The young man who tried to assassinate President Trump

A young man named Cole Allen recently attempted to assassinate President Trump.

He was not uneducated. He was not disconnected. He was not without opportunity.

He was a graduate of Caltech with a degree in mechanical engineering. He earned a master’s in computer science. He completed a NASA internship. He was teaching and mentoring students. By every outward measure, he had a bright future in front of him.

Instead, he planned an attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, arrived armed, opened fire on Secret Service agents, and left behind a manifesto naming political targets.

That should stop us in our tracks. This does not happen by accident. 

How does someone who has been given every opportunity come to believe that violence is justified?

This goes deeper than politics. It comes down to how young people are being formed, and the environments shaping how they understand truth, authority, and morality.

On our school campuses today, students are discouraged from wrestling with ideas. They are navigating a system where certain viewpoints are elevated and others are punished. Over time, that changes behavior. Students begin to self-censor, not because they lack conviction, but because they understand the cost of expressing it.

At Caltech, where Allen studied, surveys reflect that kind of environment. Twenty-seven percent of students say violence is acceptable to stop someone from speaking, fifty-four percent support shouting down speakers, and forty-two percent admit they regularly hold back their own views.

That is not the free exchange of ideas. It is a controlled environment where conformity is rewarded and reinforced.

We have spoken out about this before, particularly as DEI frameworks have expanded across education. These programs were presented as a way to create fairness, but in reality they have defined what can be said and what can be questioned. Students learn quickly which perspectives are rewarded and which are not, and over time that pressure reshapes how they think.

When truth is replaced with enforced ideology, independent critical thinking disappears.

The result is a generation that has been trained to associate disagreement with harm and to view certain viewpoints as off limits.

That shift does not stay contained to campus.

We have already seen how this mindset moved into medicine, where physicians are punished for speaking openly, where debate is shut down, and where patients are not given the information needed for informed consent. The pattern is consistent: limit the range of acceptable views, enforce compliance, and present that as consensus.

Control the information, and you control the outcome.

What begins in education eventually shows up in institutions, in policy, and in the culture more broadly.

And it raises a serious question about the future. If young people are not taught how to engage with opposing ideas, if they are not given the space to question and think independently, what happens when they encounter a world that does not conform to what they have been told?

We are starting to see the answer.

At AFLDS, our work has focused on protecting the ability of physicians to speak freely and the right of patients to make informed decisions. That remains our immediate responsibility, but it is part of a larger effort to fight the systems that replace truth with control.

If you believe truth should never be controlled, I ask you to stand with us.