What's up guys, and welcome back to the Reagan Faulkner Show. Now this weekend was crazy, and today we are covering everything that happened at the White House Correspondents Dinner, breaking down something that should chill every American to their core, to be honest with you, and that is the escalating political violence in our country. It's no longer just rhetoric, it's no longer theoretical, it is real, it is deadly, and it is targeting our leaders more than ever.

And I'll be honest, I had a completely different episode planned for y'all today. I was going to talk about the SPLC, we were going to break down and dive into that scandal, and I was super, super excited about doing that research and sharing it with y'all, but Cole Thomas Allen, he had some different plans for us, didn't he? So as y'all know, Saturday, April 25th, that was the 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner. Now if you don't know what this event is because I'd heard of it, I knew a little bit, like that there were a lot of different journalists and media personnel there, but I never really actually knew what it was.

So this event is hosted by the White House Correspondents Association, which is a group, a non-profit, that is made up of independent journalists that actually cover the President and the White House. Now the overall purpose of the event is for journalists, politicians, celebrities, and other political insiders in general, like even senior White House officials and such. They are there to network, to raise money for scholarships, to actually perform comedies, perform entertainment, perform roasts even, and then to overall educate the public on the First Amendment and its importance, which I'll note, I think it's pretty ironic that we were at an event, not we, you and I, but that our President, our Cabinet, our media, were at an event where the whole purpose is to really take note of the First Amendment, educate on it, celebrate it even, and that is where we saw political violence and silencing take place.

I mean, what a contrast to see an event openly endorsing your First Amendment and your freedom of speech while you actively see somebody trying to shut it down and to destroy our democratic process, destroy an entire Cabinet and President that were, you know, duly elected and then thus appointed. I think that that's a really interesting contrast. But anyway, back to what we're talking about, 2026, this year, was the first year that President Trump was attending as a sitting U.S. President.

He had refused to attend his entire first term and the first year of his second term. That's mostly because he said that the media was fake, that he didn't like the media, we know how he feels about fake news, so he just didn't go. Now, he explained his shift, he cited America 250, and he was noting how the correspondents now, and this is a direct quote from Truth Social, which we should not be surprised, but how the correspondents now, quote, admit that I am truly one of the greatest presidents in the history of our country, the GOAT, according to many.

And then he pledged to make the evening the, quote, greatest, hottest, and most spectacular dinner of any kind ever. That was his Truth Social post in amazing Trump fashion. The all caps are there.

I love seeing Trump use GOAT and use hottest. I think it's so funny. I mean, he's like close to 80 now.

If he's not 80, it just cracks me up. It's a little cringe, but it's really funny to see. So let's take it all in.

Trump and Melania, they were sitting at the front of the room, that big, long table. They were chatting, they were mingling, and they were actually watching the mentalist and magician Oz Perlman try to guess Caroline Leavitt's baby's name. So if y'all have seen that picture where it's like somebody's unfurling a piece of paper and Melania kind of puts her hand up to her mouth, she's like, and she's acting all surprised.

And then like, you see the sudden shift and she like, here's the gunshots and reacts. And everybody's like, oh, what was on the paper? It said Vivian. And that was Perl or Oz Perlman was trying to guess Caroline Leavitt, her new baby's name.

And he guessed that it was Vivian. So I saw people getting crazy on the internet about what they thought it said. It said Vivian.

Allegedly, it was him trying to guess the baby's name. But anyway, as he is literally performing this trick at 830, the shots ring out in the Washington Hilton. We see Melania react.

We see the person to the left of Trump react. We see Trump just kind of sit there and take it all in, I guess. I don't know.

I mean, his 60 Minutes interview, he said he just wanted to stand there and watch. And the Secret Service was like, no, sir, you can't. You can't do that.

And then he was still trying to stand there and watch. So I mean, I think it was a shock to everybody. But 830 shots ring out in the Washington Hilton.

Immediately, the president, the vice president, the first lady and the cabinet members were rushed out of the room as quickly as possible. And the alleged suspect, Cole Thomas Allen, was tackled and immediately detained at that first security checkpoint. So the purpose of that security checkpoint, where we see him speed past on that security camera footage, and then he ends up tackled like a couple of yards away.

The purpose of that was to intercept any bad people. So it did do its job as an American, as somebody that loves my country and obviously doesn't want to see my president get assassinated. I hate that he made it that close, but it did perform its job.

It did intercept the threat and they were able to tackle and detain him. So Allen had a 12 gauge shotgun on him. He had a 38 caliber semi-automatic pistol and he also had four knives.

And for context, the pistol was legally purchased around October of 2023, as was the shotgun in 2025, according to the Associated Press. I read somewhere that he was actually storing these in his parents' house unbeknownst to them. They had no clue that the guns were in their house.

I don't believe that they were happy that the guns were in their house from the brief article that I skimmed, but that is where the guns were being stored. I don't know. It didn't really say why he bought the guns.

Obviously, he wouldn't have been planning this for a long time because Trump wasn't even president in October of 2023. But he did buy the guns, 2023 and then 2025. He took the guns on.

He rode a train. That's how he got them to Washington, D.C. I saw people saying, oh, my gosh, how do you get him on an airplane? He rode a train, stopped in Chicago, got back on the train, went to D.C., had the guns, had the knives. I don't plan on talking about his manifesto in this episode.

I mean, it's crazy. Y'all should totally go and read it. It's wild.

I mean, this individual was very struggling mentally quite a lot. But it is it is really interesting. He talks about how his goal was to inflict as much damage on President Trump's cabinet from most important to least important, talks about the shotgun shells that he chose and how they will perform the least damage to the walls and to innocent bystanders, I suppose.

It is it is really interesting and kind of horrifying to read. Y'all should take a look and maybe we'll dive deeper into the entire manifesto in a different episode. This episode will be long enough and thorough enough without it.

But who is Cole Thomas Allen? Who is this man that put together this entire plan, this entire manifesto? He bought all these weapons. He brought all these weapons. He was staying in the Washington Hilton.

Who was he or who is he? He's still alive. Who is he? He lives in or lived. I mean, now he's in jail for probably a very long time.

But he lived in Torrance, California, and he graduated from Caltech in 2017 with a degree in mechanical engineering. And he was also a teaching assistant at Caltech. Interestingly enough, he was a teaching assistant.

He was a part time teacher at C2 Education, where he was actually voted Teacher of the Year in 2024. In 2025, he got his master's degree in computer science from California State or California State University, Dominguez Hills. He interned at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he was also a part time video game developer.

He had a game that was actually kind of in its indie phase, I guess. I don't know if he maintained it or what. I believe it said that he launched it in 2019 on a streaming platform called Steam, where you can download video games.

I mean, he had a video game that he had developed and put out, put online for other people. So, I mean, what happened? He was a smart kid. He was a smart adult.

He, you know, he could have really been going places. What happened to him to turn him into a brilliant mind to a would be near assassin? And unfortunately, that's a question that we will most likely never get a good answer to or a good insight of. But unfortunately, we think, oh, my gosh, that's terrible to see a young, smart, capable kid, you know, grow up, be 31 and try to kill the president and the entire cabinet like, you know, that that can't happen very often.

Right. Well, it actually is a lot more common than you would think. Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin, straight A student, perfect 4.0 GPA, 34 ACT score.

And for reference, a 36 is a perfect score. So he would have been in the top one percent of students in the United States. He received the presidential scholarship, which is the highest academic award that can be given to a graduating high schooler.

This was to go to Utah State University, which, as we know, he did not finish school there. He was not attending there at the time of the assassination at Utah State University. But he did have a presidential scholarship, which is very, very impressive.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the near Butler assassin, the Butler shooter. He was a high school senior with a 4.87 GPA, 1530 out of 1600 SAT score. Perfect scores on three different AP exams.

Very hard to do. I know from personal experience I do not have a perfect score on an AP exam. I wish I did.

I five out of five, but that's not a perfect score. Luigi Mangione, UnitedHealthcare CEO, he was valedictorian of the Gilman School in 2016, which is a very elite, very prestigious school. He graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 with a BSc in computer and in computer engineering.

And he also had a minor in mathematics. He had an MSc in computer and information sciences, and he was the lead on a university video game development project. So none of these assassins or would be assassins or near assassins were particularly stupid people.

These they were not dumb. What's scary is they were in the top 10 percent, arguably potentially even the top 5 percent of the best minds in our entire country. These are people that would be competitive for nearly any internship.

These are people that interned at literally NASA. I mean, these are not your run of the mill, thuggy, dropped out of high school, dropped out of college, illiterate individuals. These people were smart.

These people were smart enough that they probably should have known that they weren't going to succeed in assassinating the president of the United States. That's kind of one of the biggest things to me is like, how do you think you're going to get away with this? But they're not stupid. So what's influencing their opinions? I mean, this is something that bugs me is what is influencing their opinions? Is it our education system? Is it their friends? Is it our colleges? Is it technology? I mean, what is it? Because we see other people that are smart that obviously aren't assassinating people.

Like, what is the common thread between these four very smart, college-educated assassins or would-be assassins? In the days after every one of these tragic events, I saw the same narrative, to be honest. Nobody really dove into the nuance of what happened, the reality of what happened, why it's happening, why we keep seeing political violence. And I mean, dive into it in a research methodology, not just throw your opinion up on social media.

And I see the same narrative. We see important politicians on all sides disavow political violence, which, good, they need to do that. I see progressives lament the near-miss or even celebrate the assassination attempt or, in Charlie and the UnitedHealthcare CEO's case, the actual assassination.

And maybe we'll do a video about that or a TikTok or something about reacting because there are so many. I couldn't even fit them into this episode. There are so many people, like, crashing out over the guy not succeeding in this assassination, which is horrifying.

We see conservative influencers call on their followers to stop the violence, disavow the violence, not that their followers are perpetuating the violence, but just saying to everybody, like, we need to stop the violence. They're making their PSA, their press release about stopping the violence. You know, I'm sure hoping that other people will see it, the haters in the comments will see it and be like, oh, you know, this is real.

Maybe I shouldn't be so violent or use such violent rhetoric. And we see liberal and progressive influencers accuse the right of causing the division by calling the left violent, which, in my opinion, you know, the people perpetuating the violence happen to be on the left. So do with that what you will.

But it's all very predictable. And what's more predictable, in my personal opinion, is the inevitable outcome that we are going to see. No matter who calls for an end to the political violence, it could be Trump.

It could be Obama. It could be me. It could be some random other online presence, online influencer, online podcaster from the left, from the right.

It doesn't really matter. It's not going to stop. In my personal opinion, no matter how many times this happens, no matter how many times we disavow the political violence, it's not going to stop.

Influencers like Hassan Piker are calling for violence, continuously calling for violence and spewing radical socialist narratives. Just take a listen right here. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist bloods, dude.

Nichols wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson, as the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit paywalled system of health care in this country, and the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths.

And that was a fascinating story for me because America is very draconian about crime and punishment. They're very black and white on this issue. And yet, because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.

Nichols. There are two specific types of socialists. There are democratic socialists, which these people believe that they can use elections to, I guess, democratically elect politicians with their views that are going to influence policy.

And this will create and bring in their socialist utopia that they believe will solve the world's problems and everybody will live kumbaya like in Lion King. Then we have revolutionary socialists. These are completely different, completely different than democratic socialists.

Not that I agree with either, but the democratic socialists literally just believe, oh, we're going to use elections and we're going to vote in people like Mamdani and people like AOC and people like Bernie Sanders. And they'll fix it. They'll do the policy.

They'll bring in Lion King, communist utopia, kumbaya. Revolutionary socialists literally believe that they have to violently overthrow the federal government and then they can instill their socialist utopia. They have to overthrow the federal government through violence on their own, like Civil War type stuff going on there.

And then they're going to force their socialist utopia upon everybody else. Now, we're going to hop back to Trump's near assassin. Allen was a member of the Wide Awakes.

Now, this is a different group. It is not clear really what they are from my research. I cannot particularly figure it out.

They were born in 1860 where they kind of, they were like abolitionists. They were Republican abolitionists. Then today, they were re-founded in 2020.

They are no longer Republican in any way, shape or form. They are definitely a left-wing organization. I encourage you to go to their website.

It's very interesting, very confusing, very odd. But their website states, quote, we are a community of voices that welcome the ideas and membership of all as we grow this movement to create a new culture together in pursuit of liberation of mind, body and spirit. And then a different part of the website goes on to say, quote, the Wide Awakes are an open source network of radically, open source network who radically re-imagine the future through creative collaboration.

So we're seeing radical, we're seeing liberation. These are all words that socialists and communists use. Collaboration, they talk a lot about being collaborative or to working together or the collective, things like that.

So interesting language kind of for their, it's not their mission, vision, values, but it's like the first thing that you'll really see on their website. And I'm not asserting that this group is socialist. I'm not asserting that they're communist.

I'm not asserting that they're violent. I'm not asserting any of that. What I am saying is that if you go to their website and you go down the rabbit hole, there are a lot of similarities between this group and other radical far left groups in terms of their color scheme, their language, their organizing structure.

They have a like, I guess it's like a Google Doc that you can open and it has their organizing structure and upcoming events and how to join different meetings and things like that. So, you know, it's very similar to the structure of some other far left organizations that we see. The Communist Party of the USA, they state on their website in reference to socialism in the United States, basically how to obtain it.

And there, it's a long thing. Again, I encourage you to go look at it, Communist Party USA. But a segment of how to bring socialism to the USA says, the revolutionary process, revolutionary process is ongoing.

It involves the accumulation of experience, the internal deterioration of capitalism, sharpening class contradictions, growing resistance to imperialism, the ideological and political development of revolutionary forces. Even during periods that seem calm or stagnant, these processes are at work beneath the surface. The engine driving all of us is class struggle.

Any serious assessment of the moment must consider this broader unfolding process. So basically what they're saying here is that there must be a revolutionary process where capitalism's deteriorating internally, where people are actively working to show class stratifications or sharpening class contradictions. Again, think Luigi Mangione and the United Healthcare CEO where people were celebrating and saying, oh, well, he was a millionaire.

He was this, or he was a CEO, or he was wealthy. And look at us poor people. And look at us.

We can't get health care. We can't do this. We can't do that.

And you saw that class contradiction. It spurred an entire thing where literal normal people were defending Luigi Mangione because they had had experience. They felt this class contradiction, even though they didn't know what this really meant or that some of this is part of revolutionary communism and socialism.

We see growing resistance to imperialism. I look at how I was taught about Native Americans in the United States, and then I see how the next generations are being taught. It's very different.

We had Columbus Day when I was in school, until I graduated, I believe. We had Columbus Day. Now it's Indigenous Peoples Day.

We are seeing growing resistance to imperialism and accusing things of being imperialism that weren't really imperialism and changing what imperialism actually means historically, changing the definition of it for the generations that are coming in behind mine. The ideological and political development of revolutionary forces, we see people on social media literally advocating for political violence. That is a revolutionary force.

Normal, everyday people that used to be good people that are getting propagandized into believing that political violence is OK. There's a study by CSAS. I can't remember the exact statistics, but it shows that this was September 25, 2025.

It shows that leftists are more likely to be in favor of political violence. I believe it's like 25% of leftists to 12% of conservatives, maybe, or maybe 6% of conservatives. Again, we can do a deep dive into that another day, but it is very, very interesting to see this mission statement of sorts and then to see it actually playing out in our institutions.

Now, American communists and socialists, they do seek a revolution. In fact, if you listen to their lectures, if you go to their events, if you watch their YouTube videos and their rhetoric, they believe that a revolution is the only way to bring about their goals. Now, again, this can be a democratic revolution where people have had enough and they go to the polls and they vote all the way down the line for DSA candidates, or this can be a violent revolution where the federal government is overthrown.

These ideas proliferate public schools, colleges, universities, Discord channels, Blue Sky, Reddit, Twitch streamers, and more. They are everywhere. If you know what you're looking for and you know where to look, it's everywhere.

It's everywhere. It's actually crazy. They are preying on disgruntled Americans.

They are preying on well-meaning liberals and progressives that aren't radical or socialist in nature. They're just normal everyday people that want equity and equality and justice for all, and they're getting brainwashed. They are preying on that class stratification that we talked about, people that can't get a head or can't get a job or can't buy a house, and they're preying on that.

And above all, where this really comes to a head is they are preying on young, impressionable minds, the young, impressionable minds of our children growing up here in the United States, in our school systems, in our university systems. That is who they are preying on. And they're using things like, oh, you can't get a job, or you can't buy a house, or you can't do this and you can't do that.

And instead of teaching that they can work towards that and have the American dream and maybe, you know, their degree won't help them, maybe blue collar is what's going to help them, you know, that there are alternatives and things. They just teach them that socialism is the only way that they'll really be free. Socialism is the only way that they'll ever truly be liberated.

And that is how this political violence is really stirring and growing, is because this is what our children are being spoonfed by our institutions. So with that, while I agree that it is important to disavow political violence, as other people have done all over social media, as the president has done, as Obama has done, as Caroline Leavitt has done, as Melania Trump has done, literally everybody, I would counter that no matter how much we disavow it, we haven't seen the end of it, nor will we see the end of it anytime soon unless something drastically changes. Now, listen to this clip from Charlie Kirk while he was on a college campus doing a Prove Me Wrong table.

What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option. OK, so feelings mean nothing to me. Isn't why we had the First Amendment to try to push our boundaries and to hear things that might make you mildly uncomfortable? You're mislabeling exactly why we're here and what we're doing.

If I was who you think I am, I would not be talking to you this way. I would not be having this civil discourse or this dialogue or this discussion. If I was who you think I am, I would not allow anyone who disagrees with me to say whatever they want at any time here.

See, again, when you stop talking, that's when violence starts. I got a question. Here we see a leftist argue that he is being violent, that Charlie Kirk is being violent by challenging rhetoric and using his First Amendment right to free speech.

As long as we teach America's youth that emotional violence is real, that a mean tweet or a conservative speech or an idea that you don't like is the same thing as a physical punch, we will continue to see blood in our streets. If you tell a kid that words are violence, you are giving them permission to respond to words with punches and bullets and other forms of real violence, physical violence. We have a generation that literally can't handle a debate.

So what do they do? They're going to handle a rifle instead. It's time to stop the safe space delusion. Just stop it.

Just emotional violence is not really a thing. Just stop the whole thing about that before it kills us all, because it's like an eye for an eye theory. These people think, oh, well, they hurt my feelings or they said something I didn't like or they didn't validate my gender.

So what can I do? I can flip their table. I can punch them. I can kick them.

I can bite them. I can shoot them. I can bomb them.

No, you can't do those things. Somebody can say something atrocious to you, but you can't use violence on them. I mean, I feel like we learned this in preschool.

I saw one kid bite one person because he said something he didn't like or didn't share a toy. And that was my learning lesson. I didn't have to bite anybody to find that out.

He got in trouble. He got in trouble because you can't bite people, because you cannot violently attack people. That is how we degrade as human beings.

We are pretty evolved. We don't usually go out and hurt people because we didn't get what we wanted. But when we start doing that, we start backtracking.

We start devolving into literal just animals, no different than the animals that we see in the wilderness or the jungle. Now, I'm not saying we shut down free speech or that we ban these groups or that we lock up these individuals. I'm not saying that at all.

But what I am saying is that parents need to know what are being taught in their schools. They need to have school choice. If they don't like what's being taught in their schools, if they don't like their kid's teacher, they should be able to pull that child out of school, send them to another school or homeschool them.

I do think parents have a right to know what is being taught in the colleges. They're paying for it or they help their kids fill out their Pell Grants most of the time and get their loans. Or, you know, they're going to have to watch their kids pay off these loans one day.

Parents still raised us. They still have, you know, if we're going to be on their health insurance till we're 25, they should have a say in our education. They should know what's going on in the classroom.

And with that, colleges also need to hold their faculty responsible if their faculty are presenting ideas in a biased manner or if they're leading students in certain directions, trying to convince them of certain things. That is not a professor's job. A professor is there to teach unbiased information and make sure that we walk away as holistically educated adults ready for the workforce to the groups that are legitimately planning to overthrow the federal government.

Yes, those like the Turtle Island Liberation Front that was busted on December 12th, 2025, for having explosive devices and planning a New Year's Eve attack. The FBI needs to track these people down and make treason a thing again. Treason used to be a thing.

Overthrowing the federal government used to be wrong. Planning to overthrow the federal government used to be wrong. We need to make that wrong again so that people are afraid to try to plan to overthrow the federal government.

I don't know how much more really needs to be said about that. You cannot plan to overthrow your government. Literally in every other country, that is wrong.

And for some reason, in the United States, we turn a blind eye to it or kind of give them a pat on the back. And it doesn't really make news or headlines. And I mean, many of you might not even know what the Turtle Island Liberation Front is or what they were doing last December.

It's just crazy. That should have made national headlines. That should have been crazy news.

We need to bring to light how our institutions have been co-opted and stop deeming these assassins as crazy or stupid or, you know, brainwashed, which they are brainwashed or out of their minds, because I hate to admit it, but they're likely neither. They're likely neither crazy or stupid. More than likely, they are just as co-opted as our institutions, and they are just as blind to reality and how they have been co-opted as we are to the socialist, radical influences lurking in places that we as Americans used to trust.

The establishment wants you to think that all of this is random chaos, that there's no silver line linking it all together, but it's not. They have co-opted the schools. They've co-opted the media.

And now the narrative is being lost. They're losing control. Our job isn't just to win an election.

It is to rid our bureaucracies of this radical, indoctrinated curricula. Find it. Expose it.

Command your legislators to kill it. Otherwise, this disease will keep on spreading until there's literally nothing left to save. Thanks for joining me in this emergency breakdown episode.

Again, I wanted to do the SPLC. We are going to do the SPLC soon. We're going to break it all down, talk about the scandal.

But right now we have a country to save. And it starts with being awake to the reality of what we're up against, understanding it, finding it and rooting it out. Follow at the Reagan Faulkner Show on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Substack.

Follow at the Wilmington Standard on Instagram and Facebook. And if you want to support the parallel economy, get your next batch of seven weeks coffee with code all caps Reagan 2026. 10% goes to crisis pregnancy centers, and it is literally the best organic coffee that you will ever drink.

Be sure to like, subscribe and leave a comment. And I really want to know, do you think that the education system is to blame for this rise in violence? Do you think that it's something different? Do you think that it's a combination of multiple things? Drop it in the comments, because I really want to know and I want to keep researching this further. So let's talk about it.

I'm Reagan Faulkner, and this is the Reagan Faulkner Show. And I will see you on the next one.