Cole Tomas Allen’s motivation to murder Donald Trump and members of his cabinet are at first confusing. The sketchy manifesto alleges rape, pedophilia and treason. You can wave that off as usual Trump Derangement Syndrom and go after Jimmy Kimmel, but Cole put his life on the line and he is smart. A nerd. It’s possible that he doesn’t even know Jimmy Kimmel.
I asked Gemini which concerns he revealed in his online writings and I found a number of debatable concerns about programmable money, online IDs, worker displacement by automation (AI) and mass immigration, and the madness of the World Economic Forum. I rubbed my eyes and wondered if he were a Republican. The manifesto sounds daft and that got me on the track. I asked Gemini if the quality of his posts declined and, indeed, those more or less reasonable, technical opinions disappeared early 2025 and gave way to more sloppy repetitive posts about Jeffrey Epstein and Trump. They revealed a sudden and surprising lack of curiosity. He had, for example, no knowledge of the bipartisan nature of the Epstein clients and of the WEF circles. He didn’t bother to check allegations. And he described himself as an accelerationist.
I wanted to know what he specifically tried to speed up and there was nothing really but the expected collapse of the Trump administration and ‘the system’ that might magically reboot again. Finally, we arrive at bonkers land. What he hoped to bring down wasn’t an institution, but moral corruption in and of itself. He specifically did not care how life would look like after his ‘reboot.’ In his words he prioritised ‘duty over strategy.’
Cole Tomas Allen was raised as an evangelical Christian. His supposedly “anti-Christian” views were that churches and believers were not moral enough. His reasoning doesn’t have an overtly esoteric or religious look and feel, but it leaves the territory of rationality, firstly, by a lack of interest in the outcome of his actions (the “strategy”) and, secondly, by attempting to awaken the inner morals of other people with a purifying bloodshed.
This neo-religious irrationality is the hallmark of modern left-wing fanaticism. There is an intense focus on symbols, words and activism combined with a disregard for a worldly purpose. In its darkest form – and Cole Tomas Allen falls into that category – radicals believe that collapse were inevitable and actions could not stop it. All you can do is accept your decent role as it unfolds and save your soul. They themselves would avoid religious terminology, but it makes it easier for me to describe their concept.
Jem Bendell, a co-founder of the polit-cult Extinction Rebellion, has written a paper in which he coined the term ‘deep adaption.’ Officially, the group claims to fight climate change and Bendell carefully describes the coming climate catastrophe only as either inevitable or likely, but the mindset of many of its members is “post-apocalyptic” – they are already over the idea of stopping it. They are left to seek agency over emotional despair through symbolism.
They also fail to explain what the goal of soul purification is. There’s no G-d, but a judge, somebody who can read their symbols (which include symbolic actions like going to prison for the cause) and will tell right from wrong. There’s no purpose for that, either, because that judge won’t reward you. He’s ‘the right side of history’, ‘the arc of history’, or ‘history’ itself. If those phrases don’t take the role of a neo-pagan sentient deity, they are metaphors for ‘the future generations.’ Depending on the speaker those generations do or do not exist. One group is literally called ‘The Last Generation’ which again raises the question of purpose and can only be answered if, for some speakers, ‘the future’, ‘history’ and ‘future generations’ are actual neo-pagan deities who must be pleased. I doubt that they think it through to that point, but there is a judging entity worth the trouble. In the case of Cole Tomas Allen there’s going to be a ‘reboot’ of the system populated by people.
The absence of a goal and the obsession on their tormented soul point to mental problems. These milieus and organizations attract individuals with neuroticism, anxiety, and narcissism. Some are virtue-signalling Machiavellianists who only seek status in their peer group, but for most the angst is real. Many left-wing fanatics are female. Around 64% of the members of the Extinction Rebellion are women. Professionally frustrated academics are even more susceptible to this line of thinking. 85% of the members of extinction rebellion hold university degrees. Cole Tomas Allan worked as a part-time tutor after he graduated in mechanical engineering at Caltech and in computer science at Cal/Berkeley – both extremely prestigious schools.
The sociolgist Peter Turchin argues that we suffer from elite overproduction. There aren’t enough complex jobs for capable minds. This leaves behind a growing cohort of frustrated underemployed professionals whose expensive training goes to waste. The physicist Eric Weinstein describes modern academia as a pyramid scheme. The purpose of many professors is to teach students to become professors who will also contribute little more than working as professors for ever more students. For a growing number of people assuming a moral status is the only ladder they can climb.
This leads me to Cole Tomas Allen’s decline from academic rigor to loopy manifesto. Law professor Dan Kahan found out that graduates are more likely to ignore facts and logic to protect their moral identity (identity-protective cognition). Cole Tomas Allen’s outrage over Trump’s crimes from pedophilia to treason forbade the question whether the allegations are even true. Some academics are willing to jettison scientific rigor and use their training to make their opinions sound more scholarly. The chronic anxiety of the university, from exams to ‘publish or perish’, alters how the brain processes information. In fight or flight mode you need simplification and a fast friend-foe-dichotomy.
Radicals engage in a “logic” of their own. Universities provide the tools to develop intrinsic rigor, but they have no control over what an individual accepts as a premise for further logical deductions. For Cole Tomas Allen Trump’s “crimes” were simply taken as a fact and research into the matter would have threatened the axiomatic basis of his thinking.
But what poses the threat? Why is it dangerous to be wrong?
Sociologist Scott Atran found out that all of us can be pushed to engage in identity-protective cognition, i.e. in refusing to think about a matter when it touches our moral core, our sacred values. Then we stop our usual cost-benefit analysis and behave as if outcomes don’t matter. Cole Allen suffered from being ‘complicit’ with the alleged immorality of his government.
This becomes a growing problem because our moral core keeps expanding. In the past moral identities were tied to few stable roles (parent, professional, neighbour, member of a faith). They could be rigid and uncompromising on their own, but people were used to navigating conflicting moral systems. They were external and morality was not the centre of a person’s identity.
More and more beliefs and lifestyle choices become moralised. Fewer things can be questioned. The old stable roles with their moral obligations gave way to mega-identities. If you know somebody’s view on vegan dieting, you can guess his views on gender affirming care. Everything is mushed together and this colossal of moral righteousness is highly unstable. It changes with fashions, with the ‘current thing.’
And moral becomes the remaining identity stabilising force (moral centrality) for the losers of our elite overproduction game. While the old morals were external systems with rules you can break and sins to be redeemed, your new highly important mega-identity is who you are. It’s all you are. This makes everything a bitterly defended basis for any further moral reasoning and it crushes any considerations for consequences. Absurdly, the moralists of the ‘current thing’ don’t seem to notice that they were not motivated by it at all before it was a fashion.
In ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ (1951) Hannah Arendt identified the collapse of stable institutions and social structures as the main breeding ground for totalitarianism. The ‘Mass Man’ arrives when the old classes and identity groups break down. The lonely individual, the loser, who finds no common ground or common sense with his neighbour becomes susceptible to the ‘Big Lie.’ He fails to make a distinction between true and false, she noticed. That indifference might be rooted in his fear to explore facts that can threaten the morality of the new fashionable mega-identity. It is in the logic of the banality of evil that Cole Tomas Allen and other radicals simply run their moral script as a mindless ‘duty.’
I want to skip the usual talking points about the breakdown of gender roles, families, churches and local communities because the main provider of a stable role with a moral duty is wildly under-discussed: the corporate workplace.
The career that gave men their main purpose in life outside of their family was defaced by ingratitude and disloyalty. Since the 1980s hiring a new guy has been preferred over promotions and slowly but steadly it took its toll on people’s motivation. Human resources departments operate a larger budget for new hires than for pay raises. Employees who work hard to get rewarded with a promotion and who don’t invest their time in a search for the next job are effectively punished. Even the top brass are hired from outside which sends a clear signal that there are no rungs to the top. In the 1970s, 90% of the CEOs were company men who had worked up the ladder. The younger generation has completely given up on the idea that good performance would eventually be rewarded. The average time a Brit under thirty (Gen Z) stays with one company is down to 1.7 years. If accomplishment and rewards aren’t what makes you you, it’s your moral and that moral may become little more than a fad. Soon this will no longer be a problem confined to academics.
Goldstein 
