Cole Tomas Allen and the nature of evil

OPINION: In thinking about Cole Tomas Allen, the man charged with attempting to assassinate the president at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, I keep coming back to historian Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil.” Arendt, who covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, expected the chief architect of the Holocaust to be a monster with blood dripping from his fangs. That he was a monster is undeniable, but in many ways, he was rather ordinary, even bland. Some are surprised by Mr. Allen’s vanilla ice cream plainness. The man who described himself as the “Friendly Federal Assassin” is well-educated, with degrees in mechanical engineering and computer science. He has no documented history of mental illness. Those who knew him professionally said he seemed like a nice guy. Evil and education have no connection. In Germany, the less educated, such as farmworkers, were the least likely to join the Nazi Party, while the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that preceded the death camps, were often composed of professionals, including lawyers, accountants and teachers. Mr. Cole’s manifesto is extreme, but no more so than the rhetoric of many in the Democratic Party’s leadership and mainstream media. He referred to