Cole Allen appeared in court yesterday following his thwarted shooting at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. As is so often the case now, the first thing uncovered about him after the incident was his internet presence.

Allen was an active poster, under the handle “coldForce”, on Bluesky, the X-clone best known for its rapaciously Leftist user base. He had called Trump a “sociopathic mob boss” to a small audience. He closely followed Will Stancil, the progressive activist now immortalised in self-identified far-Right cartoonist Emily Youcis’s animated series The Will Stancil Show. On X, Bluesky’s Right-wing twin, commentators began speculating about the site as a radicalisation engine, the platform that “turned” a former Caltech grad into a would-be assassin. However, this gets the causality backwards.

“Radicalisation” implies a directional causal effect, where a platform is treated as the driver of belief change. It suggests that an individual entered with one set of views and exited with another, even if they were already predisposed or susceptible at the outset. But anyone who’s previously used Bluesky will know that a centrist or even moderate progressive won’t survive there for very long. Frequent targets include the pseudonymous — and proudly liberal — blogger Cartoons Hate Her, as well as Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias. Even the Left-wing journalist Taylor Lorenz wrote on Sunday that she had been “mass cancelled” for her attendance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Bluesky users have also targeted YouTuber Joshua Citarella, who, in his blog, writes about wanting to create a “pipeline” so young men can be funnelled into the political Left rather than the Right. Clearly, most people arrive on Bluesky as radicals without the need for further moulding.

This is the part of the Bluesky story that gets missed. The big migrations, after Elon Musk’s takeover and the 2024 presidential election, were not random. A Zurich study from last year clocked the link-share split at 60% Left and 8% Right; many of that latter camp are trolls. The platform is monocultural because monoculture is what its arrivals were shopping for.

Bluesky’s design supports this. Users can curate their own timelines; there are mass block lists and starter packs. The blocking function is officially known as a “nuclear block” because it erases the offending account from users’ visual field entirely. These features are sold as anti-harassment, but their actual function is anti-friction.

What this design attracts, it goes without saying, is a specific psychological type — people for whom an unfriendly reply reads as literal violence rather than an ordinary cost of speaking in public. Gender-critical journalist Jesse Singal joined and became the most-blocked user within 12 days. Vice President JD Vance has been effectively chased off the site.

Simply put: Bluesky users are more fragile. They were already primed to read a foiled assassination attempt as regime kayfabe, because everything was already regime kayfabe. The platform did not give them that disposition, though. It isn’t a brainwashing machine. They brought it with them. Bluesky is a psych ward, of sorts, but it isn’t a cult.

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Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.

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