NPR “domestic extremism correspondent” Odette Yousef has a consistent pattern of finding extremism only on the “far right.” When Cole Tomas Allen shot up the White House Correspondents Dinner, that was somehow not left-wing extremism, as NPR’s headlines over Yousef's reportage/camouflage from Monday's All Things Considered claimed:
Shooting suspect's online presence belies claims of 'radicalism'
And:
With no radical footprint, what drove suspect to try and assassinate Trump?
But wait! The violence itself defines extremism! But in Odette's oeuvre, only right-wingers can be radicals.
Last fall, she laboriously avoided tagging Charlie Kirk's killer as leftist: "the landscape of political violence and violent extremism in the U.S., I think, is much more complex....I think we often assume political violence means right-on-left violence or left-on-right violence. But, you know, we increasingly see these instances that don't map onto those divides."
Now Cole Allen can't be tagged as a radical leftist. Yousef turned to one of her normal leftist "extremism experts," Jared Holt (formerly with People For The American Way), who claimed Allen's Bluesky account was "really not that radical."
But then it turned bizarre. Yousef added: "there's also nothing we found that seems overtly conspiracist." What??
Odette Yousef looking for the WHCD shooter's radical footprint: https://t.co/dJ4zrLDtGa pic.twitter.com/Stnfr45Rx4
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 29, 2026
It quickly emerged that Allen reposted the idea that Trump being shot in the ear in Butler, Pennsylvania was faked. That went unmentioned. He also believed Trump was a rapist and a pedophile, as Yousef acknowledged: "Yes, he was using terms like rapist or pedophile in reference to the president. But honestly, his content falls into a kind of mainstream left now, Scott."
Shouldn't that make the so-called "mainstream left" a hive of fringy conspiracy theories? No, not when NPR gets to define terms.
Yousef restated her constant thesis: "The data show that political violence from the left has increased in the last year, but that is from a very low baseline over the last 10 years. And in the last decade, political violence has overwhelmingly been associated with the far right." This is easier to sustain if you refuse to admit that any of the leftist shooters are leftists.
The shooter's just an everyday American, she concluded: after talking to her sources, what emerges "is just this person's admittedly thin online presence and writings paint a picture of a pretty normal guy with views that are quite common in America. You know, it doesn't appear that there was any so-called radicalization" -- until he loaded up with guns and knives at the Washington Hilton.
PS: In the longer online article, she quotes Holt making this point:
"You look at the social media profiles that have been attributed to this suspect and they're really not that radical," said Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a company that tracks online threats and narratives. "Oftentimes it's like quite centrist, pretty moderate left wing, if anything."
An affidavit filed by an FBI agent in support of the charges claims that Allen sent an email to members of his family moments before initiating the attack. The email specifies some grievances against Trump administration officials and policies.
"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," the letter states. The letter appears to reference a range of issues from immigration detentions under the Trump administration, U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, the bombing of a girls' school in Iran and the Epstein scandal.
In an apparent reference to Trump, the letter also says "I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes."
But Holt and others say these views, however pointed some of the terminology may be, fall within a modern mainstream left.
