On April 6, 2026, Ben Shapiro appeared on theHoover Institution’sUncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson and argued thatthree institutional lies, stacked in sequence, had produced a collapse of trust so severe it was generating dangerous anti-establishment radicalism. Nineteen days later, on April 25, that argument was confirmed with the assassination attempt on President Trump during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, fired shots and attempted to breach security at the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump, Melania, Vice President Vance, and cabinet members were evacuated unharmed.
Allen who worked as a teacher at C2 Education, was a member of a group called “The Wide Awakes” and attended a “No Kings” protest in California. Allen described himself in writings as the “Friendly Federal Assassin.”
The April 25 attack was thefifth documented attemptor plot against Trump across a decade. On June 18, 2016, Michael Steven Sandford, a British national, attempted to grab a police officer’s weapon at a Trump rally at the Treasure Island casino in Las Vegas with the stated intent of shooting Trump. On July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a Trump campaign rally inButler, Pennsylvania, grazing Trump’s right ear, killing one rallygoer and critically wounding two others before being shot dead by Secret Service on the scene.
On September 15, 2024, Ryan Wesley Routh was found with a rifle in the tree line outside Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach with documented intent to kill the president and was apprehended before firing. He was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison in February 2026.
Separately, U.S. intelligence agencies and theDepartment of Justicedocumented an active Iranian government conspiracy to assassinate Trump in retaliation for the killing of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, resulting in federal criminal charges against named individuals, though no physical attempt was executed on U.S. soil.
Shapiro’s Uncommon Knowledge framework explains how that environment was built. In his own words: “I think there were three things that happened right in a row, historically, that really shifted the mindset and it matches up with the timeline.” He identified three lies, each containing what he called a “grain of truth” exploited by mainstream media and Democrat lawmakers, and then amplified on social media. Together, these lies produced what he described as a “vast anti-institutional burgeoning” that has “exploded over the course of the last five years.”
The first was Russiagate. The claim that Vladimir Putin manipulated the 2016 election, blackmailed Trump, and installed him as a foreign puppet was, in Shapiro’s words, “trash,” sustained by establishment media for four years. TheMueller Report(2019) found no evidence of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
TheDurham Report(2023) concluded the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation without adequate factual basis and applied a double standard not used against Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The Steele Dossier, which drove much of the coverage, was largely discredited, and its primary sub-source Igor Danchenko was indicted for lying to the FBI.
The narrative shaped impeachment proceedings for the entirety of Trump’s first term, then collapsed under scrutiny. For those who had accepted it, it established that Trump was not a legitimately elected president but a foreign-installed puppet, a framing that made violent removal easier to rationalize.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
