The contrast could scarcely be more jarring. Nearly a decade ago, a young mechanical engineering student at the California Institute of Technology stood before a conference audience in Los Angeles, calmly demonstrating a simple PVC-pipe prototype designed to improve wheelchair safety for the elderly and disabled.
That same man, now 31-year-old Cole Allen of Torrance, California, stands accused of arming himself with a shotgun, handgun, and knives to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in a bid to murder President Donald Trump and members of his administration.
This transformation—from quiet innovator to would-be political assassin—does not occur in a vacuum. It reflects a cultural and ideological descent that has claimed too many promising minds in an era defined by progressive intolerance, anti-Christian animus, and the normalization of political violence. Allen’s case demands we confront uncomfortable truths about how radicalization spreads among the “educated” class.
Video unearthed by Fox News Digital captures Allen in 2017 at the “Aging into the Future” conference, explaining in measured tones how his device could prevent wheelchairs from skidding. Engineering observers noted the design’s simplicity, yet it represented the work of a disciplined mind at one of America’s premier technical institutions. Allen had also completed a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory fellowship. The portrait was one of promise: a young man building things to help others rather than destroy them.
That promise evaporated. By Saturday night, Allen had allegedly checked into the Washington Hilton a day earlier and attempted to breach security at an event attended by the president, vice president, and top administration officials. Law enforcement recovered multiple weapons. His writings, according to reports, reveal a seething hostility toward Christians and the current administration—rhetoric echoing the very protests he attended, funded in part by networks tied to radical left causes.
The left’s response to political violence has too often been equivocation or outright denial of its ideological roots. Yet patterns emerge clearly: educated individuals, often from elite institutions, radicalized through a steady diet of identity politics, historical grievance, and secular contempt for traditional faith. Allen’s trajectory—from Caltech to would-be assassin—mirrors broader failures in higher education and media that treat conservatism and Christianity not as legitimate worldviews but as existential threats deserving contempt.
President Trump’s public assessment cut through the noise. He described reading the manifesto and identifying a clear hatred of Christians. This should alarm every American who values ordered liberty grounded in Judeo-Christian principles. When hatred of faith becomes a motivating factor in violence, we witness not random madness but the logical endpoint of a culture that has spent decades marginalizing biblical truth.
Allen’s earlier life also included game development and tutoring. Colleagues recognized him as an award-winning teacher as recently as late 2024. Yet somewhere along the path, exposure to certain ideological currents apparently supplanted productive endeavor with destructive rage. This is the quiet tragedy playing out across segments of the rising generation: talent diverted into grievance, ingenuity twisted toward chaos.
The Secret Service and law enforcement acted swiftly, preventing what could have been another national catastrophe. Their success reminds us that while radicalization festers in the shadows of cultural decay, courage and preparedness can still prevail. But prevention requires more than tactical response. It demands cultural renewal—a recommitment to the moral framework that once channeled ambition toward creation rather than destruction.
As the investigation proceeds and charges mount, including firearms violations and assault on federal officers, Americans should reflect on the human cost of unchecked radicalism. Promising inventors do not become assassins without a society that has lost its way.
“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.” Ephesians 5:11. In an age when darkness masquerades as enlightenment and hatred poses as justice, this charge remains urgent. The Allen case is not merely about one man’s fall. It is a warning about the stakes of abandoning the moral order that sustains a free republic.
The nation that once produced inventors serving the vulnerable must rediscover the principles capable of restraining the darker impulses of the human heart. Anything less invites more tragedy.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
