Chicago City Wire

Elias Rodriguez, the Chicago man charged with first-degree murder in the killing of a young couple outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., has had associations with several far-left political organizations, according to public records and nonprofit watchdogs.

Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), a nonprofit that monitors other nonprofits, said Rodriguez had connections to groups such as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. 

“Lots of groups want lots of people dead, and they're not fussy about the details,” Walter told Chicago City Wire. "Radical left-wing nonprofits have long recruited mentally unstable foot soldiers and stoked their minds with dreams that radical violence will eradicate the supposed radical evils of the world and lead to ‘liberation.’ It’s tragic but not surprising when some of the soldiers spill blood.”

Israeli embassy couple | Facebook

"Rodriguez fits this pattern," he continued. "Some commenters now strain to parse whether he hated Jews or just Israelis, yet it’s far more important that he hated and wished death upon large groups, like 'white people' and 'Israeli troops.'” 

As CRC has documented, groups Rodriguez flirted with, like the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the Party of Socialism and Liberation, exalt genocidal leftists and have endorsed the mass-murders committed by Hamas.  

Through its InfluenceWatch, CRC tracks hundreds of nonprofit and activist groups. 

According to Walter, some of the groups linked to Rodriguez have expressed support for Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, and have published materials endorsing the actions of groups like Hamas.

One such group, ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) explicitly lauds protesters who “have shut down highways, train stations [like Union Station], and bridges in the United States,” Walter said testifying before Congress last year. 

“ANSWER signed a declaration of the Committee of Anti-Imperialists in Solidarity with Iran that backs Iran’s direct attack on Israel and explicitly chooses the side of the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’ consisting of the government of Syria, Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist groups including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Yemen-based Houthis and Iran-backed militias in Iraq who are trying to kill U.S. troops.”

“These bloodthirsty entities who rule by violence do not exhaust ANSWER’s loyalties," Walter testified. "The coalition also supports Putin’s bellicose Russia by denouncing the 'US and NATO proxy war in Ukraine.'"

Two other such groups include the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Black Lives Matter Chicago.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation advocates for the complete abolition of capitalism and its replacement with socialism, as well as openly supporting Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, according to In IT has also praised Mao Zedong’s Chinese Revolution, which was responsible for between 40 and 80 million deaths over a 28-year period. PSL has also published articles denying the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and calling for the abolition of the police.

In a now-deleted post from October 10, 2023, BLM Chicago shared an image on its X account featuring a depiction of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag with the slogan, “I Stand With Palestine.” 

Motorized paragliders were used during the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack against the state of Israel, including an attack on an Israeli music festival near the Gaza border.