The left built this. The money trail, the rhetoric, the machine — and why no one with the power to stop it has any financial incentive to do so.
By Michael Phillips | Riptide Opinion & Analysis
The Assembling of Saturday Night
Prior to the evening of April 25, 2026, Cole Tomas Allen boarded a train in Los Angeles. He traveled to Chicago, then to Washington, D.C. He checked into the Washington Hilton on Friday. He spent Saturday waiting.
That night, President Donald Trump attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — the first time he had attended as a sitting president. The ballroom held 2,600 people: Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, senior cabinet members, and hundreds of journalists. At approximately 9:20 p.m., Allen armed himself with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives, charged through a security checkpoint, and exchanged gunfire with law enforcement.
He was tackled to the ground before reaching the ballroom. A law enforcement officer was injured — protected by his vest. No one was killed.
Before he entered the lobby, before leaving his hotel room, Allen had sent a message to his family. The White House confirmed he “clearly stated” his intent to target Trump administration officials. The DOJ announced Sunday that preliminary findings indicate the President himself was the intended target. His writings included this passage: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
Read that sentence carefully. Every word of it was manufactured for him. Not by fringe accounts. Not by anonymous message boards. By sitting United States senators, House members, cable news anchors, and the billion-dollar nonprofit infrastructure that feeds them their language and collects their donations.
Cole Allen did not write that sentence. He assembled it. And the people who handed him the pieces will face no consequences whatsoever.
This is the story of how that works, who profits from it, and why they will never stop on their own.
The Business Model
Political divisiveness in America is not a cultural failure. It is a revenue stream.
The formula is not complicated: fear and outrage generate clicks, donations, and votes. Unity generates none of those things. A political opponent who is wrong is not useful. A political opponent who is a traitor, a fascist, a rapist, a threat to democracy, a king — that is a political opponent who can be harvested. Indefinitely. Across every platform. In every fundraising cycle.
The machine that manufactures that dehumanization is not operating in the shadows. It is operating in the United States Senate, in the House of Representatives, in the offices of nationally funded nonprofit organizations, in the green rooms of cable news networks, and through a dark money infrastructure that has turned the systematic destruction of political norms into one of the most profitable enterprises in American history.
What happened at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night was not a surprise. It was output. It was the predictable, documented, financially incentivized result of a system that has been running at full capacity for years — and that accelerated dramatically after Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025.
Fear and outrage generate clicks, donations, and votes. Unity generates none of those things.
The Elected Officials Who Turned Up the Heat
Let’s be direct about something that most political commentary refuses to say plainly: the members of Congress who have spent the past year calling the sitting President of the United States a traitor, a fascist, a rapist, a felon, and a king bear direct moral responsibility for the environment that sent Cole Allen to Washington with a shotgun.
This is not a rhetorical point. It is a causal argument.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland has built his entire national brand on a single premise: that the Republican Party, its leadership, and its voters represent an existential, constitutional, democratic catastrophe. Every floor speech, every cable hit, every fundraising email that follows a particularly inflammatory statement is a financial transaction. Raskin does not de-escalate because de-escalation does not pay. The apocalyptic framing — democracy on the brink, fascism at the door, the republic burning — is not Raskin’s genuine assessment of every news cycle. It is his product. He manufactures it, packages it, and sells it to donors who need to believe they are fighting for civilization itself.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stood on the steps of the Supreme Court in 2020 and told a crowd that Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price.” In 2024, and in response to legal actions taken against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer stated on a broadcast that people “should be forcefully rising up against” the government’s actions, calling the situation a “hallmark of tyrannical, autocratic dictatorship societies.” He was never fined. He was not censured. He raised money off it.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has characterized Republican governance in terms specifically designed to signal to his base that normal democratic opposition is insufficient — that what is happening to the country is not a policy disagreement but an occupation. Jeffries promised “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” regarding the upcoming 2026 midterm elections. That framing is deliberate. It is tested in focus groups and optimized for donation conversion. Every dollar raised on that framing is a dollar that requires the framing to remain at maximum intensity.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Rep. Ro Khanna — the list of elected officials whose financial survival depends on keeping their base at a sustained pitch of existential terror is long and bipartisan in the sense that it exists across different levels of government. But it is not symmetric. Van Hollen has frequently used the term “lawless” to describe the administration. The current wave of political violence — the Kirk assassination, the Correspondents’ Dinner attack, the repeated attempts on Trump — flows overwhelmingly in one direction. And the rhetoric that produced it flows overwhelmingly from one side of the aisle.
Cole Allen wrote that he could no longer permit a “traitor” and “rapist” to coat his hands with crimes. He used those specific words because those specific words have been used — in prepared statements, in Senate floor speeches, in fundraising emails, in cable news chyrons — hundreds of thousands of times by people with press credentials and security details.
They said it. He believed it. He acted on it.
No Kings: The $294 Million Uprising That Wasn’t Grassroots
On June 14, 2025 — the same day Vance Boelter assassinated Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in their Brooklyn Park home — millions of Americans took to the streets in the first “No Kings” protest, organized primarily by Indivisible and a coalition of progressive organizations.
The media described it as a spontaneous civic uprising. The largest single-day protest in American history. The people rising up.
Researchers at the Government Accountability Institute identified $294,487,641 in grants flowing from six major donor networks to more than 100 official No Kings partner organizations. Indivisible, the lead organizer, received a $3 million grant from Open Society Foundations — George Soros’s charitable network. A nonprofit called Home of the Brave ran a separate $1 million advertising campaign in newspapers nationwide specifically to promote the marches. Fox News Digital traced participation from a network of socialist and communist organizations funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American tech tycoon and avowed communist living in China, whose network includes the People’s Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the ANSWER Coalition, and CodePink.
These are not grassroots organizations. They are professional political operations with radical leadership, foreign-linked funding, and a specific strategic objective: to frame the elected government of the United States as illegitimate and its supporters as enemies of democracy.
The protest network called Trump a king, a dictator, a fascist — not because that is an accurate characterization of a president operating within constitutional norms, but because that framing is worth $294 million to the people who deploy it. It is worth billions more in small-dollar donations, media subscriptions, and future organizing infrastructure.
When you tell millions of people that the government is run by a fascist king, and you say it loudly and repeatedly and with the institutional authority of U.S. senators standing at podiums, some percentage of those people will draw the logical conclusion that a fascist king should be stopped by any means necessary.
Cole Allen drew that conclusion. He traveled across the country to act on it.
The Violence Goes Both Ways — and That’s the Point
This is not an argument that political violence belongs exclusively to the left. It does not, and the record is clear.
On June 14, 2025 — the same day as the first No Kings march — Vance Boelter, a 57-year-old Trump supporter and conservative Christian, appointed to the Governor’s Workforce Development Board by two Democratic governors (Dayton & Walz), dressed in a fake police uniform, drove a vehicle outfitted to look like a law enforcement SUV to the home of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, and killed her and her husband with multiple gunshot wounds. He then drove nine miles and shot Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife at their home. Hoffman survived. A hit list found in Boelter’s abandoned vehicle contained approximately 70 names — Democratic lawmakers, abortion rights advocates, U.S. senators, and others. He is charged with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted second-degree murder and has pleaded not guilty.
Boelter’s politics were not ambiguous. Friends described him as a devout evangelical who attended Trump rallies. He was driven by opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights. His target list was ideological.
So was Cole Allen’s.
So was Tyler Robinson’s, the 22-year-old who shot Charlie Kirk in the neck at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025.
So were the two men who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in 2024.
This is the central fact that both political parties, the national media, and the dark money machine are invested in obscuring: the political violence crisis in America is not a partisan problem. It is a temperature problem. The machine does not care which direction the bullets fly. The machine profits from both.
The machine does not care which direction the bullets fly. The machine profits from both.
When Boelter killed Hortman, Democrats raised money on it. When Kirk was assassinated, Republicans raised money on it. When Trump was rushed from the Correspondents’ Dinner with a gunman exchanging fire outside the ballroom, both sides had fundraising emails drafted within the hour. The violence is inventory. The grief is content. The outrage is the product.
And the elected officials who feed that cycle — who cannot afford to lower the temperature because their fundraising model requires it to stay at maximum — are not going to stop. They will not stop because stopping would cost them money, influence, and power.
They will not stop because stopping would cost them money, influence, and power.
The Fraud They’re Protecting
There is a second reason the machine cannot be turned off, beyond political incentive. That reason is money — and specifically, the billions of dollars in public funds that have moved through Democratic-controlled states in ways that are now under federal investigation and that a politically calm, accountability-focused environment would expose completely.
Minnesota
Federal prosecutors estimate that more than $9 billion in public funds across more than a dozen social services programs may have been stolen or misappropriated under Democratic governance in Minnesota. The anchor case involves Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit that submitted fraudulent meal count invoices and collected millions in kickbacks from COVID-era child nutrition programs. More than 90 people have been charged. Founder Aimee Bock was convicted in March 2025.
But Feeding Our Future, federal investigators say, is “just the tip of a very large iceberg.” Prosecutors allege that roughly half or more of approximately $18 billion in federal funds flowing through 14 Minnesota programs since 2018 may have been stolen.
The House Oversight Committee released testimony in March 2026 alleging that Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware of early fraud signals within Feeding Our Future and chose not to act — specifically out of fear of political retaliation and accusations of racial discrimination. When the nonprofit sued the state for slowing reimbursements, citing racial discrimination, officials backed down. The lawsuit was the instrument. The accusation was the financial weapon that kept the money flowing.
Walz, who had been positioned as a potential national Democratic figure after the 2024 Harris campaign, dropped out of his re-election race on January 5, 2026. He cited the fraud scandal. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed him to testify in February. Whistleblowers within the state’s Department of Human Services alleged that the agency deleted data and withheld records to suppress the investigation’s reach.
The question that has not been asked loudly enough: if the programs were producing the fraud, and the fraud was producing the political organizing infrastructure that kept Democrats in power, what was the actual financial incentive to stop it?
California
Newsom’s California is the larger empire.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz has estimated that $146 billion in funds were stolen in what he called “Gavin Newsom’s empire of fraud.” In April 2026, federal prosecutors arrested eight individuals for billing taxpayers for fake hospices — a scheme that had been investigated four years earlier, with no action taken, while Newsom’s administration sat on it.
State auditors found that more than $24 billion in funding to homeless advocacy groups over five years was not tracked. The In-Home Supportive Services program — costing nearly $30 billion annually — has estimated fraud rates of 20 to 40 percent, suggesting annual losses of $6 billion to $12 billion. Newsom’s own chief of staff, Dana Williamson, was charged in November 2025 with fraud for allegedly siphoning campaign and COVID-19 recovery funds. She departed the governor’s office with a $50,000 payout for unused vacation time. His send-off statement praised her “insight, tenacity, and big heart.”
A California state senator introduced legislation in April 2025 that would raise the threshold for felony welfare fraud from $950 to $25,000 and make it harder to charge perjury for misstatements to welfare departments. The measure was framed as criminal justice reform. Critics called it what it was: legalized theft of public money.
Meanwhile, Newsom positions himself for a 2028 presidential run. The national media gives him largely favorable coverage. The fraud story gets a fraction of the attention of Trump’s latest executive order.
Maryland
Marylanders should be asking directly: Could it happen here?
When Spotlight on Maryland posed that question to Gov. Wes Moore’s senior advisor David Turner on New Year’s Eve 2025, his answer was: “To answer your question — can I assure you of that level of abuse? I don’t have the answer for you on that, but I can assure you we are doing everything we can to mitigate waste, fraud, and abuse.”
The head of Maryland’s state government cannot tell citizens whether large-scale fraud is occurring with their tax dollars. They don’t even track how much money is given to nonprofits.
What the audit record does show: Maryland’s Office of Legislative Audits uncovered $3.42 billion in undocumented federal funds across eight state agencies. Forty-two state offices spent a combined $8.5 billion last year with minimal oversight. The State Highway Administration was flagged for $360 million in unauthorized expenses charged to federal projects. The Social Services Administration was found to have placed foster children in homes with convicted sex predators. The Department of Juvenile Services failed to perform criminal background checks on workers with vulnerable youth. Thirty-four percent of audit findings repeat in subsequent audits — a rate the Office of Legislative Audits says it has not seen since before 2010.
Moore’s response to this record was to oppose the establishment of an independent statewide inspector general — the one structural safeguard that would produce independent answers — while spending $5.6 million in COVID relief funds to hire the Boston Consulting Group to perform a similar function under his direct control. That contract has identified less than 40 percent of its $75 million savings target.
The Maryland General Assembly, meanwhile, passed a utility rebate that papers over the accountability question of why Maryland ratepayers’ bills spiked in the first place — and why the Democratic-controlled Assembly has shown no interest in investigating the regulatory failures and political relationships that produced those spikes. The Assembly passed bills that generated media coverage, built donor lists, and served their political base. The structural problems that produced a $1.5 billion deficit remain unaddressed.
Moore is considered a likely 2028 presidential contender. His national brand is built on positioning himself as a competent progressive alternative — built, in no small part, on making Trump the explanation for every problem that predates his own tenure.
The Infrastructure of Incitement
Let’s be precise about what the machine looks like, because precision is what distinguishes journalism from polemic.
The No Kings protests were not spontaneous. They were coordinated by Indivisible, funded through Open Society Foundations’ grant network, amplified by allied organizations with foreign-linked Soros-adjacent funding, and infiltrated — intentionally, by design — by socialist and communist organizations that explicitly described the protests as an opportunity to spread “revolutionary organizing.” These organizations described the United States government as fascist. They described the sitting president as a king and a dictator. They distributed that language to millions of participants who, in many cases, genuinely believed they were defending democracy.
The elected officials who spoke at these rallies — who lent the institutional authority of the United States Senate and House of Representatives to marches that were partly organized by groups calling for revolutionary action — did not accidentally raise the temperature. They chose to.
The elected officials who spoke at these rallies did not accidentally raise the temperature. They chose to.
When senators and House members use the word “traitor” to describe a sitting president, they are not engaging in hyperbole. They are making a legal and moral argument to millions of people: that the man in the White House is so fundamentally illegitimate that normal democratic opposition is insufficient. That argument has a predictable tail risk. It has produced assassination attempts. It has produced a gunman at a press dinner. It will produce more.
The people making that argument know this. They are not stupid. They have security details.
The people who consume that argument, absorb it, and act on it do not have security details. They have shotguns and train tickets.
What Must Be Said
The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled Charlie Kirk’s organization a hate group the day before he was assassinated. It had done the same to the Family Research Council before Floyd Corkins walked in with a 9mm and tried to kill everyone inside. The SPLC has now been indicted by a federal grand jury for wire fraud and money laundering — accused of secretly funneling more than $3 million to paid informants with ties to the KKK while raising hundreds of millions of dollars fighting “hate.” The FBI has severed ties with the organization and called its hate map a “partisan smear machine.”
The No Kings movement — organized by Indivisible, amplified by Soros-network funding, and openly co-opted by revolutionary socialist organizations — held what its organizers claim were the largest single-day protests in American history. Elected Democrats spoke at those rallies. No one in leadership called for the language to be toned down. Toning down is not in the financial model.
Melissa Hortman is dead, shot in her home by a man with a target list. Charlie Kirk is dead, shot on a college campus by a man who had absorbed the SPLC’s designation. Cole Allen tried to kill the President of the United States at a press dinner, having assembled his grievance from years of professionally manufactured vocabulary.
And this morning, the machine is already generating the next cycle. The fundraising emails are being written. The statements are being drafted. The dollars are being counted.
Nobody who handed Cole Allen the words he used in his manifesto will be charged with anything. They will issue statements. They will raise money off those statements.
The political violence industry will not regulate itself. It cannot — the incentives run in precisely the wrong direction. What changes it is accountability: financial, legal, and documentary. It means following the money from the dark money network to the nonprofit to the PAC to the elected official to the program to the contractor to the fraud. It means asking, in every case, who benefited from keeping the temperature high, and who benefited from the fraud that high temperatures were designed to obscure.
Nobody who handed Cole Allen the words he used in his manifesto will be charged with anything.
They will issue statements. They will raise money off those statements.
And the next shooter is already reading their next email.
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