Leftist group “the Wide Awakes” denied knowing suspected White House Correspondents’ Dinner gunman Cole Allen in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation after reports claimed a connection.
Allen’s journey through leftist politics included joining the informal Wide Awakes movement before he allegedly targeted President Donald Trump at the Saturday night event in Washington, multiple media outlets reported, citing officials who heard from Allen’s family. The Wide Awakes, consisting of little more than a website and an artistic style of protest, considers itself a successor to an anti-slavery movement of the same name that supported Abraham Lincoln for president and defended free speech.
“We do not know Allen he doesn’t have a connection to us as far as anyone knows,” a spokesperson for the group said in an Instagram message. The spokesperson speculated that Allen may have instead been involved in a February noise demonstration against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Hudson, Wisconsin, which was dubbed a “Wide Awake” protest. “They are not a part of our decentralized group,” the Wide Awakes said of the anti-ICE protesters.
The Wide Awakes were “a shadowy youth movement that rose up in 1860, as the nation teetered toward civil war, then vanished,” The Guardian wrote in 2020 as anti-police Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were popularizing the new group. “Now, in another bitterly divided moment, historians, journalists and even fashionistas are converging on the movement, which helped elect Abraham Lincoln.”
Six years later, Allen sought to become his own John Wilkes Booth by taking a train from California to Washington, sprinting into the Washington Hilton with multiple weapons and trying to kill Trump and other top officials, authorities said. A manifesto he allegedly sent to family members moments before the attack called Trump “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor,” The New York Post reported. Law enforcement agents arrested him at the hotel after he allegedly shot a Secret Service agent, who was kept alive by a bulletproof vest.
Allen’s alleged behavior is a far cry from the Wide Awakes’ ostensibly nonviolent, colorful methods of political expression.
The Wide Awakes organized nationwide demonstrations on Oct. 3, 2025, by allowing viewers of the website to post locations for their own gatherings on a map. The group said the event was meant to echo the original Wide Awakes marching for slave emancipation on Oct. 3, 1860.
“Use this act of collective mindfulness to anchor your community firmly in the work and the interdependence of our world,” the October event’s description says. “It is alongside one another that we can bring about true justice and liberation.”
The Wide Awakes Instagram account‘s posts include a call to defund ICE and declaring American land as “Indian Land.”
Activist group For Freedoms launched the Wide Awakes in 2020 to coincide with BLM demonstrations sweeping the country, according to a profile by advocacy website Global Citizen. For Freedoms provides “a decentralized space” for Americans to promote “civic dialogue” through artistic expression, its website says. The group did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Allen, a California tutor and independent video game developer, also attended an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest sometime before Saturday’s incident, officials told The New York Post and CBS News. The No Kings movement sprang up in response to Trump’s second term to organize demonstrations across the country.
The formal No Kings organization did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Federal prosecutors are charging Allen with using a firearm during a crime of violence and assaulting a federal officer with a dangerous weapon, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said Saturday night.
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