Originally published May 1, 2026 for our monthly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get weekly issues.
By Staff
“There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it.
‘Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.’ With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil
INTRODUCTION
Last week, we did a deep dive on the Iran War, which could be considered our deep dive of the month even considering the attempted assassination of the Trump administration at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
By itself, the attempted shooting did not reach the room the President was in, so the seriousness of the attack was considerably lower compared to Pennsylvania’s attempt. But connected to this story is the story of splitting narratives, conservative ones and progressive ones, that are increasingly giving permission to take matters into your own hands, for the good of the whole.
In this story, we are focused on progressive violence, but we suspect we might soon be doing a report on conservative violence (though it hasn’t happened at any significant scale yet, and we certainly pray it doesn’t happen, for it is not predestined to happen).
So, our Bellwether of the month is really progressive violence, which is systemic, from street fighter to top Democrat Politician, but that violence is the result of their national framing. Within the progressive framework, conservatives, Americans, the staff of MIA, are all in a category of systemic violence that gives progressives permission, even compulsion, to violently respond to us.
Our very institutions commit social murder, which makes us all eligible for death.
Progressives can assume they are not violent for, in their minds, they are only responding to violence.
In America, a homosexual can expect to hear a person of influence boldly say on a major national platform that homosexuality is a sin without fear of being economically assassinated as a result.
In Progressive US, that person might go to jail.
If the law doesn’t send him to jail and even allows him to continue to have a public presence, then the progressive is compelled by their moral code to use violence to end the systemic violence that person is perpetuating against a disenfranchised class of people. This is their government, not the constitution.
A hierarchy of social class informs their governance code. It is the prescription for the description, that the white devil invented evil, and his continued existence is an existential threat to the planet and the non-evil people, the POC (person of color).
In America, a person can expect no significant consequences for publicly declaring support for Hamas and opposing Israel. In Conservative US, that person might lose their college career. If authority doesn’t gatekeep this person, the conservative will not take the matter into their own hands (yet). Their government is the constitution, not hierarchies of social class.
For the progressive, every objection to their program can be rooted to white supremacism. This is not hyperbole; this is observable fact. Recently, progressive Governor Tim Walz called a conservative journalist’s efforts to expose fraud in his state nothing but dog whistles to white supremacism.
For this reason, we are making Progressive Violence as seen through the bellwether event, the White House Correspondents Dinner shooting, our bellwether of the month.
Our Deep Dives now generally follow a Situation Report format, though you will get more analysis and opinion within the Background and Current Situation section than you will in our Situation Reports (like the one in this issue on pg. xx).
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
On April 26, 2026, around 8:30PM, a man attempted to break into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his administration.
Leading up to the shooting, this publication recently surmised the polarization between Progressives and Americans was only deepening, as the rhetoric from progressives was becoming increasingly violent.
Now, even conservatives are expressing fatalistic finality in response. While Progressives want acts of violence, conservatives do too, in the form of arrests that produce convictions, which is how conservatives are currently expressing their violent response, for now.
The aftermath of the shooting has seen further divides and further disconnects from one another’s’ realities, as both major factions, the progressives and conservatives, double down on their own narratives.
At this point this attempted assassination was like a pre-season NFL game because the shooter didn’t come close to the President and no blood was drawn.
BACKGROUND
The shooter’s manifesto would reveal a profound connection between the framing of reality by the most rhetorically violent progressives and the shooter’s heart. The fact that the shooter was a schoolteacher who won a “Teacher of the Month” award reveals he is also a bellwether of the public school system under progressive stewardship.
If true, this would suggest more “shooters” have already been programmed either through the teacher training and screening process or through the progressive-trained-and-screened teachers’ teachings.
THE PROGRESSIVE RHETORIC – This publication has documented the recent history of progressive rhetoric becoming increasingly hostile. This rhetoric started with the two phrases, “Punch a Nazi” and “Freedom of Speech doesn’t mean Freedom from Consequences” right as President Trump announced his candidacy for President in 2015.
Here we present two recent bellwethers in April of progressive rhetoric, along with a mention of the shooter’s manifesto which reflects progressive talking points. For more on progressive rhetoric, go deeper on progressive violence.
1.1. HASAN PIKER – Days before the attempted assassinations, progressive thought leader Hasan Piker said in response to a caller on a podcast that it was ok to kill landlords that don’t rent their properties. He said, “Yeah, kill them. Kill those mother f*ckers. Murder those mother f*ckers in the street. Let the streets—let the streets soak in their f*cking red capitalist blood, dude.”
1.2. JIMMY KIMMEL – Progressive corporate spokesperson Jimmy Kimmel joked on his show days before the attempted assassinations that Melania Trump looked like an expectant widow. Under normal circumstances, the comment could be dismissed as being distasteful but innocuous.
We are not living under normal circumstances. In the wake of numerous recent acts of political violence, it seems ill-timed at the very least. It is not unreasonable to assume something worse, though proving that legally might be nearly impossible.
1.3. RECEIPTS – Shortly after the shooting, progressive media challenged the administration’s assertion that it was progressive rhetoric which led to the shooting. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt presented evidence that shows the shooter was parroting the same exact rhetoric Democrat Politicians and Progressive thought leaders like Hasan Piker has been speaking.
She revealed Allen’s manifesto, which she claims reads like Democrat talking points.
THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS – Before the shooting, the shooter allegedly traveled from California to Washington D.C. by train, checking into the Washington, D.C. Hilton one day before the scheduled White House Correspondence Dinner.
First the shooter had to get past security on the outside perimeter of the hotel. This was not a challenge as he was a guest at the hotel. The shooter himself would note on the way that security was lax, and that if he had wanted to stage a mass casualty event, he could have easily done this.
His race past the next line of security was caught on video. The President was later seen commenting he moved “like a flash.” He never reached the actual dining hall where the President was located. After he breached security he shot a secret service agent in the chest, but the agent was not injured seriously as he was wearing a bullet-proof vest.
The agents returned fire as he ran until he tripped, where he was then apprehended.
President Trump’s take on the shooting: “I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for them. I wanted to see what was going on… And by that time, we started to realise maybe it was a bad problem, different kind of a problem, bad one, and different than what would be normal noise from a ballroom, which you hear all the time.”
THE SHOOTER AND THE MOTIVE – Cole Thomas Allen, 31, from Torrance, CA, has been identified as the suspect in the White House Correspondents Dinner. He is a schoolteacher who notably recently won a teacher of the month award.
His social media presence reveals a man who holds to progressive Christian values, who equates Donald Trump with Hitler, and uses a lot of the same phrases, the same talking points, including false talking points, that progressive thought leaders and Democrat politicians continue to use even as we create this report.
In most instances, a deeper dive would be warranted on the shooter and the motive, but in this case, the shooter and his motive fit so almost stereotypically into the progressive violence memetic, that there isn’t much depth of discovery there beyond what you see at the surface.
Also, the less time focusing on the shooter the better, as their mythologization is one of the motivations behind why such psychopaths act out in the way this shooter did. The real heart of this bellwether is the progressive spirit at war with everyone else, not the shooter himself, who became a mere avatar of that larger story.
One narrative suggests the shooter was allegedly led by progressive talking points equating President Trump and his supporters with Nazis. For this reason alone, he justified his attempt to murder the President and his administration. The counter-narrative is that the shooter was motived by Trump’s rhetoric and actions.
While some progressives fall short of saying this justifies the attempt, many not only don’t, but they are also once again upset the attempt failed.
CURRENT SITUATION
The two nations we have been describing for a while, Progressive US and Conservative US, are becoming clearer every day. The fallout from the shooting makes that even clearer.
The interpretation of the shooting is as radically different as it can be between progressive and conservative. For Americans, they (we too) need to sift through both narrative war machines to discern something closer to the truth that either side might care to see.
NOTE: We’d like to offer a caveat regarding our progressives and conservative neighbors; in both camps there yet resides true Americans who haven’t quite figured out the un-American parts of their coalitions of power.
We recognize there are most likely far more Americans among conservatives than progressives as this point, as most Americans have already left the progressive coalition of power (which is why it is becoming increasingly openly anti-American).
Conservative US is also much closer to Americanism than Progressive US is (which is fundamentally opposed to it).
The prevailing narratives are these: secret service and security deficiencies have been laid bare; Trump is using the shooting to get tax-funding for a new White House ballroom; Progressives are calling the shooting staged by Trump to save flagging opinion polls; and the emergence of an ‘offensive war against progressives’ narrative from the conservatives
PROTECTION – Shortly after the shooting had stopped, questions began flooding in about how a man got so close to putting shotgun blasts on the President and his administration. The shooter himself would call for reform to security after a sane President is in power. He claimed he could have committed a mass murder event had he wanted to because the security was so bad (yes, this bears repeating).
The White House immediately praised Secret Service and their handling of the attack. The President even claimed he got in their way.
A Fox News employee who was present at the dinner wrote on X: “The first exterior security for me was on the street outside of the hotel. I flashed my ticket and was waved through in one second. My name was not checked against any list, I showed no ID, I was not patted down and did not go through a metal detector. I probably could have shown a ticket from a prior year or a fake one as they barely looked at it. (I don’t know who that exterior security was, they were guys in suits).
From that point, I walked into the hotel with no further security check, and I walked down to the Fox pre-party where there were multiple ballrooms that were absolutely PACKED with attendees. Still did not go through any security at that point.”
PROGRESSIVE MEDIA REACTION – A title by PoliticsusUSA summarized the progressive response to the shooting, “The White House Correspondents Dinner Gunman Changes Nothing.” The story is about Trump using the shooting to try to push tax funding of the new White House ballroom, but the headline is intended to speak beyond that story, we believe.
Crooks and Liars finds it incredulous Fox would blame the progressive media for the shooting. Politico also found it incredulous that Republicans would blame Democrat leaders’ political rhetoric for the WHCD shooting.
Also from Crooks and Liars is this headline, “WHCD Faked? Trump’s Numbers Worse Than Any I’ve Ever Seen.”
Daily Kos is upset Melania wants ABC to let Jimmy Kimmel go for saying the First Lady looked like a widow in waiting. Kimmel said that just before the shooting. Remember, these are the same progressives that have ruined whole careers for opposing forced transgender morality compliance.
The biggest bellwether of the progressive media reaction to the shooting might be Nora O’Donnell’s attempt to try to read the shooter’s manifesto to the President just after the shooting. This publication has decided not to reprint the manifesto in whole or in part. It adds little value to the this report’s focus, the overall progressive spirit of war.
This is not a judgment on publications that choose to publish the whole or parts of the manifesto.
Here, O’Donnell is willing to use the CBS platform to reward a man who attempted to murder the President of the United States by delivering his manifesto to his intended target.
As of April 29, 2026, CBS News had still not revealed to their audience the shooter’s party affiliation, Democrat, or his known attendance of progressive events like the “No Kings” protests.
FALLOUT – There has been no slowdown in rhetoric on the progressive side. If anything, conservative rhetoric is now just beginning to heat up beyond the defensive to the offensive. We have seen a growing call for convictions, not indictments, and those calls have only greatly increased after the shooting.
After the shooting, progressive activists protested outside the Hilton Hotel. They held up signs that said, “death to tyrants,” “death to them all,” and “yes, they deserve to die, and I hope they burn in hell.”
Leading up to the shooting, a recent study showed that anti-government violence is spiking. We expect that trend to continue.
Illinois’ Progressive Governor JB Pritzker blamed the attempted assassination of Trump on Trump himself, further seeming to tacitly legitimize the act. Trump is either a Nazi deserving assassination, or he is not. Here, Pritzker is suggesting he IS a Nazi, further emboldening progressive teachers to be the next wave of attack.
An article in politicsususa suggests “Many Americans Don’t Care About 3rd Assassination Attempt On Trump.” This might be true, but only of progressives, not conservatives, who seem to have crossed a threshold in their minds that has shifted them from defensive to offensive violent rhetoric.
This is politicsususa’s assessment of the fallout, which isn’t completely incorrect, “If you spend five minutes on any form of social media, you’ll soon learn that the consensus reaction is people claiming the gunman was staged, MAGAs who think a White House ballroom will solve everything, and some version of the sentiment that the American people have already seen this movie twice before, and they are bored.”
What they’re missing is the MAGA part, the switch that happened after this last attempt. The PA assassination attempt shifted conservatives from American civil language to aggressive defensive anti-insurrectionist language. Now, the language shift appears to be going from defensive to offensive in nature.
A headline from PJ Media summarizes that shift: “The Time for Playing Nice is Over.”
ASSESSMENT
The third direct Trump assassination attempt has pushed the conservative base past the point of reconciliation with the progressives, who have expressed no desire at reconciliation with anyone for the past decade.
The progressives appear more frustrated their latest savior didn’t deliver the goods than anything else. A narrative quickly emerged that the whole thing was staged, as it often does no matter who was the target.
When the target is a non-progressive, the progressive media will tamp down the signals that make the shooting real at the very least, if not amplify false signals that push the staged shooting narrative (without ever having made the claims themselves). This is what they’ve done here.
Yet even though the staged narrative has received top-down corporate signaling and support, progressive communities’ rank and file street fighters had already come up with that narrative all on their own.
One thing about an ideology based on granular morality codes enforced with violence is that they tend to produce same-speak all on their own. This is ESPECIALLY true when that morality code is loaded with unique terms and redefinitions of anchor terms from the culture under attack.
This is similar to a Large Language Model in AI, but with considerably less variation.
So, the top-down signal was redundant, for the most part, at least among the true converts. To the casual viewer of corporate news, the shooter was a Christian and Trump’s own rhetoric and action is why it happened. Also, Trump and the conservatives are still white supremacist Nazis.
Among these casual viewers are true Americans, Americans who still don’t understand they are watching narrative warfare disguised as news.
There are some conservatives fighting the White House ballroom battle, but most seem more concerned with two things, cleaning up Secret Service and figuring out how to deal with the nation they are starting to recognize, Progressive US.
They haven’t given it a name, but they recognize the “left” as having its own national identity, customs, and standards for law that are mostly antithetical to both Conservative US and America (with America being the number one impediment to the progressive dream).
At this point, conservatives are still hoping for elections but are also now demanding arrests that lead to convictions. Support for the GOP and the President has been trending downward. They don’t just want arrests, though, they want first serious and clear indictments, and then convictions with serious consequences, up to and including death (though execution talk is fortunately limited, for now).
While some conservatives are excited about the recent Comey indictment, many are skeptical the indictment will hold weight and wonder when the clear-evidence-showing-treason charges will happen.
They want those charges targeting the top suspected leaders of the “coup,” the ones allegedly behind the Russia Hoax, the “stolen” 2020 election, the J6 Operation, the Open Borders policies, and the Biden Committee Presidency, to lead to convictions that lead to lifetime sentences, at minimum.
Anything less will result in the GOP and the President continuing to bleed support.
Conservatives and Americans are becoming more concerned with American survival than economics, while non-activist Americans seem mostly driven by economics and the freedom to choose abortions or the desire to see them outlawed that in preserving, restoring, and fulfilling American Rule of Law standards.
Progressives want nothing short of a reboot of the country and a purging of the land of all non-progressives, including conservatives and Americans, including the staff of MIA.
This event has not significantly moved the progressives or the non-activist Americans, but it has significantly moved conservatives and Americans. They both now clearly recognize the reality of two nations in one land, Progressive US and Conservative US, with neither nation fully embracing the America that bore them both.
Still, so far, a clear American “movement” has yet to emerge, as Americans mostly find themselves outside the camps, frustrated they can’t easily see what’s really going on behind the veil both camps’ narrative war machines cast.
We hope more of them find this publication and others like it. If you have a friend or a relative you think would like to receive our weekly news analysis, buy them a subscription at MIA subscriptions.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The President has chosen to call for the firing of Jimmy Kimmel over his “expecting widow” comments, while Trump’s FCC now moves to challenge ABC affiliate broadcast licenses. The move is clumsy and the justification for it is not clear, especially when it doesn’t target the whole broadcast industry.
IF ABC has violated broadcasting licensing standards, so has the rest of the industry.
In U.S. law, the standard is not what we know but what we can prove. We know Kimmel’s statement was intentionally broad enough that you can assume he’s inciting violence against the President but proving that in a court of law would be, well, extremely challenging.
The FCC move in and of itself would be great if it had already happened, and if it happened for every major broadcast corporation AFTER a study ACTUALLY showed violations of broadcast licensing had been occurring systematically for decades.
We think a serious study would most likely reveal this decades-long systemic pattern of violations to be true, but it would also expose both the GOP and DNC’s involvement in perpetuating this unofficial alliance between the government and corporate media, or rather, between political parties and corporate media.
This soft power appears to be a tool the President doesn’t want to completely forfeit, even if it means not vanquishing one of the two hearts of progressive power, the progressive corporate media control of socio-cultural production, signaling, and gatekeeping.
Like the move against Comey, the effort might do more to strengthen progressives than hurt them. If, once again, Comey’s charges are dismissed, or a jury finds him not guilty, this will only embolden progressives’ sense of violent injustice being perpetrated on them every day America continues to exist.
This is not hyperbole; this is the spirit already emerging in street activist level progressive discourse.
We recommend the President halt the FCC call to review ABC affiliate licensing and instead conduct the comprehensive study that could, theoretically, show the clear illegal entanglement between corporate media, American political parties, and even foreign governments and corporations.
If we are right, the study will show the public the corporate media is not the free press, it’s a criminal operation (by American standards, not progressive ones). If so, the prosecutions of the corporate media will be far more profound, and it will have public support, even from the “normies” who still get their news indirectly through that same corporate media (through the influencers who use corporate media to create content).
From here, our next move would be on Public Schools, especially Teachers’ Unions, who have been allegedly illegally using their non-partisan donations to support anti-American progressive actions, including illegal interruption operations against ICE officers (this is not referring to the lawful protests which also occurred).
The study would first happen, followed by exposure to the public, followed by prosecutions. This would be the second heart of progressive power, control of our education system.
We recommend not pursuing the death penalty and giving everyone but the top leadership an opportunity to confess with immunity and be forgiven, with a path back to the American family preserved.
BREAKING — POTUS will delay his planned trip to China for approximately one month, due to the war with Iran. 
