circuit or both. My guess would be both because it is the law in the Second Circuit, right? So it applies in the Second Circuit. Certainly most detention facilities are not in the Second Circuit. A lot of them are in the Fifth, which has come down the opposite way on this. This is why the Supreme Court exists, right? A big disagreement between these several circuit courts here. Moving on, let's talk about the

border wall. Before leaving office, Secretary, no, assigned several waivers for border wall construction. This was not in a week before she left office, but this year. One of them waived 28 laws in the Big Bend area of Texas. The waiver included 175 miles of the riverfront of the Rio Grande, including parts of the state park, National Park and federally protected river. Some of these areas are very popular for outdoor recreation. These waivers are now being challenged in court by the Centre for Biological Diversity. They're out of Tucson. You'll see them in a lot of border legal cases.

The Friends of Ruehosa Church and a Telangua River Guide named Billy Miller. It's an interesting coalition, right, that we don't often see. Like a church group has the sort of approach to this, that it would destroy historical and cultural heritage to build the wall there. Obviously, the river guide, Billy Miller, Mr. Miller has a, the claim that it would be disruptive to a business and to people's enjoyment of nature on the river. Currently, what they are doing is focusing on Chispa Road. It's near like Valentine, Texas, northwest of Martha, where the carrying out road improvements that they did not notify county officials about, which is obviously a course of disruption.

I've actually rid my bike out there a fair bit. I did some work making a film out there a few years ago. It's a really beautiful part of the country. I'm sure a lot of people will be familiar with Martha, which is near by. Oh, it's a great city. Yeah. Martha's great.

I love that area, Texas. Yeah. I watched it all burn down one beautiful, beautiful afternoon when those horrible fires started. Yeah, it was wild. Yeah, I bet. Geez. Luckily, Marfa has recovered. Great place to visit.

You can go and see the Prada store, which people now think is AI generated, which is great. Our reality is cool. You can go see the Judd Foundations or the Chinati Foundation. Donald Judd Museum, you know, a lot of good stuff out in Marfa. Pretty good cheese sandwich, a restaurant. Pretty, pretty fancy glamping set up there as well. Yep. So I checked out the CBP SmartWW Interactive Map,

which sometimes, like, they don't always have to give notice when they're changing their plans. So sometimes you find out via the Smart Wall Interactive Map. And right now it shows vehicle barriers and patrol road planned inside the National Park, right? So this will cause damage far, far beyond the riverfront. Evidently, to build barriers at the riverfront, they have to build roads to get to the riverfront, which will also spread this damage over an area that, like, especially in Texas, Texas is not a state which is abundant with public land.

It is not like those states further west in that regard. And I know this is an area which is very special to a great deal of people. I'm really interested in rang more about this, so like especially people in the outdoor industry or folks in that region, and I'd love to hear from you. You can do Coolzone Tips at Proton.me. If you want to talk about that. Do you want to do the... We reported...

We reported the news. All of it. Yeah. Again, Coolzone tips at Proton.me for story tips, for your marketing emails, you can just go ahead and flush those. We reported the news. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, poolzonemedia.com. or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey, what's good, y'all?

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