The ranks of would-be presidential assassins are a cavalcade of losers, yet the latest shooter who set out to murder President Donald Trump — the man who opened fire at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Sunday — turns out to have an elite educational background.
Cole Allen is a graduate of CalTech, the prestigious California Institute of Technology.
In the most recent City Journal college rankings, CalTech took the top spot for “value added to career,” but languished at a dismal 95th place for “student ideological diversity.”
The rankings noted the school’s “disproportionately large Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucracy” — with “roughly ten DEI staff members per 1,000 students” — and its “overwhelmingly liberal” student body, “16 liberal students for every conservative.”
Even by the sagging standards of 21st-century American universities, CalTech is politically monolithic, but is that enough to radicalize someone like Cole?
Unfortunately, recent studies suggest our institutions of higher ed actually increase their students’ acceptance of political violence.
Some 23% of Americans with a high-school diploma or less endorse the statement “Violence is often necessary to create social change,” according to the Skeptic Research Center’s 2025 American Political Perspective Survey.
After four years of college, the proportion who find political violence “often necessary” rises to 26%.
But then the numbers explode — among those holding graduate or professional degrees, fully 40% agree political violence is “often” required for “social change” to occur.
Cole earned a master’s degree at California State University, Dominguez Hills, just last year.
His murder manifesto makes his political objectives perfectly clear — he intended to bring about social change through violence: “Administration officials . . . are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.”
His colleges taught him everything from engineering to self-expression, but didn’t teach him that slaughtering elected officials is wrong.
In a republic like the United States, political violence is not “often necessary,” and even during the American Revolution, the point was precisely that we didn’t have representation: Faced with British force and denied their traditional rights as English subjects, Americans took up arms as a last resort.
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Once independence was won, Americans worked to put an end to political violence — and when it did break out, in Shays’ Rebellion or the Whiskey Rebellion, the armed mobs found the American people, as well as the forces of law, solidly against them.
It’s true that Thomas Jefferson sympathized with the bloody French Revolution, but he learned a painful lesson as what purported to be a violent uprising for liberty wound up paving the way to Napoleon’s dictatorship.
As for the change that assassins can bring about, any college graduate ought to know what the slaying of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 accomplished.
That political murder directly gave us World War I and set in motion a series of conflicts and revolutions that led to World War II as well.
By coincidence, the night before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I saw a production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” in a small town outside Washington, DC.
The controversial musical, first staged off-Broadway in 1990, showcases the insanity and vanity of presidential assassins, successful and not, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley.
They’re a tragically recurrent feature of American politics — and if we’re not on our guard, we’re sure to get more of them.
That makes the inability, or unwillingness, of our colleges and universities to teach the bitter truth about political violence a dereliction of civic duty, and of basic human decency.
Young men like Cole Allen shouldn’t emerge from years of “liberal” education more ready to accept, or commit, political violence.
Yet the effect of higher education is now the opposite of what it should be, moving graduates, and especially graduate students, in the direction of radicalism.
The effects aren’t always as dramatic as Allen’s murder attempt, but they’re pervasive, and they also include the rising tolerance at The New York Times and other left-of-center outlets for the criminal activity promoted by progressive online influencers like Hasan Piker.
For now, the likes of Piker rant like revolutionaries while making political excuses for property crimes.
But if stealing is acceptable in response to a supposedly wicked capitalist, racist American system, it won’t be long before classrooms and opinion pages start filling up with rationalizations for those, like Cole Allen and Luigi Mangione, who employ personal violence in the name of fighting the system.
This moral rot should be arrested, not promoted, by higher education.
It’s not enough if CalTech doesn’t radicalize a Cole Allen.
Our schools and universities, privileged as they are by taxpayers’ dollars, should deradicalize them — and teach them to do good, not violence, to their country and countrymen.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
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