McCulley-Stacy

Fury has replaced discourse in this country. That is not an opinion. That is a diagnosis. And on the evening of April 25th, it put bullets in the air at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

A man named Cole Tomas Allen, 31 years old, a teacher and engineer from Torrance, California, showed up to the Washington Hilton with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives. He rushed a security checkpoint and ran for the ballroom where President Trump, the First Lady, Vice President Vance, and hundreds of others were sitting down to dinner. Before the attack, he had sent his family a note apologizing to his parents, his colleagues, his students. Then he opened fire.

Nobody died. One officer took a round to a bullet-resistant vest and thankfully will recover. It could have gone the other way and turned into something far worse.

Let me be clear. I disagree with this administration on plenty, and I will keep saying so boldly when warranted. But what happened Saturday night was not disagreement. It was not protest. It was not resistance. Allen wrote that he experienced rage thinking about everything this administration had done and then acted on that rage with firearms. That is not conviction. That is the end of the conversation. Literally.

He has a degree in mechanical engineering from Caltech and a master’s in computer science. His professors called him an exemplary student. He was not ignorant. He was not uninformed. He was someone who handed the wheel to his anger and drove straight off a cliff, and handed every bad-faith actor in America a gift in the process.

When people stop seeing the other side as wrong and start seeing them as evil, violence becomes normalized. Public backlash fades. And that makes the next incident more likely, not less. We have been on that road for a while. This past weekend is where it leads.

So what do you do when you are angry? You do what Jack Kemp did. You do what Stacey Abrams did. You organize. You knock on doors. You register voters. You show up. Kemp spent decades building a conservatism rooted in inclusion and economic opportunity, traveling to communities that most Republicans had written off, making the case face to face, vote by vote. Abrams turned Georgia from reliably red to a genuine battleground by doing the same thing from the other direction. Neither of them got there by letting rage do their thinking for them. They got there by doing the slow, unglamorous work of civic engagement.

That work starts local. And here in White County, the clock is already running.

The local primary is May 5th. That is only a few days away. The people on that ballot, candidates for sheriff, for county executive, for county commission, are not supporting characters in some national drama. They are the government you actually live under. Your sheriff sets the tone for how law enforcement operates in this community. Your county commission decides where the money goes and the county executive decides what kind of county this is going to be. Those decisions land on your doorstep in ways that no presidential tweet ever will.

And here is the part people forget: in a county like ours, the primary very often is the election. Whoever wins on May 5th in the dominant party is almost certainly going to win in August. If you sit out the primary and then show up in August wondering why the choices look the way they do, the answer is that you were not in the room when it mattered.

This is the third time in less than two years that someone has tried to kill Donald Trump. No modern president has faced this many threats. Whatever your politics, that should turn your stomach. You do not substitute a gun for a ballot. You do not get to skip democracy because you are furious. The stakes are always high. That is exactly why we have elections.

Be angry. You are allowed. But direct it. Vote on May 5th. Show up in August. Hold your sheriff and your county executive and your commissioners accountable by name, in public, at every opportunity. That is how change happens. It is the only way it ever has.

The conversation has to continue. But it can not continue like this.

Published on 05/01/2026 The Expositor Newspaper