James Comey Is His Own Worst Enemy

At 3:07 in the video embedded above, Mark Halperin comes about as close to the truth as the Overton window will allow when he says of James Comey, "I've never seen somebody so unpopular act in public like he's so popular". On the other hand, Real Clear Politics has been unwilling even to touch the subject of the DOJ "8647" indictment over the past few days: that Comey is innocent is apparently not even a matter for civilized debate. Freedom of speech! Anyhow, "86" just means the the kitchen is out of soup!

But I'm a contrarian, not even a recovering contrarian. This all seems a little too cut-and-dried to me. First, a quick web search shows that people are convicted by juries, or plead guilty, for threatening the president all the time. For instance,

According to court documents, between Feb. 15, 2025, and May 15, 2025, Valeriy Kouznetsov, 41, made multiple threats toward the President of the United States, his family, and other government officials. Kouznetsov posted these threats on X (formerly Twitter), some of which he sent directly to the X accounts belonging to the President and other officials. For example, on March 28, 2025, Kouznetsov posted a message threatening the President with a “7/13 secret service repeat Philadelphia,” a reference to the July 13, 2024, attempted assassination of President Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Just last month, he was sentenced to two years and four months in prison. Or this:

Troy Kelly, age 20, of Crown Point, NY, plead guilty today to one count of a three-count indictment charging threats against the President of the United States.

. . . In pleading guilty, Kelly admitted that in May 2024 he posted a threat to kill President Biden on a social media website and that he intended it to be understood as a threat. Responding to a post of President Biden, Kelly told the then-President that he was “[g]onna put a bullet in your head if I ever catch you.”

At sentencing, the judge ordered him to have mental health treatment. In other words, people can be convicted of threatening the president of the US under what still seems to be a wide variety of specific statements and circumstances. According to Wikipedia,

The true threat doctrine was established in the 1969 Supreme Court case Watts v. United States. In that case, an eighteen-year-old male was convicted in a Washington, D.C. District Court for violating a statute prohibiting persons from knowingly and willfully making threats to harm or kill the President of the United States.

The conviction was based on a statement made by Watts, in which he said, "[i]f they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." Watts appealed, leading to the Supreme Court finding the statute constitutional on its face, but reversing the conviction of Watts.

. . . the Court established that there is a "true threat" exception to protected speech, but also that the statement must be viewed in its context and distinguished from protected hyperbole. The opinion, however, stopped short of defining precisely what constituted a "true threat."

Traditionally, the standard for whether a true threat could be punished was based its effect on a "reasonable person" in the shoes of the person who received the threat. In 2023, Counterman v. Colorado abolished that "objective" test. Counterman established a "subjective" test that required a state to show evidence that the accused subjectively understood the nature of their threat and consciously, recklessly disregarded that nature.

A few people have argued, as I did Wednesday, that on one hand, Comey is both a former Deputy Attorney General and a former FBI Director, whose agencies had investigated and prosecuted at minimum dozens of threat cases, and he had to have been aware of what he was doing. Comey made the "8647" post on May 15, 2025, we must presume fully aware of the July 13, 2024 Butler, PA assassination attempt on Trump and the September 15, 2024 assassination attempt at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, while Trump was golfing.

Comey is a major public figure whose statements consistently attract attemtion. In fact, although he deleted the post shortly after he made it, it attracted immediate attention and was widely re-posted.

Comey deleted the photo shortly after it was made, writing: “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and “I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

In an interview with MSNBC, Comey said he assumed the numbers reflected a political message in reference to Trump because of the number "47," but not a call to violence against the Republican president. He called the allegations "crazy."

At least to me, this is Comey being a little too cute. He posts something that just barely crosses the line, but then he deletes it after it nevertheless attracts major attention -- but he wants credit for deleting it, because he claims he opposers violence, and he didn't understand "86" could mean wipe somebody out, he thought it just meant the kitchen was out of soup. (In my younger, single days, I spent some time in bars, where "Manager, 86" was a frequent call on the PA, referring to the need to eject an obnoxious customer. In fact, I dated a lady bartender who routinely used the term in that context -- she'd jokingly threaten to "86" me from our date.)

And this is the Comey who got a little too cute over Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server:

In July [2016], FBI director James Comey announced that the FBI investigation had concluded that Clinton had been "extremely careless" but recommended that no charges be filed because Clinton did not act with criminal intent, the historical standard for pursuing prosecution.

On October 28, 2016, eleven days before the election, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had started looking into newly discovered emails. On November 6, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had not changed its conclusion. Comey's timing was contentious, with critics saying that he had violated Department of Justice guidelines and precedent, and prejudiced the public against Clinton. The controversy received more media coverage than any other topic during the presidential campaign.

The result, as we see in the Mark Halperin clip above, where his liberal guest remarks, "You're never going to catch me defending Jim Comey. You guys know how I feel about him from 2016", is that nobody, left or right, much likes the guy -- he's just a little too cute. That cuteness even comes out in the latest context for his "8647" indictment:

BREAKING: The DOJ is now pushing to SEIZE James Comey’s profits from his crime book, as prosecutors believe part of the reason he posted a threat on President Trump’s life was to DRUM UP book sales

DOJ is going HARD after this guy 🔥

The “forfeiture action” included in Comey’s… pic.twitter.com/aW1At0bRAk

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) April 29, 2026

He knew full well what the public reaction to the "8647" post would be, even if he took it down a few hours later, which goes to his recklessness in posting it. Victor Davis Hansen makes a good point at 2:30 below:

There's a little bit of wrinkle to this, because people were kinda startled when the attorney general announced his investigation into this, but then he said this was a long investigation, and we investigated a lot of messaging. So what I'm getting at is if there's something more, what would that more be? If he said something in a private e-mail that didn't come under attorney-client privilege, and it said maybe to his friend or his daughter, this is cool, or this is neat, or this is a good way to threaten the president. . . let's withhold judgment until we find out.

In other words, Comey just plays things a little too close to the line, he's always just a little too cute, and as a consequence of that, he has enemies. I don't think it's going to be as simple for him as getting his case dismissed over freedom-of-speech. The standard in Watts v. United States was abolished in 2023; nobody mentions that, and I betcha Comey doesn't know that, either. Heck, I wonder if his lawyers do. The law is no longer as clear as that, and Comey seems to be skating on the idea that he's a lot more popular than he really is.

UFOs

There are no UFOs. The whole planet has cell phones the last ten years and all these supposed sightings disappeared.

— Tim Dalton (@thor988835) April 29, 2026

So Trump has confirmed that UFO files are soon to be released, while a guy named Tim Dalton posts trenchant remarks saying no such thing as UFOs. A more extended version of Dalton's reasoning appeared in The New Yorker a couple of years ago:

In February, 2023, photographs of a Chinese spy balloon over Billings, Montana, prompted speculation about aliens. The Air Force eventually shot it down, but first the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane flew past and took a selfie that showed the balloon out the window. “You can see it in exquisite detail,” [University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam] Frank told me. “Where are all those pictures? Every U.F.O. picture is a fuzzy blob. Everybody carries a high-resolution camera in their pocket now, and it’s always fuzzy blobs.”

I've noted here in the past that since the age of systematic scientific observation began in the 1600s, there's been zero tangible evidence of any sort of extraterrestrial gadget constructed by intelligent life, which has created such a speculative gap that believers have been forced to impute such things to ancient hieroglyphics, deciding a Mayan so-and-so looks like he's actually wearing a space helmet or riding a rocket.

One problem is that the Darwinian paradigm has so thoroughly infected logical thinking that people conclude space aliens must be so. The chain of reasoning, according to Wikipedia, goes like this:

• There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
• With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone.
• Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
• Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step that humans are investigating.
• Even at the slow pace of envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.
• Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.

There are several fallacies in this chain. One is that so far, nobody has been able to prove that, even given the putatively necessary chemicals and environmental conditions, life spontaneously appears. And even if some sort of life were somehow to appear from exactly the right primeval ooze, how long would it take to develop the ability to reproduce itself, via DNA or some equivalent mechanism? And isn't it far more likely that, during the eons-long process of random selection necessary for this to happen, Murphy's Law would intervene and terminate the process before it could perfect itself?

It's like the joke about how billions of monkeys pounding on typewriters could generate the works of Shakespeare. And one day, one of them types out, "To be, or not to be: that is ?6ttdbgoendtgo". How many billions of times would this have to take place before you got through just one act of one play?

But let's grant that given the right conditions, life can evolve from primeval sludge. You have a whole separate problem of reason, which is necessary to develop gadgets that can travel between stars, and this is a problem of philosophy. For instance, according to Wikipedia,

Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in relation with something in the external world. This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen. It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was a historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus.

The process of building a rocket, or any other sort of interstellar gadget, requires a series of mental judgments based on a mental understanding of physical laws, on which plan might work and which might not -- in other words, a series of judgments that is tested against experimental results. So far, nobody has been able to demonsrate how this mental process relates to the physical brain; there is always a separation between the two. So where does reason come from? It almost certainly doesn't "evolve", and Darwinian natural selection is a shaky paradigm in any case.

So to imagine UFOs requires that we imagine space aliens capable of building them, which in turn requires that we first accept a very shaky hypothesis of how life appears anywhere, but then we have to accept the idea that reason, a non-physical process, somehow arises as a consequence of a physical process that creates a brain or equivalent organ that allows a space alien to think and build a gadget.

This makes my head hurt. It's much easier to recognize that space aliens and UFOs are creatures of fantasy, and there are very good reasons why we've never seen either.

Assassinations And Decorum

Once I began to read reactions to Comey's new indictment for posting his "8647" shot, it occurred to me once again that everyone's missing the point -- the same point they missed after Charlie Kirk's assassination. I said here at that time, regarding the people who were fired for indecorous remarks celebrating that incident:

Merriam-Webster defines "decoerum" as "agreement with accepted standards of conduct". In light of the remarkable rash of suspensions and terminations being visited on people who publicly celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination, some people like intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds are saying, "I mave doubts about these firings. . . . The courts can sort it out later, just like they did (sometimes) when so many people on the right were being cancelled."

He concludes maybe the courts will sort it out -- well, he's a law professor. But this isn't really a legal issue. What's happening is that ordinary standards of decorum are being reestablished. If you think about it, before anything else, Bud Light's Dylan Mulvaney campaign, in which a leading national brand endorsed transsexualism, was a violation of decorum. You don't talk about people's plumbing in a national media environment; even if children can't drink beer, they see the ads.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "In past times, how did the Secret Service handle threats against the president?" It answered,

The Secret Service's approach to handling presidential threats has evolved from primarily reactive "bodyguarding" in the early 20th century to a modern, proactive system of layered security and threat intelligence.

. . . By 1917, it became a federal crime to threaten the president by mail or other means, allowing the Service to pursue individuals before they could act.

. . . The agency conducts thousands of risk assessments annually. When a threat is identified—whether online, via mail, or in person—agents track the individual, conduct background checks (criminal and mental health), and perform voluntary interviews to determine intent and capability.

Last July, the Secret Service took Comey's post seriously, as it seems to me it should have.

Former FBI Director James Comey and his wife, Patrice, were tailed by law enforcement officials following Comey’s Trump assassination post.

Comey was under investigation for calling for Trump to be killed in a cryptic Instagram post in May.

“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Comey said in his caption.

. . . Secret Service agents interviewed Comey and his wife and nothing came of it. Comey is freely walking around attacking Trump and Kash Patel because he knows he will never be held accountable.

Kash Patel recently told Bret Baier that copycats are popping up across the country because of James Comey’s “8647” Instagram post.

If Comey was actually put in prison, the copycats would likely stop.

But the investigation apparently went beyond tailing:

The former FBI director sat for an hours-long interview with agents in Washington, DC — an uncommon step by the agency over a non-specific threat — and investigators he [sic] saw the shells on a beach in North Carolina.

In fact, the investigation now looks like it was even more substantial than that. FBI Director Patel said,

“As the former Director of the FBI, he knew full well the attention and consequences of making such a post. This FBI and our DOJ partners pursued a rigorous investigation that followed the facts - and now Mr. Comey will be held fully accountable for his actions. Thank you to our investigators, Acting AG Todd Blanche, and the Eastern District of NC for their diligent and professional work.”

The general reaction appears to be that this is actually a freedom-of-speech case, but I have my doubts. A quick web search shows that people can be convicted for making ambiguous posts on social media, for instance:

A San Antonio man pleaded guilty Wednesday to threatening President Donald Trump on Facebook before the president visited the Texas Hill Country, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

According to an arrest affidavit, Robert Herrera, 52, commented on a KSAT article posted to Facebook on July 10 about the president’s upcoming visit to the Hill Country.

Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visited the Hill Country on July 11.

“I won’t miss,” Herrera wrote, along with a picture of President Trump surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents after the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to a DOJ news release.

. . . Herrera was arrested on July 11 and booked into the Bexar County Adult Detention Center on two charges, according to jail records: making a terroristic threat against a public figure, a federal charge, and possession of a controlled substance.

Regarding the terroristic threat charge, Herrera faces up to five years in prison along with a maximum $250,000 fine.

I assume Mr Herrera's counsel convinced him that claiming this was just fantasy, or just a joke, or it was being misinterpreted, wouldn't fly with a jury. Added to that problem is the fact that Comey has served both as Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director and may be assumed to have been familiar with both the laws and significant cases, like the one above, where violations were prosecuted. But the question keeps circling back to the problem of decorum:

“Threatening the life of the President of the United States is a grave violation of our nation’s laws,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “The grand jury returned an indictment alleging James Comey did just that, at a time when this country has witnessed violent incitement followed by deadly actions against President Trump and other elected officials. The temperature needs to be turned down, and anyone who dials it up and threatens the life of the President will be held accountable.”

Estimates of Comey's net worth differ wildly, from $350,000 to $14 million. Whatever the outcome of this and the other federal cases against him, his legal bills are likely to be substantial, win or lose. Attorneys have already scoped out Comey's exposure:

I spoke with three other veteran criminal lawyers who said for these kinds of high-profile cases, it could cost a million to $5 million at a small firm, and much more at a big law firm, where some partners charge $2,500 an hour. Those kind of bills could reach $25 million or more.

. . . The former FBI director, Jim Comey, is being represented by his old friend, a former prosecutor called Patrick Fitzgerald at his old law firm, Skadden. Fitzgerald might have commanded more than $2,000 an hour, but he's retired now, working for himself and can set his own rates or even donate his time.

The problem is that even if Fitzgerald donates his own time to Comey, other attorneys will have to do grunt work that Fitzgerald himself is unwilling to do, and even for someone like Fitzgerald, work is work.

But the basic problem is decorum: no matter how many cute remarks you may be able to get away with, making light of assassination lowers the threshold. How many weirdos feel all the more emboldened by how the atmosphere fills up with loose talk? We seem to be getting more and more weirdos lately, that's the bottom line. There needs to be a penalty of some sort for lowering the threshold.

And think about it: Comey makes cute remarks that a standup comic can probably get away with. But Comey is supposed to be a serious public figure. He shouldn't be posting cute remarks at all. Something's out of whack down deep there.

King Charles's Visit

STOP IT!!!🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/XbW9BYbIKJ

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) April 27, 2026

Here's what The Mew York Times thinks important about the King's visit:

One meeting that appears to be absent from King Charles III’s carefully planned schedule in the United States this week is any reunion with Prince Harry.

On a four-day state visit intended in part to repair bruised U.S.-British relations, Charles’s itinerary currently includes no plans to see Harry, his 41-year-old son, who lives in California with his wife, Meghan, and their two children.

Buckingham Palace officials declined to comment when asked whether the king and his younger son would meet. Charles and Queen Camilla are scheduled to be in Washington on Tuesday and New York on Wednesday before departing on Thursday.

Fox News sees things more clearly:

Trump has expressed frustration with Britain’s refusal to fully join the U.S. campaign against Iran, and has urged U.S. allies to get involved militarily or operationally, particularly around protecting oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz.

"This is not Winston Churchill we are dealing with," Trump said on March 3, referring to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. "By the way, I’m not happy with the U.K. either," the president continued, referring to Starmer blocking the United States’ use of U.K. bases to launch attacks on Iran.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "How much discretion does the UK monarch have to negotiate policy on a state visit?" It replied,

The UK monarch has no personal discretion to negotiate policy during a state visit. As a constitutional monarch, the King is bound by convention to act only on the "advice" of his ministers, meaning the government retains full control over the political and policy-related aspects of these visits.

No Policy-Making Power: The King cannot negotiate treaties, set government policy, or speak freely on partisan political matters.

Government-Driven Agenda: State visits are tools of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to serve UK strategic, economic, or security interests.

So we have the problem that Trump is unhappy with the Prime Minister, at least the one who's barely holding onto his office now:

MPs are to vote on Tuesday over whether Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer should be investigated in Parliament for allegedly misleading the House of Commons.

It relates to several comments he made about the process of appointing Lord Mandelson as the UK's ambassador to the US in December 2024. Lord Mandelson was sacked the following September over his links to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Monday night Sir Keir told Labour MPs the accusation he had misled the House was "totally baseless" and accused the Conservatives of a "political stunt".

So as far as I can parse this out, if the King utters a single word to Trump that could be interpreted as relating to the current uncertainty for Starmer, it could be interpreted as causing a constitutional crisis. Conversely, he is duty bound to support his current Government in all matters. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What in the UK would be interpreted as a 'constitutional crisis' as it applies to the king, and how would it be resolved?" It replied,

In the United Kingdom, a "constitutional crisis" involving the King typically refers to a situation where the monarch's reserve powers (legally held but conventionally unused) clash with modern democratic practices. Because the UK has an uncodified constitution based largely on convention, a crisis arises when these unwritten rules are broken or come into direct conflict with the will of Parliament.

. . . Public Political Interference: King Charles is constitutionally required to remain politically impartial. Any attempt to publicly lobby or campaign on political issues could destabilize the monarchy’s role.

Resolution usually depends on the severity of the standoff and historical precedents:

Abdication: If the King’s personal choices or actions make his continued reign [un]tenable, he may be pressured to abdicate, as seen with Edward VIII in 1936.

. . . General Election: In extreme cases, a snap election can be called to let the public decide on a mandate, effectively forcing the monarch’s hand if the returned government maintains its position.

But Charles's visit to the US comes at a time of increasing conflict, when the UK is forced to rely on its membership in NATO for defense, since it has depleted its own armed forces, while Trump is less willing to allow free rides on defense by NATO members. If Charles is expected to achieve some purpose in his visit, for instance to make up in some way for the bad feelings between Trump and Starmer, he is going to have to sail very close to the wind vis-a-vis his constitutional position.

• I don't see how he can make any sort of remark, however humorous, informal, or off-the-record, apologizing in even the vaguest way for Starmer or the Government
• I don't see how he can make any sort of remark, however humorous, informal, or off-the-record, suggesting the bipartisan policy of successive Governments to deplete the UK's armed forces is in any way counterproductive or ought to be changed
• I don't see how he can make any sort of remark, however humorous, informal, or off-the-record, commenting in any way on the UK immigration crisis
• I don't see how he can make any sort of remark, however humorous, informal, or off-the-record, commenting on either the US or UK political scene.

In other words, there's very little he can say, and aboslutely nothing he can do, to accomplish anything positive for UK-US relations. He can be charrming, and he can probably observe that having met Pope Leo, he seems quite a good chap.

But if anything remotely interesting comes out of the vistt, it will provoke a constitutional crisis.

Puzzling Similarities Between Cole Allen And Thomas Crooks

I'm intrigued about what's coming out on the "Hinckley Hilton" shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, and the Butler, PA shoter, Thomas Crooks. Both seem to have been quiet and unassuming, both were good students, but their families had been worried about them and their apparent relationship with firearms. Nevertheless, that both would wind up attempted presidential assassins came as a surprise to friends and employers. Regarding Crooks, according to Wikipedia,

One investigation only found a "lunch detention in middle school for chewing gum" as bad behavior growing up. He joined the National Technical Honor Society in 2021 while a junior in high school. In 2022, he graduated Bethel Park High School with high honors and won a $500 "star award" from the National Math and Science Initiative. Crooks earned a score of 1530 out of 1600 on the SAT, as well as perfect grades on three Advanced Placement exams. Classmates and school officials characterized him as being quiet{.}

. . . During his freshman year of high school, Crooks anonymously posted threats online, warning students at Bethel Park High School to not come to school the next day. Here, Crooks had claimed to have placed bombs inside the bathrooms in the school's cafeteria. Many students stayed home the following day. The threats were dismissed by the school's administration, and no legal actions were taken.

. . . He was employed as a dietary aide in a nursing home at the time of the shooting. According to the nursing home, which is less than a mile away from where he lived, he had passed a background check and "performed his job without concern". He had been accepted into both the University of Pittsburgh and Robert Morris University in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh, and planned to attend the latter. He had been a member of a local shooting club for at least a year.

. . . Crooks' father noticed his mental health declining in the year before the shooting, and particularly in the months after graduation. He later told investigators that he had seen his son talking to himself and dancing around his bedroom late at night, and that his family had a history of mental health and addiction issues. Crooks was also making depression-related queries online, investigators found. Interviews with his teachers, friends, and co-workers suggest that many people who interacted with him regularly did not know he was troubled.

Allen's background is pretty similar; he was also quiet and a good student who seemed promising:

Allen's academic record is striking. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology — Caltech — in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Caltech confirmed his graduation to multiple news outlets. He went on to earn a master's degree in computer science at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025. According to a Caltech graduation announcement still online from 2017, he was active in a Christian student fellowship and a campus club for Nerf gun enthusiasts during his undergraduate years. In the summer of 2014, his online resume says, he completed a competitive summer research fellowship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

. . . For the last six years, Allen had worked at C2 Education, a Torrance-based test prep and college counseling company. In December 2024, the company's Facebook page named him Teacher of the Month. According to the Los Angeles Times, Allen tutored several high school students who were members of the Asian American Civic Trust, a Torrance-based nonprofit. Its president, Dylan Wakayama, told the Times the students "thought he was very intelligent, proficient in biology, mathematics and science. They thought he was on the nicer, quiet side."

According to WBALTV,

Bin Tang, a computer science professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, told The Associated Press that Allen took a few of his classes before graduating.

“He was a very good student indeed, always sitting in the first row of my class, paying attention, and frequently emailing me with coursework questions. Soft spoken, very polite, a good fellow. I am very shocked to see the news,” Tang wrote in an email.

But at the same link,

Secret Service and Montgomery County Police interviewed Allen's sister at their residence in Rockville, Maryland. She said that her brother had a tendency to make radical statements and his rhetoric constantly referenced a plan to do “something” to fix the issues with today’s world.

She also confirmed Allen purchased two handguns and a shotgun from Cap Tactical Firearms and kept them stored at their parent’s home, and that their parents were unaware that Allen was keeping the firearms in the home. He would regularly go to the shooting range to train with his firearms.

His brother also doesn't appear to have been surprised to receive a copy of his manifesto just before the shooting:

He had written about targeting Trump administration officials, and his family raised concerns with law enforcement before the event, President Donald Trump said Sunday in an interview on Fox News Channel.

. . . White House officials told our Washington Bureau and Investigative Unit that Allen's brother had notified the New London Police Department in Connecticut of Allen's alleged manifesto, which he had sent to his family members minutes prior to the incident.

Another similarity between Crooks and Allen is that despite their high academic performance, they worked in low-level jobs unrelated to their career aspirations, Crooks as a dietary aide in a nursing home, Allen as a part-time tutor at a tutoring and test cramming company. Both lived with their parents.

The knee-jerk reaction to Cole Allen so far on the right has been to blame the education system, while on the left, it's to blame guns. I think both miss the point; I get the impression that Crooks and Allen concentrated in technical fields, where they both did well, and not in fields where they might have been exposed to leftist propaganda. The guns, of course, are a symptom, not a cause.

I'm inclined to note that in males, the typical age for the onset of schizophrenia is between late teens and early 30s, and the circumstances we're learning about Allen and Crooks seem to be pointing in that direction. The most productive thing we can do is get the quackery out of the mental health profession and get much more serious about studying subjects like schizophrenia.

More From The Country That Gave Us Fabian Socialism

Here's what Rowan Williams said about the "grooming gangs," in a recent piece for The Guardian. You'll note, first of all, that he put the phrase in scare quotes, because, of course, he doesn't really believe there actually are organised groups of Muslim men deliberately… https://t.co/6CXZhMfa4K pic.twitter.com/W8h9O03Q1A

— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) April 17, 2026

Now and then, most recently here and here, I've reviewed the late 19th century idea that the best strategy to counter the threat of world proletarian revolution was to temporize with working-class demands, but nevertheless gradually capitulate to them. This was a product almost exclusively of the UK bourgeoisie. According to Wikipedia,

As one of the founding organisations of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and as an important influence upon the Labour Party which grew from it, the Fabian Society has strongly influenced British politics.

A few figures closely associated with the movement were working class, like Ben Tillett, or titled nobility, like Bertrand Russell, but their overall social alignments were more consistent with what Marx and Engels called the bourgeoisie, which most in the movement authentically were. It's always puzzled me that working-class members of the Labour party seem never to have been remotely suspicious that members of the bourgeoisie were making policy putatively intended to benefit the working class.

I've argued here that once the classic threat of world proletarian revolution a la the Soviet Union in 1917 dissipated with the collapse of the same Soviet Union in the late 20th century, Fabian socialism became a solution in search of a problem. In addition, the outcome of the 1926 General Strike in the UK was an indication that the traditional tools of the working class short of revolution, strikes, were ineffective and alienated the bourgeoisie.

But also, the bourgeoisie effectively co-opted the Labour Party from the start; The UK writer Peter Hitchens has come to recognize this strain of opinon. According to Wikipedia,

Previously a Marxist-Trotskyist and supporter of the Labour Party, Hitchens became more conservative during the 1990s. He joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003, and has since been deeply critical of the party, which he views as the foremost obstacle to true conservatism in Britain.

At the same time he made these moves, the focus of the class struggle moved from the traditional conflict between the working class and capital to the damage government policy on immigration is doing to the working class. Peter Hitchens is certainly aware of this:

Straight from the horse's mouth

“When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain.”

—Peter Hitchens pic.twitter.com/KG41rDWVKl

— The Knowledge Archivist (@KnowledgeArchiv) April 19, 2026

But I'm not sure if even here, he understood the problem: it wasn't that the bourgeois wannabe "revolutionaries" in the universities didn't really like Britain, it was that they didn't like the UK working class. This was, after all, the real subtext of the 1926 General Strike, and it still seems to be an underpinning of UK bourgeois attitudes.

Take, for instance, the opinion of Rowan Williams, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, and whose views seem utterly typical of UK bourgeois leftists. The X post embedded at the top of my post here calls out Williams's position on "grooming gangs", an outcome of bipartisan UK immigration policy since the immediate postwar period:

Here's what Rowan Williams said about the "grooming gangs," in a recent piece for The Guardian. You'll note, first of all, that he put the phrase in scare quotes, because, of course, he doesn't really believe there actually are organised groups of Muslim men deliberately targeting white working-class girls for abuse and even murder because they're white and not Muslim.

What he believes, rather, is that there have been "events," mere brute facts, like the interaction of particles at the atomic level; something for which, ultimately, there can be no human blame. There were "institutional failures," which might as well be a description of a sewage overflow caused by mismanagement of a local drainage system.

Curious, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are the girl victims of UK grooming gangs working class?" It answered,

Yes, research and official inquiries consistently show that a large majority of the girl victims in UK grooming gang scandals come from working-class or impoverished backgrounds.

Reports from high-profile cases in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford identify several common socioeconomic factors among victims:

Working-Class Backgrounds: Victims were predominantly from working-class families, often characterized by reviewers as coming from "marginalized" or "deprived" areas.

. . . Institutional Classism: Inquiries, such as the Casey Review, found that "classist attitudes" among police and social workers often led to victims being dismissed as having made "life choices" or leading "risky lifestyles" rather than being recognized as children under threat.

Targeting of Vulnerability: Perpetrators frequently targeted girls they perceived as being from less stable or supported backgrounds, using gifts of alcohol, drugs, or mock affection to groom them.

Experts and commentators on platforms like Al Jazeera and LSE Blogs argue that the intersection of class and race played a critical role in why these crimes went undetected for so long.

In other words, while I've already pointed out that a largely unmentioned consequence of UK high immigration policy was to keep working-class wages down, another consequence was more directly to oppress the working class by setting up conditions whereby its daughters would be raped by the immigrants, while both media and police agencies minimized the problem. And national bien pensant spokespeople like the Archbishop of Canterbury seem to endorse this whole strategy.

I'm beginning to think that the problems of class conflict as asddressed by Trump and the MAGA movement are substantively different from how they're addressed in the UK. The US bourgeoisie simply doesn't hate its working class; bourgeois media figures like Mike Rowe respect its work and support its interests, while the UK bourgeoisie doesn't just want to keep them down, it actively oppresses them. And this simply isn't new, it's been there at least since the 19th century. The UK has problems that a Trump, or a Trump-like figure, can't solve.

The Raiders Of The Lost Ark Thought Experiment

Spielberg's 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark poses what amounts to a thought experiment that's at its basis not too much different from the one Rabbi Pesach Wolicki poses in the YouTube presentation I've discusssed over the past two days: it boils down to the question of what we would do if the Old Testament history and prophecies turned out to be more than just a collection of comfortable fairy tales; instead, they have some bearing on current events.

Wolicki argues that the Old Testament contains numerous prophecies that the nation of Israel will be restored. Chrome AI Mode gives this summnary: Deuteronomy 30:3–5 Return from scattering to the ancestral land; Isaiah 11:11–12 Global regathering from the four corners of the earth; Jeremiah 31:31–34 Establishment of a New Covenant and spiritual renewal; Ezekiel 37:1–14 National resurrection (Valley of Dry Bones); and Amos 9:14–15 Permanent restoration and rebuilding of ruined cities.

The issue Wolicki raises is simple: it's hard to avoid thinking that the modern Israeli nation-state is shaping up to be some sort of fulfillment of these prophecies. It's certainly possible to argue that the Biblical prophecies aren't meant to be literal, they are some sort of poetic or sublime expression of the end times leading to the final judgment, a time which is still yet to come, and which no man can predict. Nevertheless, the mere existence of modern Israel as a prosperous, sovereign territory is a problem for the ancient and medieval notion that the Jews are cursed to perpetual exile.

Wolicki says there are two ways to deny this problem: first, to claim modern Jews aren't the Jews of the Old Testament, and second, that the modern Israeli nation-state is just a secular entity that happens to exist in a troubled part of the world, and we owe it no more favored treatment than any other nation-state that it may or may not be in our interest to support. In other words, modern Israel simply is not the Israel portrayed in the Old Testament.

I said yesterday that one minor imperfection in Wolicki's argument is that he directs it primarily at people like Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson, whom President Trump rightly (to my mind) characterizes as "low IQ". Can we find higher-IQ figures who see things the same way? I think the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser is one candidate. He's become a highly vocal opponent of the Iran war, for instance, here. His objections are based primarily on "just war docrine", which I've criticized elsewhere, but I think other objections are closer to the problem raised by Wolicki's modern Israel conundrum. For instance, he criticizes Trump for going back on his view that the US has no business in the Middle East:

It also should not be forgotten that for Trump to bring the U.S. into a major new war in the Middle East would be contrary to his own longstanding rhetoric. For example, in 2019, he said:

The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE…..

But then, contradictory and reckless statements are par for the course with Trump. . . . His record is one that can be characterized as unstable and unprincipled at best and shamelessly dishonest at worst. This reinforces the conclusion that his judgment on grave matters such as war cannot be trusted.

Feser's view of Biblical Israel is pretty dark, as in this X post reproduced on his blog:

These idiotic Elmer Gantrys should re-read their Bibles, where they'll find that the history of the people of God is portrayed not as one of virtue rewarded with endless military victories and material blessings, but rather one of continual moral corruption and apostasy on which divine punishment is repeatedly visited.

It seems to me that this is a serious misreading of the Old Testament history books -- yes, Israel stumbles, procrastinates, and resists God's call in Exodus and Numbers, but it does establish a state in the Promised Land, often via battles in which God actively blesses the effort. There are both bad kings and good ones, after all, and the ultimate king will be from David's line. It seems to me that Feser here is following Augustine's view, which is echoed by Aquinas, that the Jews are fated to eternal exile, which is not in fact the Biblical prophecy.

Next, Feser pretty clearly sees Israel as a modern nation-state entirely separate from Old Testament Israel, and the US has no business getting involved with Israel's wars:

I think that Israel can indeed make the case that it has a just cause, at least insofar as its aim is simply to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. (A more ambitious goal of regime change would be much harder to justify, for the same reason that, as I said in my earlier article, it would not be justifiable for the U.S. to attempt regime change. But here I am just addressing the more limited aim of destroying Iran’s nuclear capability.)

However, this does not entail that the U.S. is justified in attacking Iran. Note first that the recent U.S. bombing was not carried out in response to any act of war on Iran’s part against the United States.

The problem is that the US has been acting generally consistent with a national policy established in 1948 by President Truman:

Harry Truman understood what the land of Israel meant to the Jewish people and recognized their history in the region. From the time of Abraham, and with expulsion by the Romans, a time spanning almost 4000 years, the Jewish people had desired to occupy the land. He recognized their history was more than 4,000 years, Harry Truman recognized this and made a moral choice in affirming the Jewish state.

So the US has generally supported Israel as both a moral objective and a matter of national policy, whether Feser agrees with this or not. It's his right to argue against this, but the policy is the policy. Second, the official Catholic policy on Israel is at best ambiguous:

After clearly stating that the Catholic view does not understand the current nation of Israel as a theological entity, Benedict adds, “At the same time, however, it was made clear that the Jewish people, like every people, had a natural right to their own land. . . . In this sense, the Vatican has recognized the State of Israel as a modern constitutional state, and sees it as a legitimate home of the Jewish people, [even though] the rationale for which cannot be derived directly from Holy Scripture” (178). The modern nation-state of Israel is not what the Bible is referring to when it speaks of Israel, but the nation of Israel can be supported for other reasons.

Thus, when one speaks of “the right of Israel to exist,” one ought to differentiate the reasons one asserts this right. Claiming that the nation-state of Israel has a right to exist because the Bible says so is something entirely different than claiming that the Jewish people have a right to their own nation according to natural law. The fact that Zionism can be used to describe either position only exacerbates the confusion.

Wolicki suggests that the precise meaning of the modern state of Israel vis-a-vis Catholic teaching is still in development, but it currently says that independent of the Old Testament, the Jews have a right to be in Israel, and the Vatican recognizes this as a practical matter. Feser insists that as a secular nation-state, Israel has a right to pursue its national interests according to natural law, but US policy violates natural law insofar as it supports Israel militarily.

On this, he disagrees with 78 years of US policy, which he's entitled to do, but this does tend to push him to the fringe, and it doesn't automatically refute Truman's position that this is a moral decision just because, say, Truman was a Baptist, not a Catholic. The Catholic Kennedy supported Israel as well.

The problem is that the official Catholic position on Israel supports its existence only because of the situation on the ground -- it sets aside the question of scripture. Wolicki speifically addresses the situation on the ground as making the Church's ancient and medieval positions on the Jews and perpetual exile absurd, but he adds the pesky problem of scripture -- yes, scripture says the Jews brought their trials on themselves, but it also says this won't be permanent, and right now, the situation appears to be changing in significant ways.

This is the basic metaphor that accompanies the scene where the Ark of the Covenant is opened in Raiders of the Lost Ark -- what if the Old Testament isn't just comfortable fairy tales? In that case, you'd better not mess with Israel, huh? Natural law doesn't necessarily govern everything in that case. I keep getting the impression that Feser keeps refusing to take that into consideration -- if natural law is all that matters, we don't need the Old Testament at all, nor indeed the New one. This is at the root of Feser's problem.