Hello and welcome to Monday, April 27, 2026. It's National Tell a Story Day, National Prime Rib Day, National Gummi Bear Day, and National Little Pampered Dog Day.
Today in History:
1749: First performance of George Frideric Handel's "Music for the Royal Fireworks"
1773: British House of Commons passes the Tea Act (later led to the Boston Tea Party)
1810: Ludwig van Beethoven composes his famous piano piece "Für Elise"
1840: Foundation stone for new Palace of Westminster, London, laid by Sarah Barry, wife of its architect Charles Barry
1865: Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) is chartered
1867: Charles Gounod's opera "Romeo et Juliette" premieres at the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, France
1897: Grant's Tomb, the final resting place of US President Ulysses S. Grant, is completed
1937: 1st US Social Security payment made
1946: 1st radar installed aboard a commercial ship
1960: 1st atomic-powered electric-drive submarine launched (Tullibee)
1982: Trial of John Hinckley, Jr. begins for the attempted assassination of US President Ronald Reagan
Birthdays Today Include: Samuel Morse, American inventor (telegraph, Morse code); Ulysses S. Grant, 18th US President (1869–77) and Union general; Sergei Prokofiev, Russian composer ("Peter and the Wolf"; "Alexander Nevsky"); Walter Lantz, American cartoonist (Woody Woodpecker creator); Jack Klugman, American actor ("The Odd Couple," "Quincy, M.E.," "Goodbye, Columbus"); Coretta Scott King, American activist and wife of Martin Luther King Jr.; Casey Kasem, American radio personality (creator of American Top 40) and the voice of Shaggy on "Scooby-Doo"; Pete Ham, Welsh rock singer-songwriter and guitarist (Badfinger — "No Matter What," "Day After Day"); (Paul) "Ace" Frehley, American rock guitarist (Kiss, 1973–82 & 1996–2002); Larry Elder, American political commentator; and Sheena Easton [Orr], Scottish singer ("9 to 5 (Morning Train)"; "For Your Eyes Only").
If today's your day, we wish you a good one.
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I’ll be honest with you — I figured yesterday’s column on the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting would be my last on that topic for a while. Not because there isn’t more to say, but because it’s rare — almost unheard of — to have this much information about a shooter surface this quickly after an event like this. Past being prologue, usually any additional information, for at least a few days — if not weeks — would have been out of the ordinary. I suppose I can be forgiven for my mistake, since former President Barack Obama fell into that same trap, apparently judging that such info wouldn’t be forthcoming anytime soon.
Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy.
This is Obama taking cover in the void of information. After all, it is difficult to categorize a shooter without a manifesto or a paper trail to judge, and his statement was a calculated move to stifle talk that Democratic rhetoric fueled the attack. Van Jones played his part, too, pivoting to the "violence on all sides" defense, which is a laughably ineffective foil.
But events escaped their control.
The New York Post printed his manifesto. And as it happens, Cole Allen was on Bluesky, which I have never bothered with. You would think the search engines would have this stuff out and making the rounds, and Barry’s trying to get the egg off his face. David Strom over at Hot Air has a piece up you’ll be interested in reading: Manifesto Released: He Believed All the Lies the Democrats Now Claim They Never Said.
Of course, they did say it. They said it repeatedly.
2.5 minutes of Democrats calling for the use of political vioIence
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 26, 2026
It's on them
https://t.co/2QlIIKSwXC
Even as I hit "send" on yesterday’s column, the facts, the documents, including that manifesto, kept coming. What that info revealed proved that the situation was exactly what it appeared to be from the start. The story it told was exactly what common sense held. It showed a dyed-in-the-wool California leftist who, despite two degrees from Caltech, had in reality failed to launch and who, at 31 years old, was still living in his parents' basement. The manifesto says it all; he accepted, at face value, all the rhetoric that the left has offered for the last 12 years and acted upon that fantasy.
There's no ambiguity here. His actions are a direct result of leftist propaganda.
In that manifesto, a 1,000-word missive, Allen explicitly stated his intent to target members of the Trump administration, whom he characterized as "pedophiles, rapists, and traitors." Interestingly, he avoided referring to Kash Patel in this, for reasons he never explained. He otherwise spread the blame around, saying the press corps were "complicit" simply by choosing to attend a speech by the president.
He then tried to justify his acts under the guise of religion. He argued that Christian pacifism applies only when one is personally oppressed. He claimed that failing to act when others are oppressed—citing hypothetical victims of the administration — is not Christian behavior, but "complicity in the oppressor's crimes." All of which shows a foundational misunderstanding of his subject. Essentially, he's creating God in his own image... the height of self-serving. His social media postings indicate a strongly anti-Christian bias, so I suppose we can take his weaponized version of Christianity—preaching to us about what is and is not Christian — with a pound of salt.
I have to give the feds credit; they had Cole Allen’s social media postings scrubbed quite quickly, to the point where, when I went looking for him online two hours after he was in cuffs, face down on the carpet, there was nothing to be found. I certainly would have had it copied into my archives, and probably some significant quotes posted to yesterday’s column, had I found anything.
Cole Allen, the gunman from last night’s WH Correspondents Dinner, maintained an active online presence, especially on the leftwing social media platform Bluesky where he went by the handle https://t.co/bpKnhC8M5a with multiple references violence and guns.
— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) April 26, 2026
In one post he calls… pic.twitter.com/mvFBE0FAl7
— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) April 26, 2026
And the there's this little gem:
How did this X Account from December 21st, 2023 know to forecast this? pic.twitter.com/GrBfcQ5QHv
— Miss Katy Allison (@MissKatyAllison) April 26, 2026
I'm not sure what to make of that one.
As with yesterday, there's a small mountain of writing with all this added info coming out, much of it right here at PJ Media, from Stephen Green, Stephen Kruiser, Matt Margolis, and Scott Pinsker, to name a few. But I think this quote from Rush Limbaugh at the Wall Street Journal is worthy of a re-posting:
The latest liberal meme is to equate skepticism of the Obama administration with a tendency toward violence. That takes me back 15 years ago to the time President Bill Clinton accused “loud and angry voices” on the airwaves (i.e., radio talk-show hosts like me) of having incited Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. What self-serving nonsense. Liberals are perfectly comfortable with antigovernment protest when they’re not in power.
As a measure of how things have gone, let's take a look at what Mary Katherine Ham said at the now-defunct (and offline) creation of Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard, just a few days after the Limbaugh quote surfaced:
Where’s the civility, I ask you? Was it not just this weekend that former President Bill Clinton warned that words have power, and that in voicing dissent, we should be careful not to get out of hand? And yet, here we have a group of protesters registering their discontent with the government within close physical proximity of the actual president of the United States. With the current political climate and all the threats we’ve heard so much about, can these citizens really think that this kind of conduct is appropriate?
Well, given what we saw Saturday night, and the reaction from the Democrats since, I think the answer is an obvious "yes." Certainly, Cole Allen considered it so.
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