I’ve been sitting with this story for several days now. I can’t let it go.

A 31-year-old man named Cole Allen walked into the Washington Hilton last Saturday night armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives. He charged a Secret Service checkpoint. He opened fire. He fully expected to die.

He didn’t die. But the life he built is over.

Caltech graduate. Master’s degree. Teacher. Son. Brother. A man described by a former FBI profiler as rational, empathetic, and emotionally present — not psychotic, not unstable in any clinical sense.

So what happened?

He was lied to. Relentlessly. And no one he trusted told him the truth in time.

**The Manifesto**

Minutes before the attack, Cole Allen emailed a manifesto to his family. He called it a rational act of conscience. He cited crimes he believed the President had committed — language pulled directly from years of political propaganda he had absorbed and accepted as fact. He wrote with the tone of a man who had thought it all through. A man who had prepared rebuttals for every objection.

He even addressed his Christian faith. “Turning the other cheek,” he wrote, “is for when *you yourself* are oppressed.”

He believed he was fighting for others. He believed he had no other choice. He believed the lies so completely that he was willing to die for them.

That is not madness. That is deception at its most dangerous.

**What I’ve Seen in Five Decades of Ministry**

I have sat across from people whose lives were in ruins — and in nearly every case, the destruction began with a lie they chose to believe.

Sometimes it was a lie about their worth. Sometimes a lie about their enemy. Sometimes a lie about what justice requires.

The father of lies is not stupid. He does not come to us with obvious nonsense. He comes to us with something that feels like righteous anger. Something that feels like clarity. Something that feels like finally seeing the world as it really is.

And once that lie takes root in a man who has lost his will to live — a man who, as the profiler noted, no longer values his own life — the consequences become catastrophic. For him. For everyone around him.

Jesus said: *”You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”* (John 8:32)

The opposite is equally true. You will believe the lie, and the lie will destroy you.

**The Question That Haunts Me**

Where were the people in Cole Allen’s life willing to tell him the truth?

His sister said his rhetoric had been escalating for a long time. He was talking about doing “something” to fix the world. He was attending protests. He was affiliated with activist networks. He was storing weapons at his parents’ home without their knowledge.

Somewhere along the way — in all of that — he needed someone to sit down with him and say:

*”I love you. And you are being deceived. The people feeding you this narrative are not your friends. They are using your anger. And if you follow this road, it will cost you everything.”*

That is not a political statement. It is a pastoral one.

It is the oldest call in the Christian life: speak the truth in love, even when it is costly, even when it risks the relationship.

Because silence — comfortable, conflict-avoiding silence — has consequences too.

**A Word to Those Reading This**

Look around at the people in your world who are being fed a steady diet of rage, despair, and political poison.

They may be brilliant. They may be sincere. They may have a conscience that still functions — and that conscience is being weaponized by people who do not care what becomes of them. None of the people who spoke the lies to Cole will spend their lives in prison.

Speak truth. Do it with love. Do it with courage. Do it before it costs them everything.

Pray for Cole Allen. Pray for his family, who alerted authorities and tried to stop what was coming. Pray for the Secret Service officer who took a round to his vest and walked away alive by the mercy of God.

And remember what we have always known:

The truth sets men free.

The lie destroys them.

*Living by lies always leads to misery and death. The father of lies knows that. It’s time we act like we do too.*

As founding Pastor of The Bridge Community Church and Executive Director of Mo Hodge Ministries, Mo resources Pastors and Leaders in the area of leadership development. He enables Pastors and leaders in the following areas: Developing Teams, Church Growth, Church Planting, Discipleship Multiplication, Nonprofit Organizational Management, Multi-site Church Development, Public Speaking, Capital Campaigns, and Sr. Pastor Succession. … Mo and his wife, Nancy, live in Anderson, IN with their children and grandchildren. Though retired, Mo is still active in ministry, preaching, teaching, and planting new churches wherever the Lord leads. You can follow him on LinkedIn or through his Newsletter.

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