Go ahead, share a conspiracy theory, who cares

Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from California, allegedly had multiple guns and knives on him when he was tackled to the ground by Secret Service — or, possibly, just fell down by accident — at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday night. The entire country immediately decided it was a false flag operation, but let’s pretend it wasn’t for a second.

Allen reportedly sent his family members a surprisingly coherent manifesto — as far as manifestos go — in which he said he wanted to minimize casualties, but that he would “still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary.” He apparently did not plan to go after FBI Director Kash Patel, though. It’s unclear why. Maybe he figured Patel would have been fired by the time he got to the dinner.

Reports are still coming in about Allen and why he allegedly carried out the attack. Though no one has explained why he wasn’t wearing a shirt when he was tackled. NBC News verified that he is the owner of the @coldforce.bsky.social Bluesky account. The platform has taken it down, but the bio read, “I’m a random Californian guy with posts about American politics, support for Ukraine, and observations of small creatures.” Based on screenshots I’ve seen, he spent his time on the app sharing posts about how much he didn’t like the streamer Hasan Piker and openly fantasizing about killing the president. So, you know, the median American voter in 2026.

After Allen’s name was released, users started scouring the web for his social accounts and stumbled across an X account called @HenryMa79561893, which only posted once, back in 2023. The post simply reads, “Cole Allen.” And @HenryMa79561893’s header image is a stock image that was used on a website called Time Machine, which is a European organization dedicated to using big data to build accurate reconstructions of the past. This would be only sort of weird if it weren’t for the fact the @HenryMa79561893 has a Pepe The Frog avatar. One of the Krassenstein brothers (remember them?) thinks the header image is a photo of Trump holding up his fist after his first assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024. But that’s only because everyone has gone completely fucking insane.

But, as I said at the top, it seems like most of the country is convinced Trump organized this himself. If you’re looking for a good temperature check for how America 2 is processing this, actor January Jones made a whole Instagram story yesterday about how it was an inside job. And it seems like Threads users are fairly unanimous that this was an elaborate ploy to get Trump his military grade ballroom-bunker. Which has been stuck in legal limbo for months.

Trump false flag rumors have been flying around for the last few weeks, even before this weekend’s thwarted attack, after a major Trump supporter cast doubt on some of the details surrounding the Butler assassination attempt. And former MAGA personalities like former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and comedian Tim Dillon, who are already feuding with Trump, pounced on them.

None of this was helped by the fact that almost every single big right-wing X account this weekend immediately started posting that it was time to build the White House ballroom to keep the president safe. I guess the Fiverr payments got deposited into their Paypal accounts at the same time. I know the relationship between national media and the federal government is so incestuous that it might feel like the WHCD is an official government event, but it’s not. So it’s highly unlikely that the next one is going to be held at the White House. But like I said, everyone’s lost their minds. So who cares. Oh, actually, if you’re looking for something else to share as proof this was all staged, here’s a video of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, before the dinner, telling a Fox News reporter that there will be “shots fired.” Share it on your Instagram with a fun caption. Indulge a little. Nothing matters anymore.

The assassination attempt was probably best summed by UFC CEO Dana White, the only man in America with exactly the right amount of head trauma to fully understand our current reality. “It was fucking awesome,” White told NBC News’ Ryan J. Reilly. “I literally took every minute of it in. It was a pretty crazy, unique experience.”

The New York Times, in one of their many dispatches on the assassination attempt, reported similarly blasé reactions from the room of dinner guests, as Trump was rushed out. “Lloyd Blankfein, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was sitting with CBS News journalists toward the front of the room when the emergency occurred,” The Times story reads. “As the confusion unfolded, Mr. Blankfein turned to his seatmate and asked, ‘Are you going to finish that salad?’” At least The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold managed to film a selfie video of herself hiding under a table. Good for the ‘gram, I bet.

The general, “so what?” from the country is, of course, troubling. And Puck’s Dylan Byers wrote on X about the disquieting experience of watching America collectively shrug its shoulders on Saturday, describing an experience similar to my own. Like Byers, I was in a bar watching the Knicks game when the news hit that Trump had been evacuated from the WHCD. And, like Byers, none of the TVs changed to the news. No one seemed to even notice. Back in 2024, during the first assassination attempt, I watched dozens of phones around me ping with push alerts. I was on a plane, listening to passengers nervously whisper about the news. But there was no discussion this time. The uniquely American 21st-century callousness that has allowed us to ignore school shootings and COVID deaths and climate catastrophes and ICE occupations has reached its logical endpoint, where we just accept that this is simply just how things have to be.

Though, there was one difference this time. The Atlantic argued in a piece on Sunday that “the shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner made clear who gets saved first.” Obviously, President Donald Trump was rushed out, as was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, not so much. The violence of modern America will reach us all eventually. The 1% of the 1%, the richest and most powerful, will likely get out safely. Maybe their wives will too. But the rest of us will have to decide whether we run, hide, or clip it for social.

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Pulling back the curtain on Wikipedia's Articles for Creation process

There is enormous demand for new Wikipedia articles, especially from brands and startups looking to influence how they appear in search and AI results. But despite the promises of sketchy vendors, getting a new entry published remains extraordinarily difficult.

Lumino's exclusive audit of 1,009 Articles for creation (AfC) submissions offers a rare, data-driven look at how this process actually works. The findings challenge common assumptions about notability and reveal the structural dynamics shaping the encyclopedia's growth and guidelines. 

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We’ve finally settled on a video strategy lol. After months of experimenting with — and reporting on — different kinds of short-form video, we’ve decided that the game is totally rigged. So we’re just going to do what Garbage Day does best: Focusing, very selfishly, on what we actually like doing.

A few months ago, we did a big reader survey asking you all where you spend the most time online and the number one answer was YouTube. So our new video editor Dan Méth and I are bringing back the Garbage Day YouTube channel, posting weekly videos going long on all the stuff we’re covering here in the newsletter. Paying subscribers will get to see these videos early. So if you’re a big YouTube person and want early access to what we’re cooking up over there, hit the big green button below.

Michael Tracey, a Substacker whose reactionary horseshoe politics are too unintelligible and disjointed to really get into here, and former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, got into a bit of a scuffle at the Substack WHCD party over the weekend. The fight got so heated, I guess, that Tracey posted up in front of a Hampton Inn in DC and challenged Acosta to come fight him lmao.

The cause of the fight was allegedly due to Tracey harassing Julie K. Brown, the reporter who has been leading the Jeffrey Epstein investigation for literal years now. Tracey is convinced that the Epstein investigation is a moral panic. So much so that he showed up to harass people at Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre’s memorial last week.

It must have been a last minute decision to attend because, as Derek Guy, the menswear guy, noted, Tracey forgot to take the size tag off his pants:

An Iranian propaganda account, though not Explosive Media, which is the main one, published a new AI-generated video attacking Trump. This one was focused on the WHCD, created by a user going by @HemmatMahdi, based in the US.

Well, Badiucao, a Chinese artist based in Australia, noticed that at one point, the video features "我们抗议,” or “we protest.” Most of the other text in the video is garbled nonsense. “Does it mean the creator's prompt is originally in Chinese？Or they are using a Chinese AI model to generate the slopaganda,” Badiucao asked in a post on X.

Which is a good question actually! The user replied to Badiucao, writing, “I didn’t even realize! And I didn’t use Kling lol. Good catch 😅” “Kling” refers to Kling AI, a Chinese AI model owned by Kuaishou.

For me, this is less of a question about whether or not, like, China is making pro-Iran content and, honestly more of a question about what models are being used to make it.

A user on Reddit’s r/Biohackers is vax-maxxing. “I slowly collect ALL the approved vaccines into my body, always few shots during one doctors visit,” they wrote. “Now I am vaccinated in advance even for diseases I will for sure not encounter this year, just for these potential heterologous effects.”

They provided a list of all the vaccine they’re taken recently, including ones for Alzheimers, shingles, and high-dose flu vaccines. They’ve been answering questions in the comments. They say they haven’t noticed any general improvement with their immune response, though.

“At this point I can piss into aquarium and heal these fish by it,” they wrote.

P.S. here’s a very interesting story about Hollywood!

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***