National

By Noah Stanton | Commentary, I Stand for Freedom The distance between a talking point and a trigger pull is shorter than most Americans want to believe. It’s a gap measured not in miles but in repetition — the slow, steady drumbeat of rhetoric that tells an unstable mind the president is a monster, that democracy is dying, that someone has to do something. On April 25th, someone did. Cole Tomas Allen traveled cross-country to the Washington Hilton, checked into a tenth-floor room, and descended to the lobby outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner ballroom carrying a loaded 12-gauge shotgun, a .38 caliber pistol, and multiple knives. Minutes earlier, he’d sent a pre-scheduled email to family and friends — a thousand-word manifesto in which he called himself the “Friend...