His Grad School President Quoted the “Patron Saint of Political Violence” as His Daily Mantra. His Student Tried to Kill the President.
Cole Tomas Allen spent four years at Caltech and three at Cal State Dominguez Hills — a campus where the president invoked Frantz Fanon, called by The Atlanticthe “Patron Saint of Political Violence,” as his personal inspiration. On April 25, 2026, Allen rushed a Secret Service checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. An officer was shot in the chest. Allen is charged with attempted assassination of the President.
He is presumed innocent. The data around him is not.
Updated: May 2, 2026 · 3:00 PM ET
Caltech engineer. DEI-saturated grad school. Manifesto calling Trump a traitor. Shotgun at the WHCD.
Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, earned a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) between 2013 and 2017. He interned at NASA. He won a local TV feature for inventing a wheelchair safety device as a student. He later earned a Master of Science in Computer Science from California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), graduating in May 2025. At C2 Education tutoring, he was named “Teacher of the Month” for December 2024.
Approximately ten minutes before rushing the WHCD security checkpoint on April 25, 2026, Allen emailed his family a manifesto calling himself a “friendly federal assassin,” comparing Trump to a traitor, and expressing rage at the Trump administration’s detention policies. He carried a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. A Secret Service officer was shot once in the chest. Allen was wounded and arrested.
His online record, recovered from Bluesky (handle: “Coldforce”), showed posts comparing Trump’s 2024 election win to “Nazis getting elected” and encouraging followers to buy firearms. He donated $25 to ActBlue for Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign. His sister told Secret Service he made “radical statements” constantly and had referenced a plan to “do something” to fix societal problems. He attended a “No Kings” protest and investigators identified loose affiliation with The Wide Awakes, a progressive network co-organizing with the Sunrise Movement and Climate Defiance.
The CSUDH president called Frantz Fanon his “daily mantra.” Fanon wrote that violence is a “cleansing force.”
During the years Cole Allen attended Cal State Dominguez Hills (2022–2025), the university’s president was Thomas Parham(served 2018–December 2025). In a 2024 webinar, Parham stated he wanted to “dislodge” students from “intellectual, emotional, and behavioral apathy” and directly attacked President Trump.
More significantly: Parham publicly cited the philosopher Frantz Fanonas his “daily mantra.” Fanon, a Martinique-born revolutionary theorist, is the author of The Wretched of the Earth, in which he argued that anti-colonial violence is a “cleansing force” that “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction.”The Atlantichas called Fanon the “Patron Saint of Political Violence.” Parham invoked him as a role model for his entire administrative approach.
“When you can brag about grabbing women by the privates, that is sexual assault that would wind everybody else up in jail.”
CSUDH President Thomas Parham, in a 2024 university webinar — directly attacking President Trump by name
When ICE used a CSUDH parking lot as a staging area in July 2025, Parham wrote to students calling the federal agents’ presence “disheartening and upsetting for many in our community.” Anonymous CSUDH employees told Fox News Digital the campus maintains “far-left ideology and antipathy toward countering views.” One stated: “Campus policy treats ICE like it is an invading army. There is constant talk of ‘the community under threat.’”
Chicana/o Studies, Africana Studies, Asian Pacific Studies — maintained despite serious financial constraints and few enrolled majors
Fanon's defining work: colonial violence is a 'cleansing force.' The Atlantic: Fanon is the 'Patron Saint of Political Violence.'
President Parham's letter to students, July 2025 — called federal agents' presence 'disheartening and upsetting'
Parham's 2024 address referenced Trump by name while discussing his role 'disrupting and dislodging' certain beliefs
To advance DEI, Caltech dropped the prerequisites for calculus, chemistry, and physics. At a science and engineering school.
Allen’s undergraduate institution, the California Institute of Technology, is one of the world’s most prestigious STEM schools. It is also, according to a October 2025 report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), “thoroughly saturated with DEI’s broader ideological agenda” at every level of campus administration.
Core STEM entry requirements eliminated to advance DEI enrollment goals. A Caltech engineering degree no longer requires that incoming students know calculus before arriving.
Required for faculty and researchers across departments — not elective.
'Positionality in Research' (101 and 201) — applying Marxist-derived ideological frameworks to physics and engineering research methodology.
NAS report: the framework 'translates Marxist ideas from class struggle to broader aspects of racial and cultural struggle' — institutionalized into STEM curricula.
This isn’t one radicalized man. This is what the surveys have been warning about for years.
Multiple independent studies — from FIRE, the Skeptic Research Center, the Buckley Institute, and the Goldwater Institute — document a campus environment that systematically suppresses conservative speech, enforces ideological conformity, and correlates with dramatically higher acceptance of political violence among its graduates.
High school diploma or less: 23%. Some college: ~20%. Bachelor's: 26%. Graduate/professional: 40% — nearly double the least-educated cohort. Gen Z political liberals: 49%.
27 of 43 undergraduate departments have zero Republican professors. Three departments have neither Republicans nor independents. Humanities: 72:1 ratio. 98.4% of faculty donations went to Democrats.
Only 11 of 257 schools achieved a C or higher. For the first time, a majority of students opposed allowing any of six hypothetical speakers — liberal or conservative — on campus.
A record high. Bottom five: Barnard (last), Columbia, Indiana University, University of Washington, Northeastern.
Only 15% of universities protect speech to the level the Constitution requires. The rest use policies that could be used to punish students for protected expression.
Down 13 percentage points from the Class of 2023. Only 17% of conservative students felt comfortable discussing controversial topics vs. 41% of liberal students.
In order to succeed academically or socially. Described by researchers as 'preference falsification under institutional pressure.'
40 million student hours. University of Michigan: $30M+/year for 241 DEI employees. University of Virginia: 235 DEI employees, some earning up to $580,000/year.
Cole Allen is not the first. The pattern runs from California to the Capitol.
The most directly comparable case is Nicholas Roske, 27, of Simi Valley, California. On June 8, 2022, Roske traveled to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland carrying a Glock-17, zip ties, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a hammer, a screwdriver, a crowbar, duct tape, and padded boots. His stated mission: kill three conservative Supreme Court justices to “flip the Court’s ideological balance for decades.” He was motivated by the leaked Dobbs draft opinion and school shootings.
Roske pleaded guilty in April 2025. In October 2025, a federal judge sentenced him to 97 months — over eight years — in prison plus lifetime supervised release. His case was sourced to DOJ primary documents.
RAND Corporation (September 2025) documented approximately 150 politically motivated attacks in the first half of 2025 — nearly double the same period in 2024. Political violence in the U.S. is at its highest level since the 1970s.
The target of the assassination attempt posted from Truth Social within minutes.
Law Enforcement has requested that we leave the premises, consistent with protocol, which we will do, immediately. I will be giving a press conference in 30 minutes from the White House Press Briefing Room. The First Lady, plus the Vice President, and all Cabinet members, are in perfect condition. We will be speaking to you in a half an hour. I have spoken with all the representatives in charge of the event, and we will be rescheduling within 30 days.
The Fake News Media, and the Radical Left, have created a Climate of Hate and Violence against me. When you tell people, day after day, that the President of the United States is 'Hitler,' 'a Dictator,' 'the Enemy of Democracy' — unstable people listen. They act on it. Our universities teach this. Our media amplifies it. The shooting last night is the direct result of years of political indoctrination. We must hold them accountable.
Cal State Dominguez Hills, the school attended by the so-called 'Friendly Federal Assassin,' had a President who praised Frantz Fanon — the man who wrote that political violence is a 'cleansing force' — as his DAILY MANTRA. These are the people teaching our children. Democrats call this 'Higher Education.' I call it what it is: a taxpayer-funded radicalization factory. DEFUND IT!