I knew as soon as the shooting was reported: I bet the killer was a Mangione freak.
That’s Luigi Mangione, if you don’t know. The curly little guy who gunned down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York street in December. The curly little guy who’s become a folk hero to the impotent American left as it struggles to deal with the magnitude of its failure, after a decade of rallies and crusading and every kind of screaming last-ditch attempt, to stop Donald Trump from being president.
Which is kind of funny, really—the impotence, I mean—since the reason Mangione carried out the shooting was because a botched back surgery meant he had to give up his career as a budding amateur porn star. Leftists like to claim he was some great vigilante for justice, a masked avenger righting the wrongs of the American healthcare system one CEO at a time, but no, actually he was just an incel. An incel killer—another Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian.
Anyway, the ups and… downs of Luigi Mangione’s sex life aren’t the point here.
On Thursday, Elias Gonzalez murdered two workers from the Israeli embassy in Washington as they left the Capital Jewish Museum. Yaron Lischinsky, 28, and Sarah Milgram, 26, were greeted by a hail of more than two dozen bullets from a handgun. They didn’t stand a chance.
Video footage of the curly little guy—notice a pattern?—showed him shouting “Free, free Palestine” as he was led away by police. When he was approached by police, he apparently produced a red keffiyeh and started chanting: “There is only one solution: intifada revolution.” Catchy.
His social-media profiles, including his Twitter profile, are a standard leftist Third Worldist nightmare. Not-so-young Elias, who lives in Chicago, works as an “oral history researcher” at a non-profit that promotes African-American history; he was a member of a local radical socialist group; and he regularly participated in protests at least as far back as 2017. Pictures doing the rounds show him holding a dumb placard at a BLM protest in 2017, the slogan some variation of “Whitey’s on the moon but we need more money for the programs.”
He also published a manifesto of sorts, which the FBI is now paying very close attention to. “Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state,” Rodriguez wrote, “and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright.”
Thrilling, original stuff.
But it’s the Mangione connection I’m interested in. As well as following the Mangione MO to the letter, Rodriguez acknowledged on social media in a number of posts that he admired the small killer from the Big Apple. In one post Rodriquez wrote, “80% of the country applauds the targeted annihilation of a healthcare insurance exec.”
Way back in December, when the body of Brian Thompson was barely cold, I said Luigi Mangione would be the model for a fractured, broken left that had lost the will to organize and do anything meaningful, and this is yet further proof that I was right.
I like being right, generally, but this doesn’t feel great.
And it’s worth remembering that Elias Rodriguez isn’t the first, either. We’ve all conveniently forgotten a transgender man, Ryan Michael English, tried to kill newly appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and burn down the Heritage Foundation, and that he was a fan of Luigi Mangione. That’s exactly what he told the police: Luigi gave me hope that I could do something myself.
What really interests me about this new case is the link to the official Democrat party.
So far, all we’ve had from the Democrat Party is sly sideways acknowledgement of what I call the “Mangione model.” Nobody in the official party has gone as far as reptilian journalist Taylor Lorenz in declaring her deep yonic love for Luigi, but the nudges and the winks have been unmistakable when radical Democrats like Bernie Sanders and AOC talk about “oligarchy” being the greatest threat to America today. If a small number of very rich white dudes are all that stand between Amerikkka and the verdant sunkissed uplands of the shirkers’ paradise, then it seems pretty clear what the answer is.
Nudge, nudge.
Wink, wink.
But now, with Elias Rodriguez, there’s something a little more tangible than gestures and innuendo to tie the disciples of Mangione to the party proper. Because it turns out Rodriguez’s father was invited to Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress back in March by Democrat Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García.
“Eric Rodriguez was our guest during the President’s Joint Speech to Congress, but we don’t know his family,” Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) admitted on Thursday night.
In March, Rep. Garcia hailed Eric Rodriguez as “an outspoken advocate against attacks on veterans’ services and the rights of unionized federal employees.”
“Eric represents the very best of our community—someone who has served his country, continues to serve his fellow veterans and fights every day to protect the dignity of working people,” the congressman said in a statement.
“His presence at the Joint Address is a powerful statement: we will not sit back while veterans and workers are treated as political pawns.”
As far as we can tell, like so many leftists, Elias Rodriguez was not happy with his father, but that does nothing to diminish just how embarrassing this is. The link via Rodriguez père should make Democrats very uncomfortable, and no doubt there will be a lot of denials and disavowals in the coming days.
But it also shows us that the Mangione model is getting closer and closer to the mainstream political machine.
The degrees of separation are getting smaller. And that’s reason for us all to be worried.