Within minutes of the brutal gunning down of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington last Wednesday, President Trump said the murders were “based obviously on antisemitism,” a term reiterated by his FBI director and other administration officials.
Soon the framing was taken up by the news media, though the manifesto of alleged gunman Elias Rodriguez said nothing about Jews. I asked the people who knew him if he’d espoused antisemitic views and they said that while Rodriguez hated Israel and its policies, he never focused on or indeed said much of anything about Jewish people.
“Unequivocally no,” a woman who knew Rodriguez told me when I asked if he ever made antisemitic remarks. “Everything I know about Elias leads me to believe he acted in protest of the Israeli State and Zionist ideology, not Judaism.”
“He never, ever said anything remotely racist about Jews or anyone,” said another woman who knew him, “not even in a joking way.”
“I would’ve sussed it out, too,” the woman, who identified as half Jewish, said. “People can pick up on stuff like that.”
“I don’t think so,” said a man who had known him since middle school.
“Not openly,” said a former coworker, adding: “he never commented on it or anything.”
One person I spoke to gave me access to the messages from a private group chat where Rodriguez was a prolific poster (right up to the day before the shooting). I spent several days poring over his words. The messages don’t reveal any hatred of Jews per se, but they do portray an often bitter man who hated all sorts of other things — especially Israel and its war in Gaza.
“The genocide makes me go a bit nuts every few days and break down crying,” Rodriguez told the chat over a year ago.
Composed mostly of childhood friends, Rodriguez spoke candidly in the chat, spanning thousands of posts going back over a decade. To give a sense of how intimate the conversation could get, they would sometimes discuss Rodriguez’s relationship with an older woman he met at a GameStop when he was a minor. Asked about the age gap, Rodriguez wrote that “she had just turned 23 when I was 15.”
In another post he confided that “after my dad came home from iraq he had a couple violent outbursts,” one of several references to his strained family dynamic.
“Posting was his real passion,” said one of the chat participants, adding: “He loved it.” The friend said Rodriguez had drawn inspiration as a kid from the niche but culturally influential forum website Something Awful, particularly its irony-laced, misanthropic subforum, FYAD (short for “Fuck You And Die”).
“I’m almost surprised you’re not antisemitic Elias,” a chat member once wrote. “It usually goes hand and hand [sic] with the whole Stalin did nothing wrong mantra,” alluding to Rodriguez’s support for old school communism.
“One of the biggest things that stalin [sic] didn’t do wrong was ending the most antisemitic regime ever yet known 2 man,” Rodriguez responded.
The chat logs reveal a man who hated the Republican and Democratic parties, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, the right and left, the “bourgeoisie,” the United States, the West, and, of course, Israel. He even hated the only political group I could find he’d associated with.
“PSL sucks shit,” Rodriguez wrote in one of many messages lambasting the obscure Party for Socialism and Liberation that he had once participated in. “I wish I had just done a misadventure with FRSO [Freedom Road Socialist Org] rather than PSL lol,” he wrote.
Still, when it came to race, Rodriquez’s hatred seemed reserved for white people.
“Lol you probably would have to actually genocide white people to make this a normal country,” Rodriguez wrote in one post. “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.”
Rodriguez threw around terms like “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” “disgraced aristocrats” and ranted about his own disadvantages in life.
His hatred of Israel was evident in posts he made the day of Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, including:
“Just saw an incredibly gory video of the aftermath of Israeli troops trying to get dressed for the ambush absolutely massacred by hamas [sic] fighters lmao.”
“Love checking back in with the news every few hours like, ‘Hm I wonder if Israel still exists?’”
Asked if he loved it, Rodriguez replied: “You don’t often get to credibly wonder if Israel is over yet today or not.”
The picture that emerges from these chats is one of a quick-witted, voracious reader and even ladies’ man who was generally well liked by his friends. But underneath all of this was a bitter streak that could veer into casual cruelty.
For example, Rodriguez attacked another member of the chat who he saw as privileged, for lamenting about the challenges of having a brother with schizophrenia. Rodriguez said in posts:
“Why not just have him committed? You can’t possibly be gaining anything from a relationship with a person like that.”
“Just put him in a padded room and forget about him. If there was a person you loved, he’s gone now. Let it go.”
“Can you just chain him in the basement and slide meals under the door?”’
“I’m just tired of hearing about this guy … He’s useless, we get it. Stop complaining and just dispose of him.”
When I published Rodriguez’s manifesto — earning me an FBI visit — I stressed how important it was to make these materials public so there wouldn’t be an information vacuum for conspiracy theories to fill. Predictably they have, with many calling the attack a “false flag” orchestrated by the government to further suppress criticism of Israel. The term “false flag” even spiked to its highest number of Google searches this year.
“It’s driving me crazy that people are calling it a false flag,” a woman who knew Rodriguez said. “This development is shocking but not completely out of character,” she remarked, echoing a sentiment expressed by others. They were at first shocked but not ultimately surprised that Rodriguez did what he did.
“He always had strong political convictions,” the woman said. “From the sound of the manifesto he’s the same as he was.”
In all his rage though, Rodriguez had an almost wide-eyed optimism about the global south, which as a self-identified Maoist Third Worldist, he believed alone had “revolutionary potential.”
“He was a big proponent of ‘the emerging resistance axis’ of Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Assad’s Syria,” a friend recalled. “He seemed pretty vocally in favor of Hamas for years — way before 2023. He’d always hated Israel and would call it ‘The Little Satan.’”
Rodriguez’s posts support the friend’s account, conveying disappointment with setbacks these groups faced.
“Honestly i’m still just feeling sad about the murder of hassan nasrallah,” Rodriguez said in another post, adding: “It hurts when people are killed specifically for doing what’s right, when so many are afraid to…”
When the IDF released video showing the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Rodriguez reacted with dismay.
“100% him sadly,” Rodriguez told the chat.
Authorities allege that Rodriguez during his arrest expressed admiration for Aaron Bushnell, the U.S. airman who immolated himself last year in front of the same Israeli Embassy where Rodriguez’s alleged victims worked, in protest against U.S. support for Israel amid the Gaza war.
“Just now saw the unblurred video and lost it,” Rodriguez told the group chat, referring to the footage of Bushnell’s immolation posted online, his only reference to the incident.
From what I can tell, Rodriguez never revealed to the group chat his plans to kill the Israeli Embassy staffers; and people who knew him weren’t able to identify a precipitating event that led to it. But one friend noted that he seemed to become nicer in the weeks leading up to the event.
The day before the shooting, Rodriguez told the group chat that on his flight to DC, he saw and shook the hand of Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor impeached and convicted for public corruption before being fully pardoned by President Trump.
“Lmao is he?” Rodriguez replied when someone in the chat asked if Blagojevich was ambassador to Serbia.
“Hilarious,” Rodriguez remarked after someone linked to a news article reporting that Trump had considered Blagojevich for the position.
The next day, he would allegedly shoot to death 26-year-old Sarah Milgrim and 30-year-old Yaron Lischinsky.
What is most striking about Rodriguez’s posts and the observations of his friends is the absence of any antisemitic remarks.
“These horrible D.C. killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!” Trump said that day.
Indeed grisly murders such as these must end — I hope we can all agree on that much. But how can that happen without facing the reality that hatred of Israel and what it is doing in Gaza is not the same as antisemitism.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Chuckled a bit at his rant against PSL 🤣
“,The genocide makes me go a bit nuts every few days and break down crying,’ Rodriguez told the chat over a year ago.” This sentence caught my attention because several of us just said virtually the same thing on X when we saw the photo of hundreds of Palestinians in a giant cage waiting for food.
Thanks for this, Ken. I no longer question whether it was a false flag. I got a little nervous when I read the litany of people he hated because I’m not far behind him. (Now the FBI will visit me. 🤣)