Hate Incorporated: The left's intolerance machine threatens to change security forever

When the White House correspondents’ gala – halted by a third assassination attempt by a gunman of President Donald Trump – returns next month for a somber encore, it will hardly resemble the laid-back, star-studded event that has been staged for decades at the Washington Hilton hotel.

The red carpet – which was unsecured and in the line of sight for accused assassin Cole Tomas Allen when he burst through a security checkpoint Saturday night – will almost certainly be moved inside the magnetometer-laden security perimeter.

A ticket and a tuxedo won’t be the sole form of permitted entry. ID checks will likely be imperative.

And the joviality of reporters wining and dining the Washington VIPs they cover for a living will likely be supplanted by the memories of loud gunshot blasts and the mad scramble they unleashed.

Public event security will be forever changed by Saturday night’s near horror in the nation’s capital, which played out on live television, experts told Just the News.

“It has got to change,” said former Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund, whose effort to better fortify the U.S. Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot was thwarted when his request to deploy National Guard for extra security was denied by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lieutenants.

Sund said the threat of political violence has vastly expanded beyond politicians since 2020, noting that since United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a Manhattan hotel in 2024, incidents against corporate executives have soared more than 300%.

“So now you got to look beyond the workplace. You got to look beyond the Capitol. You got to look beyond wherever they may be having their office and see where they have to be protected, like these events, like the Washington Hilton, the baseball field at Alexandria or at their homes,” Sund said during an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show. “So now they’ve got to extend that security perimeter.”

Prosecutors on Monday laid out an extraordinary tale of how Allen, a high-intellect teacher and computer gamer, bought two guns in California, traveled across the country by train undetected and booked a room at the Washington Hilton in an assassination plot that brought him within yards of the ballroom where the president, the vice president, the Cabinet and the top echelons of government were all dining. Allen’s goal was to kill the president, then work his way down the line of succession until he was stopped, prosecutors alleged.

He was thwarted by Secret Service agents, one who was shot in the bulletproof vest covering his chest and another who jumped in front of the president on stage to take a bullet, just in case the gunman reached the ballroom. Their valor won’t be forgotten, Trump declared in the hours afterward.

But the simplicity of Allen’s plan and its near success is a wake-up call, according to several members of Congress who were in attendance Saturday night at the Washington Hilton and talked to Just the News.

“When I entered, my (security) detail dropped me off, and a Secret Service agent was kind enough to bring me down to the red carpet event, but there's no metal detectors or anything just to get into the hotel,” Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Arizona, recalled. “I mean, this is still a public space that serves as a hotel as well. And obviously the suspect exploited that.

“The perimeter needs to be bigger,” Hamadeh added. “I think, from a security person point of view, it needs to be bigger. The ballroom should not have been the first point of metal detectors. When you have that many dignitaries at the red carpet, you know they could have been killed. They could have done so much damage. Maybe not to the president, but to his entire administration.”

The security establishment has promised and made better security arrangements after the two prior attempts on Trump’s life in 2024 in Butler, Pa., and West Palm Beach, Fla., the assassination of Charlie Kirk at an open-air Utah college campus in 2025, or the wounding of congressman practicing baseball at a suburban Washington field all the way back 2017.

Those events – along with the BLM riots in summer 2020, the Antifa attacks on immigration agents, the execution of the United Health Care CEO and the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh near his personal home – have something more in common than just the exploitation of current security postures.

Read a list of all the left-inspired acts of recent political violence here.

They all, according to publicly released evidence, involved perpetrators influenced by a vast left-wing machinery that bombards social media, community protests and even establishment television with an unrelenting message of hatred and intolerance that can dehumanize the targets of violence and motivate armed actors to action, experts said.

That machinery ranges from nonprofits like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which actually paid racist actors in the name of fighting extremism, to the organizers of the No Kings protests who unleashed hundreds of thousands of old and young protesters onto the streets on the false notion that America has somehow become a monarchy under Trump.

In between, elitists and teachers have infused the nation with claims that America’s history is racist and unrighteous and that young Americans are predestined to fates determined as oppressors or the oppressed based on their skin color. And well-funded nonprofits consorting with America’s enemies in China and Cuba are openly fomenting a color revolution in hopes of securing a Marxist future on U.S. soil.

Allen appears to have been influenced by some of that ideology, as well as Democrats’ incessant but unfounded claims that Trump was involved in the late Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking.

The manifesto police said Allen wrote suggested he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” and that he subscribed to the Marxist paradigm of critical race theory that divides people into oppressors and the oppressed.

"Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes,” Allen purportedly wrote.

For sure, there are agitators on the right, as well: those who foment antisemitism, racism or conspiracy theories among them. But the scope and scale of the left’s intolerance machine and its funding, which reaches into the hundreds of millions of dollars, dwarfs the right, leading some to see a professional Hate, Inc. being forged on the political left.

“The left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him has gotten multiple people hurt and killed, and it almost did so again this weekend,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lamented Monday from the press briefing podium.

The solutions, experts and lawmakers say, are tricky in a nation that protects its free speech feverishly.

“Look, we're the party of free speech, and the other party is the party that talks about hate speech, and that does create kind of that odd situation,” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said. “I began my life at the time of the Vietnam War, and seeing hate speech toward every soldier, sailor and Marine who defended their country. I went to school at Kent State, where four were shot in a riot that occurred there on the campus.

"It has been bad before, but that's not an excuse for us not to raise the standards of decorum in Congress. Because if we're going to represent the American people, we're going to have to do so by, first of all, acting like the adults they thought they sent to Washington."

Meanwhile, the FBI is building more indictments against nonprofits like SPLC believed to have sowed discord, while the IRS is aiming to yank some of the prized tax exemptions that drive such group’s fundraising. For some, those actions have been too slow to address the threat.

“There are a lot of agents, both internationally and domestic, that are engaging in behavior that is either illegal or not in our best interest, and we're just kind of, we've been turning a blind eye to it,” Rep. William Timmons, R-S.C., told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “So obviously, the Southern Poverty Law Center, we've just figured out, has been facilitating all of the domestic unrest for the purpose of the fundraising off of it.

"And I mean, China and Russia have been doing the same thing. We need to have our eyes on this. We need to make sure that we're protecting our government, our society, our people. And I think that we have gotten wise to this.”

On the flip-side of accountability is the mission to radically re-imagine security at large VIP events like the White House Correspondents' Association or even for prominent figures walking down the street.

Sund, the former police chief, said he suspects Saturday’s episode has set such changes in motion, and he endorsed Trump’s notion that one day the White House should have its own ballroom that has security that can’t be achieved in the private sector settings of a hotel like the Washington Hilton, which has now seen assassination attempts on Ronald Reagan and Trump 45 years apart.

“You need to change your routine,” he said. “Changing it to another venue would be great. Changing it to a secure venue, like a White House ballroom, would be the best option out there."