Monsters like Elias Rodriguez don’t suddenly emerge from under a rock. Their anti-American and anti-Israel hatreds are honed over time by a revolutionary ecosystem composed of different organisms. Years before he shot in cold blood an Israeli couple in the prime of their lives, Rodriguez was taught to loathe the West.
Given the parlous state to which we have mindlessly allowed our universities to descend, Rodriguez may have imbibed some of this anti-Western dogma at the University of Illinois, Chicago, from which he graduated with an English degree in 2018.
But we know for sure that concurrently with his “education,” Rodriguez was associated with two leading institutions of the revolutionary ecosystem, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and one of its front groups, the ANSWER Coalition, an acronym for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.
He attended several marches coordinated by both groups in 2018, and was identified as a member of the PSL. Now that Rodriguez has been caught committing a heinous crime, however, both groups are distancing themselves from him.
Black Lives Matter Chicago also admitted that Rodriguez was a supporter and took part in several marches. BLM Chicago was one of the groups that cruelly posted pictures of paragliders with Palestinian flags after the terrorist group Hamas massacred over 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, the New York Post reported at the time. Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine,” moments before his arrest.
Since Rodriguez murdered Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgram at the Jewish Museum in Washington DC last Wednesday (finishing off Milgram as she crawled away on the floor), journalists have been forced to bring up ANSWER, though carelessly describing it as an “activist group,” or — even more shamefully by NewsNation — as a “group that fights against racism and war with organizing centers in cities and towns across the country.”
Even that marks a certain progress. Usually, journalists just report on demonstrations and riots without identifying the groups that organize them and bus in marchers. This gives the disturbances an undeserved air of spontaneity and the false impression of popular anger.
ANSWER, the PSL and others are actually communist groups that coordinate marches and the takeover of strategic chokepoints in urban areas, and are tied to foreign enemies such as China and Cuba. The same media that breathlessly brought you reports of the “Russian collusion” with the 2016 Trump campaign — which we now know to be false — rarely reports on this real danger.
In a paper published barely a year ago, the stellar Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), lifted the veil on ANSWER, the PSL, and other such groups as the People’s Forum and the International People’s Assembly (IPA), and their connections to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose geopolitical influence they promote.
“The People’s Forum, IPA, and ANSWER Coalition serve as the conduit through which CCP-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S., advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda,” said NCRI.
Moreover, NCRI added that these three far-left groups “are part of a network linked by close financial, interpersonal, and ideological ties to Neville Roy Singham and his wife Jodie Evans, a power couple within the global far-left movement with close ties to the CCP”
Evans is the co-founder of CodePink, a group that organizes street mayhem. Evans announced on X two days after Rodriguez’s murderous rampage that she was “fasting for Gaza.”
Singham, a multi-millionaire, lives in Shanghai, China, “where he shares premises with Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Ltd., a Chinese propaganda firm focused on presenting a positive image of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the global south.”
According to a 2023 report by the New York Times, one of the rare instances when the legacy media has reported on this network, Singham’s “ties to the propaganda machine date back at least to 2019, when, corporate documents show, he started a consulting business with Chinese partners. Those partners are active in the propaganda apparatus.”
Singham’s money also finances the People’s Forum, which organized an anti-Israel demonstration by thousands on New York’s Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023, before Israel had fired a single shot in retaliation.
The People’s Forum and the other groups make clear repeatedly that their ultimate target is the U.S. Seven of these groups, including the People’s Forum, and the two groups Rodriguez was involved with signed in 2023 a statement that read, in part, “we mobilize in the belly of the beast because we understand that we have a unique role to play in combating material support for Zionism, and weakening the handmaiden of U.S. global imperialism.”
The People’s Forum is headed by Manolo De Los Santos, who has been indoctrinated in Cuba for years and has tweeted pictures of him with Cuban dictator Miguel Diaz-Canel. De Los Santos operates inside the U.S., but his bio at the Black Alliance for Peace says that “he was based out of Cuba for many years.”
On April 30, 2024, two hours before protestors stormed Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, De Los Santos addressed some 100 keffiyeh-clad protesters at his group’s headquarters in Midtown, where he said, “We have to be the bodies willing to stand between the police and our students.”
These are the groups, and the foreign forces, that nurture our young haters.
Rodriguez didn’t come out of nowhere. He came from here.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
