The White House Correspondents Dinner shooter and would-be assassin Colin Allen’s manifesto has been published and it appears he was in part radicalized by the Congressionally-mandated release of the Jeffrey Epstein files under H.R. 4405, where he at one point falsely accused President Donald Trump of being a “pedophile”.
Only a couple years ago, Epstein “reporting” — if you can call wild speculations about who was on the what turned out to be non-existent Epstein client list “reporting” — was relegated to podcasts, but in 2025, the issue was mainstreamed by Congress and legacy media and became H.R. 4405.
In so doing, Congress nearly unanimously forced publication of every unverified hearsay allegation ever made about Epstein Island, which included unsubstantiated, false allegations against very high profile figures including President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton and other wealthy persons and officials this column simply won’t mention who were somehow supposed to be a part of a grand conspiracy to blackmail the rich and powerful with salacious sex tapes with minors that in reality never existed. It appears to have been a fantasy.
Otherwise, who was blackmailed? What policy was changed because of blackmail? Or what was given in return?
The original source for there being a “client list” appears to have been Epstein himself, but not for sex trafficking but originally as a financial manager, cultivating an image beginning in the 1980s that he would only work with financial clients who made more than a million dollars a year and later that he would only work with billionaires.
In July 1980, Cosmopolitan named Epstein “Bachelor of the Month” with a description that said Epstein was a “financial strategist” who “talks only to people who make over a million a year”. In 2002, New York Magazine did a profile piece on Epstein, with one investor stating Epstein “maintain[ed] some sort of money-management firm”. The article itself stated Epstein had as much as $15 billion under management and might include the first mention in print of the infamous “client list”: “Epstein is said to run $15 billion for wealthy clients, yet … his client list is a closely held secret.” And then the original source for Epstein being some sort of intelligence operative appears to have been Epstein himself, too.
A January 2001 London Evening Standard story about Ghislaine Maxwell referenced Epstein as bragging about his supposed intelligence ties: “He has a license to carry a concealed weapon, once claimed to have worked for the CIA although he now denies it – and owns properties all over America.”
On the blackmail claims, the source once again may have been Epstein himself. Virginia Giuffre’s memoir stated, “He’d always suggested to me that those videotapes he so meticulously collected in the bedrooms and bathrooms of his various homes gave him power over others… He explicitly talked about using me and what I’d been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favors.”
Still, there was years-long reporting on the topic and it had the near-tragic impact of endangering not only President Trump and Cabinet but the entire White House press corps that helped push the narrative, with Cole Allen apparently believing he was targeting Epstein-related criminals at the Washington Hilton on April 25. Had he gotten to the ballroom, reporters who had pushed the fantasy could have possibly been caught in the crossfire — killed by a monster of their own making.
It was a similar pattern as the Russiagate conspiracy crap at the June 2017 shooting by Rachel Maddow superfan James Hodgkinson at the Republican Congressional baseball practice, where Hodgkinson was fueled up with fake conspiracies that Trump was a Russian agent who had worked with Moscow to steal the 2016 election. Hodgkinson, who was killed by return fire by police, had posted, “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co,” with a link to a Change.org petition to impeach Trump on charges of treason for allegedly colluding with Russian intelligence services. Luckily, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) survived the shooting.
Was Allen radicalized by Russiagate, too? We don’t know for certain, but he did similarly call Trump a “traitor” so maybe he was.
Fortunately, Allen never got to the ballroom, and as widespread as Epstein coverage became in 2025 — it spooked Congress into voting for H.R. 4405 — politically motivated murders still remain exceptionally rare.
A 2025 Cato Institute study showed from 1975 to 2025 there were 3,577 politically motivated murders including terrorist attacks, most of which were the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania and April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing: “Two attacks are responsible for most of the terror deaths on US soil: 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Those two attacks caused 3,147 deaths, which is 88 percent of all terrorist murders over the 51-year period. Of the other 430 murders, right-wing terrorists account for 45 percent of people murdered, Islamists are responsible for 32 percent, left-wing terrorists are responsible for 16 percent, and attackers motivated by the other ideologies account for the remainder. The number of politically motivated killings is not increasing over time.”
So, the most violent far and away are Islamic jihadist terrorists. Now one can quibble about who in Cato’s eyes constituted “right-wing” or “left-wing” but where there is far less to quibble about is that politically motivated violence resulting in murder is exceptionally rare in our otherwise civil society.
In the meantime, a 2025 poll from Politico asked the question if violence is sometimes justified. 24 percent say it is, with similar numbers of Republicans and Democrats saying so.
And yet, we don’t have violent political crime rates of 1 out of 4. It’s not 1 out of 40 either, 1 out of 400 or even 1 out of 400,000. Per the Cato study, it’s actually about 1 out of 4 million.
For example, regular Americans do not live in fear of voting and there aren’t Democratic or Republican political strongholds targeted for violence on Election Day, because there is no scourge of political violence. It’s one of the safest things you can go and do — and even for Americans absorbing radical political propaganda, voting is also their most likely outlet for airing their grievances, not assassinations.
Still, as President Trump has correctly noted, presidents are far more likely targets of political violence rather than average Americans — with 8.8 percent of presidents, or four out of 45 men who have served, having been murdered by an assassin’s bullet. When you include the other seven who had attempts on their lives, bringing the number up to 11, it rises to 24.4 percent, basically a 1-in-4 chance of being shot at if you are or have been the president. Trump already has the most assassination attempts — now three — of any president.
So, yes, there is a political violence problem, but it’s mostly a problem for the President of the United States.
In contrast, Americans are treated with a rather paranoid unreality of whether “all of them” want us dead, “most of them” or less than most when the numbers of people actively engaged in political violence of this caliber are infinitesimal. But who is “all of them” and who is “us”?
They don’t “all” want us dead, and even among those who believe political violence might be justified sometimes, almost none of them appear to be acting on it.
When we think about political camps, almost always, and speaking about them very generally, there is very little distinguishing between voters, elected officials, party officials, bureaucrats or those who work in certain institutions. So terms like “left” and “right” are ascribed to individuals whether they opt in or not. A kind of us and them, that tells us very little about the remote danger of active threats.
If “left” and “right” are supposed to violent, if anything, then it must be that almost nobody is “left” or “right” since hardly anyone actually takes up arms for their bullshit political cause.
Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
