All posts tagged: Normie

Cole Allen Is Another Normie Extremist

Cole Allen Is Another Normie Extremist

On Saturday night, after Cole Tomas Allen’s alleged attempt to assassinate President Trump and administration officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a familiar ritual began on the internet: compiling a portrait of the shooter, based on the digital breadcrumbs of his online life. Over the past decade, this trail has frequently led to a similar place. The suspect in many cases turned out to be a white man radicalized by spending time in the internet’s dark crevices. Payton Gendron, who killed 10 people in 2022 at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, posted a manifesto that quickly circulated on 4chan, in which he included neo-Nazi imagery and described himself as an “ethno-nationalist.” Before Robert Bowers shot and killed 11 people in 2018 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, he posted bigoted content on the far-right social-media platform Gab. Allen, a tutor who traveled from California to the Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives, according to authorities, does not fit that profile. The 31-year-old …

Feeld Was a Dating App for the Freaks. Now Some People Call It ‘Normie Hell’

Feeld Was a Dating App for the Freaks. Now Some People Call It ‘Normie Hell’

Alise Morales just happened to be on the dating app Feeld the night a man was detained by ICE agents a mile from her Brooklyn, New York, apartment. Fresh off of a divorce, Morales, a 35-year-old comedian, was in the market for something strictly casual. That’s when she came across Paul’s profile. “I was a couple swipes in, and it took me a second to even get what I was seeing,” she says. He was 32, straight, and, like Morales, looking for “casual fun.” He was also one mile away. Then she noticed his bio: “Hey I’m Paul! ICE agent in from out of town looking for fun :)” Initially, Morales thought it was a bad joke, “but there was nothing else on the profile to indicate that it was, or what the joke would even be,” she says. News alerts across her socials had mentioned an active ICE operation in the area. “I’m like, is this guy actively kidnapping one of my neighbors right now?” Of all the dating and hookup apps, Morales felt …