They Really Think We’re Stupid

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner — that annual exercise in polite fiction where journalists who spent the year softballing power pretend to roast it — became the site of what we’re now supposed to accept as an attempted assassination. Cole Tomas Allen, a Black man, allegedly armed, allegedly ran into a room containing the President, Vice President, and the entire cabinet of an administration that has made cruelty toward Black Americans a governing philosophy, and he was taken into custody. Alive.

Let me say that again: taken into custody alive.

In a country where Philando Castile was shot seven times for disclosing he had a licensed firearm during a traffic stop. Where Breonna Taylor was killed in her own bed. Where Tamir Rice didn’t make it past twelve years old for holding a toy. Where John Crawford III was executed in a Walmart for carrying merchandise the store was selling. We are now supposed to believe that a Black man charging the most heavily secured room in American political life — hosting a president who ran on open white grievance and an attorney general who treats civil rights enforcement like an inconvenience — somehow survived the encounter.

The math doesn’t work. Not in this country. Not with this administration.

This is what I’m calling Plausibility Privilege — the luxury of expecting people to accept a story that only makes sense if you ignore everything we know about how power actually operates. It’s the storytelling version of qualified immunity: the facts don’t have to add up as long as the people telling the story have enough authority to insist they do.

Because here’s what we know about armed Black men in America: the threshold for lethal force isn’t reaching for a weapon. It’s existing in a way that makes someone with a badge nervous. It’s holding a cell phone an officer mistakes for a gun. It’s sleeping in your car. It’s standing on your own property. It’s selling loose cigarettes. The bar is so low it’s underground, and yet we’re supposed to believe that in the single most high-stakes security environment in the country, surrounded by Secret Service trained to neutralize threats before they become threats, this man not only got close enough to be a danger but lived to be processed.

They’re not even trying to make it believable. And that’s the point.

This isn’t about whether the incident happened. It’s about what the story of it is being used to justify. Every authoritarian government needs its Reichstag fire — the spectacular threat that allows them to crack down on dissent, expand surveillance, declare enemies of the state, and position themselves as the only thing standing between order and chaos. The details don’t have to be convincing. They just have to be useful.

And let’s be clear about who this narrative serves. An administration that has already deployed federal agents against protesters, threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act against American cities, and described Black activists as terrorists now has a tidy story about a violent threat at the heart of their power. It’s the kind of story that justifies anything that comes next — more security theater, more surveillance, more state violence dressed up as protection.

But it also serves the broader project of gaslighting. When you tell a story this implausible and demand it be accepted without question, you’re not just lying. You’re testing how much reality you can bend before it breaks. You’re conditioning people to accept that the official version is the only version, no matter how badly it contradicts lived experience. You’re making disbelief itself a form of dissent.

So no, I don’t believe it. Not because I think the Secret Service is incompetent — they’re not. Not because I think violence is impossible — it’s not. But because I live in a country where Black men are killed by police for far less than running toward the President of the United States, and I’m supposed to accept that this one — this one — was handled with the kind of restraint that gets extended to white mass shooters who surrender after slaughtering dozens.

The story insults our intelligence. And it insults the memory of every Black person killed by the state for crimes as minor as being perceived as a threat from across the street.

If they wanted us to believe this, they should have written it better. But they didn’t need to. Because the story was never for people who would question it. It was for people who need permission to stop pretending this administration operates inside the boundaries of truth. The rest of us know better. We’ve seen how this country treats armed Black men. And we know that if this story were true, there would be a body, not a booking.

Additional:
Prosecutors release video of armed man storming correspondents’ dinner
Man charged with attempting to assassinate Trump to remain in custody
Suspect in White House Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting Charged with Attempt to Assassinate the President