On Saturday night, after Cole Tomas Allen’s alleged attempt to assassinate President Trump and administration officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a familiar ritual began on the internet: compiling a portrait of the shooter, based on the digital breadcrumbs of his online life. Over the past decade, this trail has frequently led to a similar place. The suspect in many cases turned out to be a white man radicalized by spending time in the internet’s dark crevices. Payton Gendron, who killed 10 people in 2022 at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, posted a manifesto that quickly circulated on 4chan, in which he included neo-Nazi imagery and described himself as an “ethno-nationalist.” Before Robert Bowers shot and killed 11 people in 2018 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, he posted bigoted content on the far-right social-media platform Gab.
Allen, a tutor who traveled from California to the Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives, according to authorities, does not fit that profile. The 31-year-old had donated $25 to Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. On what appears to be Allen’s Bluesky account, the posts that he has liked tend to be from run-of-the-mill liberal accounts, such as the activist Will Stancil, the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, and the satirical-news website The Onion. He reposted criticism of Hasan Piker, an influential socialist commentator. Many liberals dislike Piker for his positions against Israel, his praise of Chinese-style communism, his remark that “America deserved 9/11” (he later said that he should have used more “precise” language), and his support for petty theft from large corporations.
Even Allen’s manifesto, which he reportedly sent to family members before his attack, is a peculiar mix. It includes his stated desire to kill administration officials and potentially anyone who got in his way, which presumably means at least some of the more than 2,000 dinner guests. But he also apologizes to anyone he might otherwise affect. That contrasts with other shooters’ manifestos, which have outlined racist fears of impending white genocide and have advocated for the murder of nonwhite people. A former colleague of Allen’s described him to me as a “normal-ass dude, like anyone else,” who was well liked at the tutoring company where they worked and had exceedingly quotidian interests—chiefly anime and the popular video game Super Smash Bros.—and was an “animal lover.” The former colleague, who asked to remain anonymous over concerns of professional reprisal, said the two of them never talked about politics.
Allen, in other words, is a “normie”—internet slang for someone with conventional and widely held beliefs—but also an extremist who was willing to kill for those beliefs. In this sense, he represents the relatively new phenomenon of normie extremism, in which people who hold otherwise mainstream political views carry out acts of political violence.
Allen is the clearest example of this trend, but not the first. I wrote about the ascent of normie extremism after Luigi Mangione allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024. Mangione also had relatively unremarkable political views. His Goodreads account showed that he read books by popular authors, including the well-known science writer Michael Pollan. He followed a mix of mainstream figures on social media, including Joe Rogan and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His favorite writer appeared to be Tim Urban, a popular blogger who writes about science, psychology, and a range of other topics. Perhaps the only signal of something potentially sinister was Mangione’s praise for Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, though appreciating the Unabomber has become more and more common among young people—itself an example of normalizing extreme perspectives.
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The phenomenon has become evident in reactions to tragedies as well. Many of the most viral posts after Thompson’s killing express tacit, and sometimes outright, sympathy with Mangione’s alleged actions. Soon after the shooting, one poll found that 81 percent of college students had held a negative view of the health-insurance CEO. Nine months later, when Tyler Robinson allegedly killed Charlie Kirk, the influential conservative, many on the left lamented his death, but a noticeable contingent celebrated. Robinson himself didn’t appear to be particularly radical prior to the shooting but was chiefly concerned about protecting gay and trans rights, according to his mother’s reported statements to investigators and published text messages that he had exchanged with his roommate.
Memes that suggest violence against prominent or wealthy targets—whether about the mantra “eat the rich,” guillotines, or orcas destroying luxury yachts—have floated around the internet for years. Mangione’s shooting of Thompson suggests that these ideas have gained sufficient influence to inspire real-world harm.
Today, acts of political violence in the United States are at their highest level in decades. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute found that from March 2021 to December 2025, the share of Americans who agreed with the sentiment that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country” increased from 15 percent to 20.
Why so? Some experts have pointed to polarization driven by social-media algorithms that prioritize divisive content. Others have pointed to rising inequality, downward economic mobility, inflammatory rhetoric by politicians, and a loss of faith in institutions, including doubts about the legitimacy of elections.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociologist who focuses on extremism at American University, told me that part of the explanation may lie in America becoming a more brutal place. Although overall crime rates remain relatively low, she noted that certain types of violence happen more frequently. From 2020 to 2024, instances of domestic violence rose, and instances of hate crimes and mass shootings have both increased in the past decade. Those attending the Correspondents’ Dinner may have never before had to duck and cover under tables, but it’s something that their kids have been trained to do as a routine safety precaution because of the prevalence of school shootings.
Miller-Idriss also pointed out that images of state violence, such as videos of ICE agents tackling immigrants and protesters, have become more common in the past 12 months. “I see it as we live in an ever more violent society, and there’s not enough being done to prevent that,” she told me. More people now believe, she said, “that my political views, my grievances, whatever, should be handled in a violent way.”
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The potential for political violence is compounded by the fact that this is a time of deep political and social discontent. Trump’s approval ratings are hovering near the lowest numbers of his second term. Satisfaction with “the way things are going in the U.S.” sits at 21 percent. Economic confidence is also low, polling shows. Americans are experiencing historic levels of ideological polarization. This, the extremism expert Amy Cooter told me, is a recipe for political violence. “When people don’t feel like the normative political system is responsive, they’ll lash out at the system,” she said.
The cruel, unresponsive world that Miller-Idriss and Cooter described was already here more than a year ago when Mangione inspired a fandom for political violence. Now there is Allen. And before long, there will likely be another apparently normal person, with ostensibly mainstream political views, who resorts to violence to make their point. It is precisely their normalcy that makes them so hard to stop. Neither Mangione nor Allen were on authorities’ radar until it was already too late.
The post The Era of Normie Extremism Is Here appeared first on The Atlantic.
