The Progressive Ecosystem Is Breeding Killers
- Jeffrey Blehar
- May 24
- 6 min read
Yes, it can happen here. 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.
This article was first published by the National Review
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