By Jeffrey Blehar
Friday, May 23, 2025
Wednesday night’s barbarous murder of two Israeli Embassy
employees — gunned down, shot in the back allegedly by
a pro-Palestinian activist while leaving a peace event at the Jewish Museum
in Washington, D.C. — is more than a mere workaday atrocity. I have had
difficulty writing about it, at least to contribute anything more than a
semi-articulate howl of rage. (He was about to ask her to marry him, for
God’s sake.) It has gotten underneath my skin in a uniquely uncomfortable way.
For it feels unmistakably like an escalation.
The alleged killer is from Chicago — in fact, he went to
college at the University of Illinois Chicago, mere blocks from where I live.
He is not Palestinian or even Muslim at all; he is instead an unremarkable
young left-wing activist named Elias Rodriguez. His social media activities
indicate he became obsessed with the Gaza war after October 7 out of vicarious
sympathy for the cause of the “oppressed,” but he otherwise expresses an almost
frighteningly generic range of “young progressive activist” views, the kinds
that one might associate with the average Bluesky account, not with a
cold-blooded killer. (I had to at least bitterly chuckle when one media outlet
stipulated that the alleged killer’s purported
manifesto was “written in the clear language of an English major” — whether
it is authentic or not, that is a devastatingly accurate description.)
It is important to note that while Rodriguez is morally
deranged, he is not insane, certainly not in the judicial sense of the term. He
legally owned a gun in the city of Chicago and, according to reports,
transported it properly on an airplane through O’Hare Airport to Washington,
D.C. Understand how difficult it is to legally own a gun here, and how
conscientious one must be to properly transport it on a flight, and it becomes
clear that the only thing arguably insane about Rodriguez’s actions was his decision
to fly instead of simply renting a car.
No, this man was not crazy in the way Jared Loughner was,
not at all; the killer methodically planned his murders with sociopathic
amorality. He unloaded 21 rounds into his victims. He closed in on the girl to
kill her after first wounding her. Then he walked into the Jewish Museum while
pretending to be a bystander, asked for a drink of water, and turned to
announce his guilt to the crowd, proudly chanting “Free Free Palestine” in a
sing-song tone that made my eyes run over blood-red with reflexive revulsion.
I do not think I could hate a living person more than
this man. I hate him for what he did. I hate him for the shame he has brought
to my city. (I can assure you there are hundreds more students and teachers at
UIC who speak and carry themselves exactly like Rodriguez does; I have seen
them with my own eyes.) I hate him for his celebratory chanting. And I hate him
for what he represents: the antisemitic disease we all saw incubating on
college campuses for decades, now bursting forth with its foul progeny.
In late October 2023, only weeks after the October 7
massacre of Israelis by Hamas, I wrote about an appallingly
thuggish attempt by pro-Palestinian protesters to intimidate Jewish
students at Cooper Union in New York City, one abetted by the cowards in the
school’s administration:
What truly enrages me is that I see
where this is all going. When institutions such as Cooper Union tacitly yield
to tactics like these without imposing severe and permanent consequences, they
mainstream it. Radical organizations — and Palestinian “justice” organizations
are the sine qua non of the campus variety — are inherently radical: They push
boundaries, test limits, and always seek to escalate. We will be getting more
of this in the future because of the lack of backlash now. The confrontations will
be heightened. The rhetoric will be even more sweepingly bloodthirsty. Tempers
will flare even higher as the implicit threats become explicit, gleeful — maybe
even chanted by a crowd.
I fear something terrible will
happen next. People have reassured themselves for years that these kids were
only cosplaying radicalism, and that they would “grow out of it” as their
parents did. Now an entire generation of adults on the Left are discovering
that, as both Shakespeare and Vonnegut would have been happy to remind them,
the line between playacting and true belief in this sort of fully immersive
radicalism fades away after one has spent enough time steeped in it. The
manifest incoherence of sentiments like “LGBTQ + reproductive freedom for
Palestine” has allowed us to treat the people who turn out behind such banners
like harmlessly confused children rather than a truly insidious and growing
force within the American Left. We just assumed they couldn’t possibly be
serious. It turns out they are.
What haunts me is that the logic of
it all leads toward violence.
The title of that piece was “It Can Happen Here.” Do you
remember the phrase “stochastic terrorism”? It was briefly all the rage among
the chin-scratching intellectual left back during the first Trump era, part of
their argument that speech (right-wing speech and right-wing “disinformation,”
to be precise) was dangerous if not functionally equivalent to violence and
ought to be policed as such by the likes of Nina Jankowicz. This perfectly
emblematic New
York Times op-ed will suffice to illustrate the point: Both the murder
of an abortion doctor and a fatal shooting outside a Planned Parenthood were
directly blamed on the inflammatory rhetoric of anti-abortion protesters.
It was a bullet, not those words,
that ended Dr. Slepian’s life. But by repeatedly using rhetoric that demonized
abortion providers as monstrous “baby killers,” the protesters increased the
likelihood that someone in their ranks would eventually decide using lethal
force to stop them was justified.
In recent years, a term has begun
to circulate to capture this phenomenon — “stochastic terrorism,” in which mass
communications, including social media, inspire random acts of violence that
according to one description “are statistically predictable but individually
unpredictable.” In other words, every act and actor is different, and no one
knows by whom or where an act will happen — but it’s a good bet that something
will.
Back then, of course, the threat of stochastic terrorism
came exclusively from the right — the concept was transparently born as an
excuse to justify excluding the “wrong” voices from the public square. And yet,
much like “fascism” has forever threatened to descend upon America but somehow
always and only lands in Europe, so too does the stochastic terrorism predicted
by the left seem to really affect only themselves. Luigi Mangione, despite
himself having access to the finest health care in the world, was radicalized
into assassinating a health care CEO through nothing more than his internet and
YouTube reading list. Elias Rodriguez, who profiled as little more than your
standard keffiyeh-clad college activist, similarly received his primary
education online.
And don’t kid yourself: The left is swimming in this sort
of deranged content in ways that the right is barely aware of. Present media
coverage focuses almost exclusively on the influence of the right-leaning
podcasting ecosystem. (Its obvious role in the 2024 campaign provides ample
justification for this.) But my guess is that the left-wing universe will breed
further killers in years to come.
Why do I say that? Because right now, on YouTube, I can
go listen to Taylor Lorenz rhapsodize for 30
minutes about online calls to murder Donald Trump. I’m not kidding, that
isn’t dramatic hyperbole, and it is a terrifying example of how openly crazy
the tone of the left’s discourse has become. Lorenz, “internet influencer” par
excellence, opens by talking with obvious fascination about the newest TikTok
trend: “Somebody needs to do it.” The “it,” she helpfully explains, is killing
Trump — but she adds with a giggle that she prefers to use the term
“unalive-ing Trump” because she doesn’t want YouTube to demonetize her account.
Lovely.
This is the context out of which the Mangiones and the
Rodriguezes of the world arise. So where are the lengthy discussions about how
the online left’s currently maximalist rhetoric of panic, siege, and
destruction is creating the environment in which the left’s newest celebrity
assassins have arisen? You won’t find them, for the disgusting reason that far
too many on the left sympathize with the goals of people like Mangione and
Rodriguez, if not their specific acts. They want more of this, at least
if it helps apply pressure to get them to the outcome they desire. And so I
predict they will get more of it. Much more.
Ever since the October 7 massacres, I have written with
fervor and outrage about what I’ve taken to calling the New Antisemitism — the
generational resurgence of an ancient hatred I had fooled myself into believing
was in permanent decline. (The “Won’t Get Fooled Again” joke thus intentionally
suggests
itself.) But I am terrified by these shootings because they feel like
something new. Islamic terrorism is nothing new. Anti-abortion terrorism is
nothing new. Antisemitic terrorism, for that matter, is nothing new. The
profiles of these sorts of terrorists are at least somewhat predictable, for a
whole host of reasons. But now that the left has encouraged this sort of vicarious
terrorism, terrorism committed out of progressive empathy to a cause rather
than personal involvement, it feels like any college activist in America is now
plausibly part of the threat profile.
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