TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@joshschr @barron1946_john And since we are aware you’re not she this is parody..I’m giving you permission to keep your 2 bucks. and bang your key board somewhere else.

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

https://t.co/fQLuJIg0Ju

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@nypost Whatconstitutes incest? Let’s say, if you were adopted at age 2. Does that personaccept to exemplify a parent to thatchild in every way? Just thinkabout thechild’s mental wellbeing .This is my father or mother. Can you imagine whenthey start coming to your bed at age 9,12.14.15?

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@doqholliday A home first, (long story) with a big green house to grow food. I know how to can and would teach my grandchildren how and why it’s a valuable skill. I could provide things to family, friends,elderly.
If there are Med Beds coming soon, I definitely would choose one or three 🥰🌷

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I was one of 300,000 people who solved the WHCA shooting in 40 minutes. None of us were right. But we were fast, and that night, fast felt like the same thing.

I need to tell you about a tweet.

Not because it matters. Because I thought it did. Because for 3 hours on the night of April 25, 2026, I was certain it was the most important thing on the internet, and I need to tell you what that certainty felt like before I explain why I was wrong.

December 21, 2023. An account called Henry Martinez. @HenryMa79561893. Pepe the Frog avatar. Glitched rainbow banner, the kind of pixel corruption art that looks generated, or found, or planted. Zero following. No bio. No replies. No likes. No history. Created that month and immediately abandoned.

1 post. 2 words. No context. No hashtag. No thread.

Cole Allen.

Just a name dropped into the algorithm like a coin into a well. Then silence. 2.5 years of silence.

I found it at 11:47 PM. I know the exact time because I screenshotted the screenshot. 21 million views by then. 27,000 likes. 12,000 bookmarks. 2,000 replies and climbing. The account had 2,100 followers it never asked for. The only people who follow it found it after the shooting.

One post. 0 engagement for 868 days. Then a man with that name charges a Secret Service checkpoint with a shotgun, and the dead account becomes the most analyzed two words on the internet.

I screenshotted it. I saved it to a folder. I sent it to my group chat with no caption, just the image, because no caption was needed. Everyone already had it. Everyone was already doing what I was doing.

Research.

That's what I called it.

Here is what I built in 40 minutes.

Cole Tomas Allen. 31. Torrance, California. CalTech, class of 2017. Mechanical engineering. Cal State Dominguez Hills, master's in computer science, 2025. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory summer fellow, 2014. C2 Education tutor. Teacher of the month, 2024.

I typed faster than I've ever typed at work.

Indie game developer. Published a game on Steam called Bohrdom. Non-violent. Skill-based. Inspired by chemistry models. Self-propelled pinballs, bullet hell without the bullets. He trademarked the name. He was working on another game: a top-down shooter set in outer space. A person who designed fictional violence for a living and removed the violence.

I didn't stop to think about that. I was looking for the next connection.

CalTech Nerf Club. Christian Fellowship. Registered to vote with no party preference. 1 political donation on record: $25 to Kamala Harris via ActBlue. October 2024. $25. The price of lunch.

And then I found it.

The JPL 2014 summer fellowship program lists a co-author on a published research paper: Henry Martinez.

Cole Allen was a 2014 JPL Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow.

Both names. Same program. Same year.

I had 3 tabs open. I was cross-referencing a dormant Pepe account with a 10-year-old academic paper. I told my group chat I'd found something. I hadn't found anything. I'd followed the same trail 300,000 other people were following at the same speed, and the speed felt like intelligence.

40 minutes. That's how long it took. Before the Secret Service finished their incident report. Before the Acting AG drafted a statement. Before a single journalist filed a story. 300,000 people had already built the board, pinned the photos, drawn the string.

I was one of them. I was fast. I was thorough. I was wrong about what those words meant.

Then somebody ran the Pepe avatar through a face comparison. The frog holding a glass of whiskey in a bow tie. Next to a photo from inside the ballroom. A man at Trump's table holding a glass. Same angle. Same tilt. Arrows drawn between them. "LOOK AT THE GLASS. LOOK AT THE TIE." Shared 40,000 times before anyone asked what it proved.

I shared it. I didn't ask either.

Then somebody found the banner image on the Henry Martinez account. Glitched pixel art. Rainbow static. And somebody else found an EU research project from May 2022, "Study on Quality in 3D Digitisation of Tangible Cultural Heritage," that used the exact same visual aesthetic in its branding. "TIME MACHINE" was the project name. Time Machine.

A tweet from 2023. A project called Time Machine. A man from the future.

I could feel the board filling in. Every piece clicking against the next like magnets. My brain building the room before I'd checked whether the foundation was real. That feeling, the one where the pattern assembles itself faster than your skepticism can keep up?

That's not research. That's gravity. And I was falling.

Here is what the people with followers did while the rest of us were building their evidence for free.

Karoline Leavitt, hours before the dinner, in a recorded interview: "There will be some shots fired tonight." She was talking about jokes. She says. The clip was timestamped, captioned, and circulating to 6 million people within 90 seconds of the first gunshot. 90 seconds. That's not reaction time. That's preparation.

Fox News, mid-broadcast. Their White House correspondent's phone cuts out after her husband tells her "you need to be very safe." She later explains that the Washington Hilton has notoriously bad cell service. The internet doesn't believe in bad cell service. Not when it has a better story. I didn't believe in bad cell service either. Not that night.

Then the word. Both sides. Simultaneously. The fastest bipartisan agreement in American history:

STAGED.

The left said staged to distract from the Iran war and the cratering approval ratings. The right said staged because a Harris donor did it. Both sides said it within the same minute. Both were certain. Neither had evidence. Neither needed any.

I recognized this. I'd seen it before. Butler, Pennsylvania. The same pattern. The same speed. The same certainty arriving before the facts. I recognized it and I kept scrolling.

Alex Jones called it staged at 9:14 PM. By 11:30 PM he said it wasn't. By midnight he was "investigating." By morning he was selling supplements about it. 3 positions in 6 hours. Every one of them monetized. I know his timestamps because I was tracking them. I called that research too.

Marjorie Taylor Greene posted "many questions about Cole Allen" at 12:47 AM like she was peer-reviewing a doctoral thesis she'd never read. I liked the tweet. Then I unliked it. Then I screenshotted it.

Brooklyn Dad, 1.3 million followers, asked "Staged or not staged?" like he was running a poll on pizza toppings. 800,000 impressions on that question. He didn't investigate anything. He didn't have to. He just asked the question and let 300,000 people do his research for free. People like me.

That's content creation. That's what we call it now. A question with no intention of finding the answer. A prompt designed to generate engagement, not information. Brooklyn Dad didn't need to know if it was staged. He needed you to reply.

Jack Posobiec. Libs of TikTok. Tom Fitton. All posted within minutes of each other. Not about the shooting. Not about the agent who took a round to the chest. Not about the 1,000 people who crawled under banquet tables in formal wear. About building a new White House ballroom. The president referenced the ballroom in his press conference that night. He posted about it on Truth Social the next morning.

They don't need the conspiracy to be true. They need it to be first. They need the narrative shaped before you've finished processing the sound of the gunshot. By the time you look up from under the table, the story is already written, the merch is already printing, and the thread is already pinned.

That is the machine. It doesn't run on truth. It runs on speed. And the people who operate it have more followers than the Secret Service has agents.

I fed it for 3 hours. I called it staying informed.

I need to tell you about a train.

Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. 3,000 miles. Roughly 50 hours, if you take the southern route through Texas and up the coast. Maybe longer.

Cole Tomas Allen boarded that train with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. He sat in a seat. Or a sleeper car. We don't know yet. And he watched the country pass outside the window for 2 days. The Mojave. The Rio Grande. The Appalachian foothills. The Potomac.

What does a person think about for 50 hours when they have decided to charge a federal checkpoint?

Does he sleep? Does he eat in the dining car? Does he look at his phone? Does he read the news about the dinner he's traveling toward? Does he think about the game he published, the one where he deliberately removed the guns? Does he think about his students? Does he think about the fellowship, the summer at JPL, the paper with the name that would end up on a dead Pepe account 2.5 years before he ended up on the ground in a hotel lobby?

I don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody is asking. I wasn't asking. I was looking at a Pepe avatar through a face-matching overlay at 2 AM and calling it evidence.

40 minutes to build the board. 3 hours to fill it. 0 seconds on the train ride.

The internet found the tweet in 40 minutes. The NASA paper in 45. The ActBlue receipt in 3. The Fox News clip in 90 seconds. The face-match Pepe theory in 20. The Time Machine banner connection in 30.

Nobody found the train ride.

Because the train ride doesn't have engagement value. It doesn't confirm anything. It doesn't fit a board. It doesn't go viral. It doesn't have a ratio. It's just a man, a window, and a decision that nobody can explain by cross-referencing a tweet with a 10-year-old PDF. Not me. Not the researchers. Not the influencers. Not the politicians. Not the algorithm.

The tweet has 21 million views.

The train ride has none.

And the Secret Service agent who caught a shotgun round in his vest went home to his family that night. He is not trending. He is not a thread. He has no Pepe avatar. No one is drawing arrows to his face. He is alive because Kevlar works, and that is the least interesting thing that happened on April 25, 2026, according to every platform that covered it.

According to me. I covered it too. I just didn't know that's what I was doing.

I deleted the board.

I kept the screenshot.

I don't know what the tweet means. But I know what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean what the people with the biggest megaphones need it to mean. It doesn't mean what the algorithms want to amplify. It doesn't mean what I decided it meant at 11:47 PM, when I was still falling, still reaching for the pattern because the pattern felt safer than the silence.

The glass in the Pepe's hand is not the glass on the table.

The banner is just pixel art.

The tweet is still there.

Sometimes a name is just a name. And sometimes a man gets on a train, and the only conspiracy is that we'll never understand why, and we'll build 1,000 theories to avoid sitting with that.

40 minutes to build the board. 50 hours on that train. I spent my time on the wrong one.

I know because I'm still thinking about it. Not the train. The board. That's the part I can't stop replaying. Not the silence. The speed.

That's the conspiracy. Not the tweet. Not the Pepe. Not the Time Machine.

The conspiracy is that speed felt like intelligence. And I fell for it. And I'll fall for it again.

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@Oceanbreeze473 👗

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@ProjectConstitu 🙄🙄🙄 uhmmm…then there’s this
Nick Adam’s created the meme in February. Trump just used it. Also, someone (not Trump ) photo shopped the demon in. 🙄trouble makers, all of you

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

https://t.co/7A9YxMqXTU @RealJamesWoods

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@PatrickTucker15 @RealJamesWoods @FishermanWords This isn’t mental illness. This is the true meaning of “entitlement “. Give me what I want. Do what I want. Or you will see my destructive petulant childish fit throwing. Stop excusing bad behavior for mental illness

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

All because the mincing dandy in California’s governor’s mansion is pushing his “climate change” fable as a way to con us all into the 15-minute-city hoax beloved by all communists.

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@ronsterd89 $385 💰

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

https://t.co/D45uDWQthj

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@RealJamesWoods Agree with James

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@PaulDMauro

[Sarcastic Liberty 🇺🇸 @SarcasticLiberT]

@crismontrees @PaulDMauro https://t.co/uaHwFn1KdR

[crismontrees @crismontrees]

@PaulDMauro No one is talking about the still where there is no gun visible and back straps are missing

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@Rhiachnash 🤚 Positively!! I need financial help. I’d help some others too. Grateful💜

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

What the actual hell are we witnessing here?? 🤯 https://t.co/4791cCZfBE

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

Read the comments 👇

[Rep. Tom Cole @TomColeOK04]

This funding package funds countless critical programs, strengthens our national security, cuts spending, and bolsters American energy dominance. On top of that, it delivers on critical community projects throughout Oklahoma and the entire nation. More: https://t.co/DXY3vaNfEV

[TCollier🕊❤️🗽🔔 @TraeCollier]

@tawnniee Little d&@k syndrome ?🤔

[nativepgh @nativepgh]

@legitbrittFLA The amount of people who are blatantly intentionally lying about what happened today is wild.

They are absolutely trying to turn this into the next George Floyd.

They are foaming at the mouth right now for an excuse to burn, loot, and destroy the city.