Bizarro World Cole Allen’s ‘heroic’ failure

Note: This column first appeared on Cashill’s substack.

“I was striving, you might say, for that mirror-image, that opposite,” said Bizarro creator Alvin Schwartz. “And out of a machine which would reveal the negative Superman, came the mirror image – always remembering that in a mirror everything is reversed.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of course, was the courageous Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazi dictatorship and was finally hanged for his alleged role in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer died a hero. In Bizarro World, Cole Allen is a hero. Like Bizarro, he came “out of a machine,” the woke-industrial complex that has thousands of others just like Allen rolling off the assembly line.

Unlike “scholars” Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, the biracial Allen was the real deal

This machine finds and exploits young men with a hero syndrome, that is “a compulsive need to save, fix, or rescue others to gain validation, admiration, or a sense of purpose.” Alas, instead of producing Supermen, the woke-industrial complex produces “negative” Supermen. Immersed in a world of pretend fascism, these Bizarro Bonhoeffers act out as though the fascism were real.

In the past two years, in fact, that machine has forged three other assassins or would-be assassins from the same mold that produced Allen, all of them male, young, technically sophisticated, and seemingly normal. Who knows how many more are, like Allen, waiting for “the best timing and chance of success.”

President Trump called Allen a “lunatic,” and prudent Democrats more or less concurred. But what is most disturbing about Allen’s manifesto is its sanity. There is nothing crazy about it. Millions of other Democrats believe just what he does. Given the info fed to Allen and other residents of Bizarro World, he acted decisively, even heroically. Many of Allen’s supporters fault him only for missing.

Said Allen, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” His Bizarro World media projected the vices of its own allies—rapist Bill Clinton, pedophile Jeffery Epstein, traitor Hillary Clinton—on to an innocent Trump, and Allen chose to believe his media.

For all his book learning—a BS at Cal Tech, a masters from Cal State—Allen apparently did not know that Trump was the one who blew the whistle on Jeffrey Epstein, that Trump’s traitorous link to Russia was a Hillary Clinton dirty trick abetted by her deep state allies, or that Trump’s rape accusation was pre-election lawfare spun by a woman who could not remember the year of the alleged rape or whether Trump used his finger or his penis.

On Saturday evening, Allen entered the Washington Hilton armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. His “rules of engagement” allowed him to kill anyone who stood between him and his “targets.” Raised Christian, Allen dismissed the admonition to “turn the other cheek” as irrelevant given that he was the rare Democrats not “oppressed.”

He clarified, “I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.” His charges here range from the dangerously myopic to the perfectly fictional, but none of these charges would raise eyebrows on a CNN panel let alone on MS-NOW.

Allen is hardly unique. His fellow high achiever Luigi Mangione shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. Like Allen, Mangione saw the world more clearly than “normies” could ever hope to. “The details are coming together,” he wrote before the shooting, “And I don’t feel any doubt about whether it’s right/justified.” Said biographer John Richardson, “What do we do when our presumed assassins start to seem normal, and when normal people start to admire them?”

These Bizarro World Bonhoeffers seem normal only in their Orwellian ecospheres, shielded bubbles, large or small, in which the opposite of the true has become the default position. “Turning the other cheek when ‘someone else’ is oppressed is not Christian behavior,” wrote Allen echoing Bonhoeffer. “It is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

Said Bonhoeffer, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

The high achieving Thomas Crooks seemed “normal” until he shot President Trump and killed Cory Comperatore. Like Allen and Mangione he too was a techie who thought himself smarter than the world around him. Tyler Robinson, the accused killer of Charlie Kirk, graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA and received a merit scholarship to Utah State University.

Like Crooks and Allen and even Mangione, Robinson’s early conservative views were ground away by the propaganda wheels of the woke industrial complex to the point where he was inscribing on his bullets, “Hey fascist! Catch!” (Would-be golf course assassin Ryan Routh is something of an outlier in this group. He is older, has a long criminal history, and few would confuse him someone “normal.” That said, he, too, studied, engineering at college.)

Luigi, too cool for school

Allen’s fatal error was to misjudge the anti-fascists of Bizarro World. For all their numbers and marches and posters, they are a profoundly superficial lot. They know next to nothing about anything, fascism especially, and will quickly forget a guy whose fatal flaw is to be nowhere near as cool as Luigi Mangione.

Note: This column first appeared on Cashill’s substack. Please subscribe.