News Vérité

Cole Tomas Allen, now officially a suspect until convicted but clearly the person armed to the teeth who ran past metal detectors, has managed to transform the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner into the stuff of history. Some 36 hours later, the dinner and his interruption of it are still the lead stories on virtually every TV channel, at least the national ones. Allen, in a memoir, even admitted to targeting Trump and Company (except Kash Patel for some reason) with his arsenal of weapons; the assailant-in-legal-waiting in his often tangled verbiage famously dubbed himself “Your Friendly Federal Assassin.” Now that’s a phrase that needs to go down in the history books. I can envision it as the title of a book or movie. After-the-fact research shows that Allen had worried his family members by often uttering threatening statements. On the day of the incident, he sent his 1,000-word memoir to his family, and his brother promptly alerted police in Connecticut (where the brother lived). Of course, the event was taking place in New York City, not Connecticut. The most interesting residue to me is how Demofiends are running from the rhetoric that creates monsters in the person of a

For one brief shining moment — one that will hopefully endure — both President Trump and the media, U.S. and European, came together in response to an incident that could have led to tragic consequences. The event, as most of the world now knows, was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner honoring the First Amendment, with President Trump as the principal speaker. As the gathered guests began the first dinner course at about 8:36 p.m. ET, gunshots rang out, and police and Secret Service sprang into action. It turns out that the gunshots accompanied the attempted break-in of the dinner by an assailant armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and “multiple knives,” as police reported. The assailant was later identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California. He was a registered guest at the Washington Hilton Hotel, where the event was being staged. Trump, who was whisked off the dais after the gunshots, actually wanted the dinner to continue after the incident, but the Secret Service decided that that was not a good idea. Instead, Trump went back to the White House to hold a press conference. “In light of this evening’s events, I ask all Americans to recommit to