When two young Israelis were gunned down in Washington, D.C., outside the Capital Jewish Museum, it put a new spotlight on the murderous violence of the American left.
The alleged gunman, Elias Rodriguez — the one who chanted “free, free Palestine” as he was led away in handcuffs — has a long leftist history that doesn’t even stop at cheerleading for former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, according to messages from a private group chat published Tuesday.
But don’t expect D.C. Democrats, or the establishment media, to explain it.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, a veteran of left-leaning publications like The Nation and The Intercept, published the messages on his website in an apparent attempt to dispute the idea that Rodriguez acted out of anti-Semitism.
As far as that goes, it’s debatable whether the piece succeeded. One message quoted by Klippenstein shows Rodriguez openly celebrating the killing of Israeli soldiers by the Jew-hating group Hamas. Cheerleading for the group responsible for the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust tends to indicate at least some level of anti-Semitism.
But even more importantly, the messages make it clear that Rodriguez was just the latest in a long line of leftists who consider bloodshed part of the cost of doing political business — and the lives of human beings to be completely expendable in the process.
(Examples aren’t hard to find. Consider Luigi Mangione, the accused gunman in the December assassination of a United HealthCare executive, or James Hodgkinson, the Bernie Sanders supporter who shot up a gathering of Republican members of Congress in 2017.)
For instance, Rodriguez evidently had regular praise for Stalin, a man whose policies killed an estimated 20 million people — even outside the slaughter of World War II.
He also, according to Klippenstein, used Marxist-Leninist terms like “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” and “disgraced aristocrats” — Stalin himself would probably have applauded at the way Rodriguez spoke of genocide and mass imprisonment.
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But for Rodriguez, those measures were reserved specifically for his white countrymen.
“Lol you probably would have to actually genocide white people to make this a normal country,” Rodriguez wrote, according to Klippenstein.
“Like even a very targeted and selective rehabilitation program would probably have to lead to the lifetime imprisonments of tens of millions of white people.”
So, he is indisputably a “man of the left,” as National Review’s Noah Rothman put it in a piece last week.
And if he wasn’t a supporter of former President Joe Biden or his insipid Vice President Kamala Harris and their Democratic Party, it was only because they weren’t leftist enough.
“It makes no difference at all that this murderer’s ideological proclivities were to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party,” Rothman wrote. “His politics were of the left. He made a career out of activism for the left. He responded to the incentive structures established and maintained by the left. He is a creature of the left. It is, therefore, incumbent on the left to disown him and disabuse his ilk of the delusion that their darkest impulses are righteous.”
But American leftists aren’t going to claim him, much less take responsibility for creating the marinating stew of hatred, envy and resentment that apparently drove Rodriguez to murder two complete strangers in the cause of “free, free Palestine.”
And the establishment media is unlikely to explore the obvious, larger political motivations behind the killings.
The Democratic Party — including Harris — abetted the spasm of Black Lives Matter violence that wracked the country in the summer of 2020.The establishment media downplayed the destruction with ludicrous spins like “mostly peaceful” riots.
These are not institutions that have a history of telling the truth about the impact of violence from the political left or the leftist disregard for human life — whether it’s on the streets of D.C., the blood-soaked fields of post-revolutionary Russia or in Stalin’s gulag.
From the messages Klippenstein quoted, Rodriguez wasn’t shy about his opinions. And he was apparently proud of his politics.
He might be too publicly extreme to serve as the poster boy for American leftists like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett. He might be too far even for the leftists who glorify Mangione and a murder on the streets of Manhattan.
But the reality is, he is a leftist dream come true.
The messages Klippenstein reported make one thing clear: Rodriguez is on their side.
Just don’t expect Democrats to admit it.
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