Murder in the Capital

Putting the D.C. terrorist attack in context

On a quiet spring evening in our nation’s capital last night, beneath the shadows of American monuments, two young lives were extinguished in an act of racist hatred: Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, both Israeli embassy staffers — and an adorable couple engaged to be married. Sarah, an American Jew from Kansas, was reportedly committed to peacebuilding and advancing relations in the Middle East and North Africa while Yaron “always had a smile on his face” and spoke at last night’s event, sharing “how excited he was to be going back home to spend the Jewish holiday of Shavuot with his family in Israel.”

Their murderer, Chicago-resident Elias Rodriguez, killed them as they emerged from the Capital Jewish Museum, shouting, “Free, free Palestine!” and “I did it for Gaza!” Much will be written of this in the coming days, but to give you a sense of the ideological waters in which this terrorist swims, let me share two facts. First, he is a member of the far-left Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Second, he is a Black Lives Matter activist. You may not know PSL, but notable members include the pro-Soviet professor Jodi Dean, who approvingly quotes Joseph Stalin in her 2019 book Comrade and who described images of the paragliding Hamas butchers who raped and killed teenagers at the Nova music festival on October 7 as “exhilarating.” The party’s former vice presidential candidate Eugene Puryear said of October 7:

And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters, and I’m sure they’re doing very fine despite what the New York Post says.

Both Puryear and his terrorist colleague Rodriguez are known for their heavy involvement in the Chicago chapter of BLM, which as you may recall, celebrated October 7 by posting the following image:

Last night’s sickening terrorist attack in the heart of the U.S. capital is not an isolated incident but a predictable outcome of the mainstreaming of anti-Zionist rhetoric that increasingly functions as a socially acceptable proxy for antisemitism. I have argued before that anti-Zionism as it exists is functionally no different from antisemitism, and indeed, denouncing Israel has become the cost of entry into polite progressive society even as the very language of protest has become indistinguishable from the language of hate, a process that accelerated with the anti-white rhetoric of BLM during the George Floyd protests and expanding to Jews in the wake of October 7.

But this attack marks a turning point in the politicization of diasporic violence, showing how unresolved global conflicts, amplified by protest culture and algorithmic outrage, can metastasize into targeted political assassinations on U.S. soil. What is so chilling here is the psychopathic intellectual insulation acts like this, or that of Luigi Mangione, so warmly receive. The woke left simultaneously claims words are violence, even silence is violence, yet justifies the literal slaughter of innocent people so long as the “correct” ethnic group is targeted. Indeed, they are not seen as victims but are blamed even in their death as oppressors, whereas the actual murderers are recast as Christ-like resistors.

Make no mistake, just as many moderate Muslims fail to speak out against the horrors perpetrated by their fascistic brothers and sisters in the faith, this act of terrorism was similarly aided by the intellectual left’s failure to confront the ethical cost of its moral confusion and racist hate. This has been a long festering rot and these murders once again reveal the true face of the movement, a movement that has so thoroughly dehumanized Jews that gunning two of them down actually feels to some like a political statement of liberation rather than an echo of the most infamous and brutal oppression the world has ever known. But let’s be even more clear. This was not about Gaza. There were no tanks in downtown Washington. No checkpoints. No troops. There was no “occupation” of this man’s life. This was leftist antisemitism and it happened right in America’s capital. That it was dressed in the language of freedom does not exonerate but rather indicts the culture that gave him moral license.

This ethical collapse, this contagion of borrowed grievance overlaid onto identity politics, is sociopathy masquerading as social justice, political psychopathy as social contagion, a phenomenon I’ve written about before but with empathy parceled out by power dynamics and moral value indexed to victimhood. This is the psychosis of our age, the idea that the scales of history must be balanced by a pound of flesh while absolving the people with knives by outsourcing blame to systems and structures.

And in that moral outsourcing, the individual loses accountability and what remains is pure will unmoored from truth and aimed at whoever is cast as oppressor. In this case, two young Jews leaving a reception about turning pain into purpose. There is no context that makes the cold-blooded murder of two beautiful young people a matter of debate. Either we recognize this for what it is — a terrorist attack born of ideological rot — or we open the door to more of it. To be sure, we can now expect the left to double-down on their repulsive moral calculus and I fear we can also expect the Trump administration to use this in further targeting pro-Palestinian activists for their speech. But we do not defeat these people by bending on our principles. After all, what makes them our political enemy is precisely that that they chose to take that path in the pursuit of ending oppression. We must not follow in their steps. No ends justify such means. Rather, our means must be an end in themselves.

This isn’t just a moment to mourn. This is a moment to choose between civilization itself and the psychodrama of radical chic. This is a moment to reflect on how the left has sunk into such disgusting moral decay in the name of fighting oppression. This is a moment to fortify ourselves in the practice of our ideals and not merely their proclamation. The sky is grey in Washington today. But if we refuse to learn this, it will be a long time before the sun returns. May their memory be a blessing.