Press Gala Shooting Sidelines Iran Disaster - The Monday AM Quickie 4/27/26

By Whitney Curry Wimbish — Apr 27, 2026

Good morning to everyone, especially Chonkers, the 2,000-pound Steller sea lion who showed up in San Francisco a month ago. He’s a newcomer to Pier 39 and gets along with everybody; as the WSJ explains, “Sea lions are thigmotactic, a scientific term for very social creatures who like to cuddle.” -Whitney

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THE BIG NEWS

Press Gala Shooting Sidelines Iran Disaster

The American media elite’s grotesque annual display of loyalty to the powerful people they are supposedly meant to keep in check was interrupted Saturday night when a gunman fired multiple shots and attempted to run past a security checkpoint, NBC News, NPR and the NYT reported. The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner “descended into chaos,” and Trump, who was attending for the first time as commander-in-chief, didn’t get to give what mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt had promised would be a “classic” Trump speech.“There will be some shots fired in the room,” Leavitt said. She was right! Kinda. The gunman fired between three and eight shots, not in the ballroom but elsewhere in the building. One of them hit a Secret Service agent, who was taken to the hospital for his injury.

Other agents tackled the suspected gunman, 31-year-old Cole Thomas Allen of Torrance, CA, a man who was the Teacher of the Month at his school in 2024 and described by a childhood volleyball teammate as “borderline genius,” NBC and the Wall Street Journal reported. Allen was armed with a shotgun, handgun and knives; Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney in Washington, said he would be charged with using a firearm during a crime of violence, assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon, and potentially more crimes later.

Shortly after the shooting, news outlets reported that Allen referred to himself as a “Friendly Federal Assassin” and that he’d written a manifesto listing Trump regime targets “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” It also included what, frankly, sounds like what average Americans across political parties think about the Trump regime. Per the LA Times:

“Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial,” it said. “I’m not a schoolkid blown up, or a child starved, or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” the document said.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about this whole thing. For example, what was up with security? The Hilton lobby and lower levels had no security scanners, the WSJ reported, and guests only had to pass through magnetometers “as they entered the ballroom where the dinner was held.” Listeners of WTF episode 613 may think that’s pretty weird given how much security had to be in place so Barack Obama could visit Marc Maron’s neighborhood . Anyway, Saturday’s shooting brings the number of assassination attempts and other security breaches aimed at Trump to at least five, according to Al Jazeera.

After the shooting, hardly anyone was talking about the disaster in Iran anymore and that massive ongoing crisis got pushed down on the homepages of news outlets. Before the dinner on Saturday, Trump took steps to worsen it by cancelling at the last minute the plan for special envoy Steve Witkoff and special son-in-law Jared Kushner – his “top negotiators” – to go to Pakistan to negotiate a peace deal, the NYT reported. Trump then said Iranians should just negotiate with him over the phone. “They can call me,” Trump said. “We have all the cards. We’ve won everything.” That is one hell of a whopper. His war is already juicing inflation, worsening the affordability crisis, and pushing oil prices so high that airline executives are cancelling thousands of flights, adding new fees, or both, so that we feel the worst of it, instead of them.

MORE STORIES TO WATCH

Hatred for Data Centers Impacting Elections All Over

Data centers squander communities’ valuable water and electrical resources, drive up utility costs and are a nightmare to live near. They exist to power artificial intelligence, which makes kids kill themselves, multiple lawsuits allege. AI is the reason there is a “frightening advancement in the ability to generate child sex abuse imagery” and a shedload of slop no one wants, that cops are arresting people for crimes they didn’t commit, that surgeons are botching surgeries, and that executives across industries are eliminating jobs. These are all unforced horrors, visited on us by greedy, boorish, incurious, drug addicted rich boys. So it is no wonder that the massive bipartisan and increasingly violent backlash against data centers is playing into elections all over. In Pennsylvania, hatred for data centers is scrambling four competitive House races in the eastern part of the state. That’s where Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro wants to plop down even more data centers, which, as we’ve discussed, people despise. Republicans represent all four districts and CBNC says now all of them are “in play” and could disrupt Trump’s stranglehold on the House.

Data center opposition is especially potent in Georgia, home to a massive artificial intelligence industry. Opposition “is starting to bleed into local and statewide elections, including a competitive governor’s race and a Senate contest that could help decide the balance of power in Washington,” Politico reported. Forty-seven percent of Georgia’s voters oppose data centers – five points higher than voters nationally – and they are pissed that politicians won’t listen to their concerns. “I can’t picture anybody, including me, voting for anybody who has expressed approval of data centers or who has acted on behalf of them,” said Joe Reed, a 68-year-old retired educator and political independent.

Climate Collapse: 27 Million Facing Severe Weather Outbreak in Plains States

Severe Storms Hit Several States, Tornados in Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma At least two people are dead in Texas, two are dead in Indiana, and one is dead in Illinois; strong storms are also hitting Arkansas, Texas and Missouri and are expected to continue today. via ABC News, CBS, My San Antonio, NBC News and The Weather Channel.
Counties Across Country Prepare for Massive Flooding Kansas and Wisconsin are two of the states where counties are under flood warnings; some warnings will stay in effect through the week. via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Kansas City Star.
Multiple Fires Blazing in Florida and Georgia, Fueled by Record-Breaking Drought Air in those states and their neighbors is now dangerous to breathe, “with the worst conditions reported near Savannah, Georgia and Columbia, South Carolina; a fire burning in Florida’s Ocala National Forest was sparked by a car fire, the second time that’s happened in two weeks. Meanwhile, Corpus Christi, Texas, is at risk of becoming the first US city to ever run out of water; “absent a biblical rainfall event, its reservoirs are on track to completely dry up by next year.” via Inside Climate News, Ocala News, The Georgia Sun and NBC News.
5,000-Mile Pacific Ocean Hotspot Will Likely Worsen Extreme Weather The giant marine heatwave stretches from Micronesia to California and is 6 to 8 degrees higher than average; the “exceptional event” will worsen conditions in the upcoming months and has the potential to cause mass wildlife death. New research shows that 600,000 seabirds were killed in a single marine heatwave near Australia a few years ago. via the UK’s Natural History Museum blog and the Washington Post.

QUICKEST QUICKIES

Florida Republicans Want to Redraw State Voting Map to Favor GOP The special session starts tomorrow and will consider the Republican plan to redistrict so they can have more seats in Congress; the state’s constitution “explicitly prohibits” partisan redistricting. via The Guardian and the HuffPost.
Trump’s 2027 Budget Proposal Gives Nuclear Weapons Massive Windfall The proposed spending plan “would almost double the budget for plutonium pits, the chemical-filled metal sphere inside a nuclear warhead that kicks off the explosion in a nuclear weapon.” via 404 Media.
Sen. Thom Tillis Will Vote for Kevin Warsh as Fed Chair He had been blocking the Trump nominee in protest of the Justice Department’s investigation into the current chair, Jerome Powell, whose tenure is up next month; the Justice Department dropped the investigation as of Friday. Warsh is a former banker and member of the billionaire family that owns Estée Lauder; he’s also a former member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and told Congress in 2007 that subprime investments were nbd. Oops! via the AP, NBC News and the WSJ.
Justice Department Okays Firing Squads for Executions The regime wants to “ramp up and expedite capital punishment cases,” and has also reauthorized single-drug lethal injections as a means to kill people. via the AP.

SOME NUMBER

5,668

That’s how many books were banned in libraries last year, according to the American Library Association, a record high. The most banned book was the celebrated 2006 novel Sold, by Patricia McCormick, about sex trafficking in India.

ON THE SHOW TODAY

4/27: Sam and Emma are in the studio. Their guest is David Griscom, host of The Jacobin Show, co-host of Left Reckoning and author of The Myth of Red Texas Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South.

DON'T MISS MR CLIPS‌

This is the New Navy Secretary

Have some self respect man.

Pennsylvania's DSA-Backed Congressional Candidate | Chris Rabb | TMR

Check out Rabb’s Campaign.

PARTING WORDS

“I didn’t have time to process my emotions. I just wanted to make sure that nobody got hurt.”

-- 12-year-old Jackson Casnave, a sixth-grader in Mississippi, who was aboard a school bus heading down a highway when the driver suffered a severe asthma attack and passed out. Jackson and four fellow students sprang into action and stopped the bus, saving the driver and the other kids on board. “What they did took courage,” principal Dr. Melissa Saucier told NBC News. “They didn’t wait for somebody to step in, they stepped up themselves, and that says a lot about their character.” May we all be as courageous.

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