Will There Be a Post WHCA Dinner Reckoning? Royal Visit. Steve Forbes on Billionaire Flight. Purple-haired Legislator to EPA Head: Drink Weed Killer! Turley on Virginia. More
What would-be Trump assassin Cole Allen apparently failed to appreciate was that attempting to shoot up a black-tie venue filled head over heels with swells from the world of journalism was destined to backfire.
Indeed “Kim Wit” Jimmy Kimmel still doesn’t get it that his unfunny joke about First Lady Melania Trump as “an expectant widow” delivered in the same venue did backfire. Kimmel “rejects” White House criticism of his distasteful remark.
Not everybody is that obtuse. An editorial at The Free Press focuses on “The Culture That Bred Cole Allen,” asking “How does the unacceptable become acceptable?” Also at TFP, Douglas Murray, who attended the White House Correspondents Association dinner, notes the “Reason the Shooter’s Manifesto Sounded Familiar“:
My Saturday night began the same way it did for most attendees of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: being harangued by protesters outside the venue. As I walked up to the hotel, one woman in a keffiyeh screamed at me, “How could you possibly have dinner with a child rapist?”
That was the tenor going in.
One of Allen’s the illogical points in his “manifesto” is that President Trump is a pedophile.
New York-DC psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert finds (as do others) a “common thread that ties a would-be assassin’s manifesto to a journalist’s excuses for “microlooting,” as endorsed in a New York Times story. Alpert writes:
The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner wasn’t random. The alleged perpetrator accompanied it with a manifesto justifying his actions: “Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be ‘inconvenient’ for people who aren’t the victim?” he wrote. “In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.”
This reflects a pattern you see every day in less spectacular form.
Nadja Spiegelman, an editor at the New York Times, recently coined the term “microlooting” to describe acts of stealing from big corporations, such as shoplifting from Whole Foods, and feeling justified in doing so. Ms. Spiegelman hosted a podcast in which left-wing commentator Hasan Piker said he’s “pro-stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers” and because self-checkout systems anticipate theft. …
This isn’t about theft. It’s about how easily grievance turns into permission—how feeling wronged starts to look like a reason to do wrong.
What did Donald Trump do to wrong the American Left/elite crowd that hates him so much? Well, this (“Trump Is on a Hero’s Journey“):
Donald Trump came from nowhere (Queens is in the nowhere part of New York City), although he had something most don’t get: a head start. His father was wealthy. Mr. Trump was given a small fortune, and he grew it into a big one. He hustled himself into a position as the premier nouveau riche real-estate man in the world’s most dynamic city….
Mr. Trump’s (2016) victory inspired confusion and rage. The elites he had defeated refused to accept him as the nation’s leader. They hounded him. They conspired to jam him up on false charges of collusion with a foreign power. They impeached him twice.
Wall Street Journal columnist Bill McGurn says “three cheers for the Secret Service,” which behaved courageously at the dinner, one surviving only because of a bullet proof vest, while elsewhere on the same great page James Freeman says, “America needs Democrats to pounce.” Pictured is befuddled former President Barack Obama, who is still searching for Cole Allen’s motive, despite Allen’s having made it abundantly clear in the manifesto. Karol Markowicz writes that the Left has the ability to stop the violent rhetoric. Just for the record: I think the answer to the question I posed in the headline is “no.” The hatred and ideology are too ingrained. Ms. Must would love to be proven wrong.
Investigators, meanwhile, are working on why Allen apparently did not want to target FBI head Kash Patel. Unherd’s Sohrab Amari sees Cole Allen as postmodern. The New York Post profiles the “picture perfect” Allen family. And a socialist socialite says Mrs. Hegseth’s WHCA dinner dress didn’t cost enough. In closing, a Byronic take on Allen’s manifesto:
It wasn’t a crazy manifesto, like the Unabomber. It wasn’t an identity-consumed manifesto, like the Tennessee transgender shooter. Instead, it was an oddly cheerful document, especially given that Allen appeared to expect to be killed in his attack. But more than anything, Allen’s manifesto resembled the reams of anti-Trump boilerplate one sees on some left-leaning social media.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla (I still can’t get used to that) are paying a state visit today. Being a sucker for royal visits, I hope you won’t miss the New York Times feature on great moments in royal visits past. CBS also has a nice spread on the visit. The King and Queen had tea with the Trumps. Gerard Baker wonders if the Prez and King can save the special relationship.
The special relationship isn’t the only thing going through a rough patch. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is begging lawmakers to allow him to miss a budget deadline. In a City Journal piece headlined “New York’s Real Pied-à-Terre Problem,” John Ketcham argues Mamdani’s plan to tax wealthy part-time residents doesn’t address a bigger issue: rent-stabilized apartments used illegally as second homes.
Steve Forbes offers four ways to fix what’s wrong with New York City and stop the exodus. With a dazzlingly clear analysis of the exodus:
The political class in New York keeps looking for complicated explanations for a very simple fact: people leave when government makes life too expensive, too cramped, too disorderly and too unrewarding.
New York, as you know, isn’t the only place that chasing out the rich. An editorial at the WSJ (“The California Wealth Tax Advances”) notes that, according to a new study, some $777 billion in wealth has already fled the state.
A lefty’s hopeful take: “The Iran conflict has become the new Cold War” in Axios. Sorry, but “It’s Way Too Early to Declare Defeat in Iran,” according to Walter Russell Mead. Mead says that Trump’s critics “think he is desperately looking for an exit. Don’t count on it.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. blockade is so effective that “Iran Is Flooded With So Much Unsold Oil That It’s Stashing It in Derelict Tanks.” Iran is turning to Putin for help. President Trump appears to be less than favorably impressed with Iran’s latest proposal.
All Is Lost: According o the Washington Free Beacon, Wendy Sherman, Obama era negotiator with Iran, opines that President Trump will fail in negotiations because “doesn’t have enough experts.” Like Wendy Sherman?
Meanwhile, purple-haired Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro completely lost it in a hearing with EPA head Lee Zeldin, tactlessly suggesting Mr. Zeldin drink weed killer:
DeLauro, the purple-haired ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, argued that Zeldin’s budget proposal “reads like a climate change denier’s manifesto” as she asked the EPA chief to “justify abandoning [the EPA’s] duty to protect Americans” from climate change.
More calmly, George Washington University law professor and Fox Contributor Jonathan Turley argues that the Commonwealth of Virginia’s recently adopted redistricting scheme should be overturned by the Supreme Court:
Virginia was considered the gold standard among states rejecting gerrymandering with fairly divided districts in a state that is divided right down the middle. It then elected Governor Abigail Spanberger, who assured voters that she was adamantly against gerrymandering and then immediately called for the most radical gerrymandered map in the nation after she was elected.
