Cole Allen’s Manifesto, Decoded

A close read of the suspect’s document – and what it is designed to do.

ANALYSIS by Susan Katz Keating

“Hello everybody!” is not how shooters begin their manifestos. But that’s how Cole Allen began his.

Allen was subdued on Saturday after he exchanged gunfire with the Secret Service at a premier Washington, D.C. black-tie gala where President Trump and prominent officials were gathered. Allen had multiple weapons in his possession. Before embarking on his would-be spree, he sent out a document. It’s easy to see what the document says – versions have circulated online – but what does it actually mean?

I have covered more than 70 mass murders that succeeded. Nearly all of them produced some form of paper trail. Those trails taught me to look for meaning inside the words. Those trails are built to do something. This is a read of Allen’s document—how it is built, and what it is designed to do. 

“Hello everybody!” The Opening Move

The opening is jarring because it is so ordinary. It reads like a group chat message, or a social media post from someone you know. That is not an accident. It is the document’s first move.

Allen wants you to feel like you know him before he tells you what he did.

The apologies that follow are specific in a way that should unsettle any experienced reader of this genre. He apologizes to his parents for a particular lie about a particular cover story. He apologizes to colleagues and students for a “personal emergency” that he then immediately, with dark humor, notes has become technically accurate. He apologizes to the people on his flight, to hotel workers who handled his luggage, to “non-targeted people at the hotel” who were endangered by his proximity. He apologizes to victims of past abuse he was unable to stop and future victims he may be unable to prevent.

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I have read documents by men who expressed regret. I have rarely read one where the regret reaches this far. Structurally, it establishes moral seriousness before the document makes a moral argument. Every reader who thinks “he sounds like someone I know” is receiving that framing. Every reader who nods at the specificity of the guilt is being pulled into it.

The apologies are the document’s foundation. Everything built on top of them inherits their credibility. And credibility is what allows it to travel.

The Central Claim: “Permit”

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

The word “permit” plays a precise linguistic role. It is not the language of anger that no longer can be controlled. It is the language of revoked authority. It assumes that Allen had the authority to allow something and has now withdrawn it. His prior inaction is framed not as powerlessness but as a conscious choice, now reversed.

This is jurisdictional language. Allen is not describing a feeling. He is describing an office he has assumed. He is the person who decides what will and will not be allowed. That office does not exist in any democracy. It exists in the language of sovereigns. 

The parenthetical that follows matters: “I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.” This is not a breaking point. It is a long-held conviction waiting for opportunity. That is a different profile from someone who snaps. It is someone who has been waiting.

The Rules of Engagement: Ethics as Recruitment

Allen presents a hierarchy of targets. He prioritizes administration officials by rank. He designates Secret Service as targets only if necessary, with a preference for non-lethal incapacitation. He exempts hotel security, Capitol Police, National Guard, hotel employees, and guests – unless they shoot at him. 

He specifies buckshot over slugs, citing wall penetration and bystander risk. He then adds a qualifier. He would “still go through most everyone here” if necessary, on the basis of complicity.

What this section does is transform premeditated violence into something that reads like applied ethics. This is not presented as a rampage. It is framed as a disciplined operation with constraints. The distinction between targets and non-targets is reasoned. The choice of ammunition is justified. The moral work, he suggests, has been done.

The Objections and Rebuttals: A Known Audience

The objection-and-rebuttal format suggests exposure to structured argumentation, but the content is more revealing than the format.

The objections are specific: Christian doctrine, inconvenience, partial success, racial identity, and a constitutional-religious question. These are not generic. The racial objection in particular is too specific to be hypothetical. Someone must have said that to him. He rejected it. He included it.

This is a document with a known audience. The rebuttals are written for people who pushed back. It appears that he may have been testing this framework in real time.

The response to the Christian objection is the most sophisticated. He argues that “turning the other cheek” applies to personal suffering, not to the suffering of others. He argues that indifference to others is complicity. Variants of this argument exist in serious theological writing. He has absorbed it and is applying it to his own case in a way that the tradition would reject but cannot easily dismiss from within its own terms.

The Gratitude Section: Emotional Reach

Between the rebuttals and the postscript, Allen thanks his family, church, friends, colleagues, students, and acquaintances online.

This is not incidental. It makes him legible as a person embedded in relationships. He is not isolated. He has a community. He has something to lose.

Documents that present their authors as isolated figures have limited reach. Documents that present their authors as socially embedded extend further. Readers can locate themselves in the portrait. This is where Allen becomes recognizable. 

The Postscript: Signal Under Reduced Control

“Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing?”

This is the most important section.

The register drops. The formal argument disappears. What follows is an account of a security failure: no cameras, no room sweeps, no agents in corridors, security focused on the perimeter and blind to someone who checked in the day before. He is not boasting. He is describing what he found.

“If I was an Iranian agent… I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed.” 

That line should be isolated. It is colder than the surrounding text, more analytical, more professional. It reads like a threat assessment, not an aside.

The postscript also contains the most human line: “I want to throw up; I want to cry… Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.”

That is not resolution. That is a man under strain, using dark humor because it is the last register available to him. It is also the moment most likely to create identification in the next reader; one who may be inspired, pick up the mantle, and attempt what Allen did not accomplish. 

To my read, that is what the document is meant to do.

Susan Katz Keating is publisher and editor in chief of Soldier of Fortune.