The Progressives' Terrorism Problem
After a killer's political delusions of "righteous violence" drove him to murder random Jews on the streets of America, it is clear that the disease of terrorism has metastasized from Right to Left.
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This is a guest essay written by Jonathan Forrester, a professor at a U.S. community college.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The celebrations of Luigi Mangione five months ago were a warning too few heeded.
You may recall that Mangione has been identified as the suspect in the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in New York City last December.
When one man could murder someone in public and — however “justified” people may have found him — be victorious in the court of public opinion, civil rights activists across the political aisle knew that this likely portended a new era of “justified political murders.”
After two consecutive mass shootings took place at the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand in 2019, by a Right-Wing racist nutjob, many of us came to understand that terrorist attacks can be carried out by “lone wolves,” and yet it will almost always also be the case that said “lone wolves” intellectually connected to the politics of earlier radical terrorists — and were inspired by them.
Elliot Rodger1, the incel woman-killer, was an example of that. The 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooter was another. So is Dylann Roof, who murdered Black people in a U.S. church in 2015. The list goes on. These men did not know each other, but they were inspired by each other, feeding off of each other’s stories, actions, and political motivations before they eventually became terrorists, too.
Terrorism is a disease. Terrorism is a transmissible, global disease. And for a long time, many of us in the West thought that it was a disease primarily limited to Right-wing fanatics after the 1990s.
But times change, and it is clear in 2025 that the American Left has a serious problem with downplaying, justifying, and — yes — committing acts of terrorism.
Last Wednesday night, on the evening of May 21st, we received a further echo of that.
Elias Rodriguez is an American citizen who represents himself as a champion for “minority rights.” Though most recently working for the American Osteopathic Information Association — which is denouncing and distancing itself from him following his arrest — Rodriguez also worked for a “progressive” institution named History Makers, which records Black history.
Rodriguez himself is not Black, though, just part of a trend of “progressives” who take it upon themselves to speak for minorities — often over them, and often doing horrendous damage to their public battles for equal rights. It is important to remember minority histories, so when the class of self-identified activists doing that memory are also prone to violence against other minorities, it bears remembering that this hurts and undermines memory-keeping efforts.
On May 21st, Rodriguez was arrested after carrying out a terrorist attack at a political event. Having surrendered himself and his weapon, it is guaranteed that he will be convicted of crimes that will make him a terrorist.
In other words, Rodriguez committed a terrorist attack. It is terrorism, the same way that it was in the Tree of Life shooting or the Christchurch shooting. All are terrorist attacks. And while we don’t know enough about Rodriguez yet, it is probably the case that he is another example of the lonely-male-to-political-murderer pipeline, just like the others.
And just like most of the others, Rodriguez is not only a terrorist, but also a racist.
Rodriguez went to the American Jewish Committee’s Young Diplomats Reception with the intention to murder people based off of their nationality and/or ethnicity. He then fired at the people he saw, not knowing if they were Israeli Jews, American Jews, French Jews, Ukrainian Jews, etc.
The only information that Rodriguez had was that there were Jews at this event, and that some of them were Israeli. Based off of only this information, he took aim and murdered two people: a young man and woman, who were a couple, and who were about to be engaged.
Rodriguez then screamed, “Free, Free Palestine!” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!” and then allowed himself to be arrested.
For some of you, reading that made it suddenly become not a terrorist attack, and certainly not a hate crime. If that is you, then you need to ask yourself when your political priors made you a political fanatic incapable of understanding that the lack of rule of law also applies to you.
If this is not murder, if this is not racism, if this is not a fundamentally unacceptable crime, then you should have no reason to believe that the rule of law truly protects you.
It does not matter if you say that you just don’t like Zionism, or that some of you simply don’t like Jews. None of those things really matter. Consider, again, the facts of the case: Rodriguez knowingly carried out a terrorist attack based of the ethnicity of his targets. He very likely could have killed American citizens, but it would all have been the same to him because his main target profile was killing Jews who were Zionists — a category to which the vast majority of American Jews, and Jews worldwide, belong. To Rodriguez, politics that he does not like mean you do not deserve the right to continue living.
If you and enough people agree with Rodriguez, then congratulations, you have just helped all of those racist groups, that we have tried so hard to suppress, win their greatest victory — if enough people popularly believe that Rodriguez is not a terrorist, and not a racist.
Even though he is clearly both by the letter of the law, the collective delusion that his politics mean he was “right” to do it has clear consequences for other people, too. The tens of millions of people that privately believe that, say, the KKK and the Aryan Brotherhood are also justified whenever they commit acts of terror and racism against people, can now defend those racist terrorists more effectively.
It is imperative that every Westerner understands, regardless of their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that Rodriguez is a terrorist and a racist who betrayed the United States by violating its laws, out of service to an ideology that he perceived as separate from and superior to the unity of this country.
Rodriguez murdered people based on their ethnicity at a political event here in America, and endangered American citizens in the process, while also publicly urinating all over the Constitutional promise of freedoms from violence that are supposed to make America (and the West at large) different.
Rodriguez murdered two people who, in the end, happened to be Israeli embassy staffers, and he claimed to do it for “Palestine.” Well, now there are two fewer Jews in the world, and this has done absolutely nothing for Palestinians whatsoever. But here’s what it has done:
It has continued the trend of political violence over the last year, in which traitorous Far-Right and Far-Left elements continue to undermine the rule of law and all of our safety.
It is yet another terrorist attack by a “progressive” person, which is continuing to do horrendous damage to the appeal of “progressives” to other populations.
It has all but ensured that American Jews, who are literally the most “progressive” demographic — the group whose members won a lot of the cornerstone “progressive” issues, like contraceptive rights, or gay marriage — will continue to abandon progressivism because of the growing sense that “progressives” are either apologists for acts of terrorism and racism, or actually terrorists and/or racists themselves.
And if you think that’s ridiculous, consider if you are the person that said, “Oh, well in that case,” when you read that Rodriguez broke the law and murdered two Jews in a terrorist attack in our nation’s capital because he thought he was doing something “for Palestine.”
One of the victims, Sarah Milgrim, was an American citizen, not an Israeli. More ironically, she was at an event that discussed humanitarian aid for both Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza. Milgrim wanted to achieve an equitable future of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Murdering her, or really anyone at this event, was ironic. But that irony is lost on the murderer because the only information Rodriguez had was that it was a Jewish event of some kind. He said as much to a bystander after committing the murders, taking shelter inside the museum, and then wondering aloud something to the effect of, “Do you think that the shooting was because it was a Jewish museum?” The shooting that he had just done.
Either there is a rule of law, or there isn’t. But, my goodness, there is something so unfunny about young Left-wingers doing everything in their power to erode protections against political violence without ever considering that they are making it inevitable for Far-Right political groups to be encouraged by them, and start doing so, too.
After all, if a young man can kill Jews in the name of “Palestine,” and roughly 80 people can try to start a “revolt” against Jews in Brooklyn in the name of “Palestine” (as happened earlier this month), and in Los Angeles two Israeli Jews can be murdered in the name of (or by cover of the name of) “Palestine” (also this month), and a whacko can try to murder the Jewish Governor of Pennsylvania in the name of “Palestine” during Passover in April — and all of these things happen with a nary cry of contempt from massive portions of the “progressive” Left, especially in the Democratic Party’s leadership — then we’re cooked.
And not just Jews in the West, but all the rest of us who are only free in the West, because (for all its faults) the West is better than where most of us came from. How funny, then, that the nut-jobs are screaming, “No one’s free until we’re all free!” and doing everything in their power to make it that, in reality, no one is free.
We will not only lose the rule of law, but we will also lose our civil liberties.
A British-born American mass murderer who is known for killing six people and injuring 14 others during the 2014 Isla Vista, California killings
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The disease that has parasitised Elias Rogriguez's brain and soul is an equal-opportunity destroyer of intellectual function and moral judgment. It doesn't discriminate of the basis of educational level or socio-economic status. Just look at the wealthy and well-educated child-zombies shrieking anti-Israel slogans, intimidating and abusing their Jewish classmates and celebrating the war-crimes of Hamas. On the campuses of 'elite,' formerly well-respected universities. It looks like a Hollywood production about a post-apocalyptic hellscape, like 'The Last of Us.'
I don't pay a lot of attention to political labels like 'Left,' or 'Right.' But I think I can recognise mass psychosis when I see it. 'Progressives' (if that's a term that applies) need to start considering what is emanating from their own part of the ideological spectrum. In the interest of fairness, nuance and balance (which 'Progressives' always claim to be for) the 'Right' needs to do the same.
While there have been right wing nuts, terror has always been part of the leftist play book going back...well to the French Revolution but more recently in the 60s and 70s. None of this is new. Its just that for whatever reason, Western Jews refused to recognize where the hate has been emanating from.