On the menu today: An appalling double murder in Washington, and another sign that the bond market is not so laid back about the trajectory of the federal government’s spending habits.
Tragedy in Washington, D.C.
It’s the details that get you. Yaron Lischinsky, age 30, was a research assistant in the political department at the Israeli embassy in Washington. In a fact that may surprise some people, a friend described him as a “devout Christian.” (About 180,000 Israelis are Christian, just under 2 percent of the population.) His girlfriend was Sarah Lynn Milgrim, age 26, who also worked for the embassy and organized trips to Israel. According to Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador, Lischinsky had purchased “a ring this week with the intention of proposing next week in Jerusalem.”
Last night, the American Jewish Committee was hosting its annual Young Diplomats Reception at the Capital Jewish Museum. The synagogue on the grounds was dedicated in 1876 — another reminder that America was always diverse — and the structure itself was lifted and moved twice — first in 1969 and then in 2016.
Amanda Rothschild, a speechwriter on national security issues in President Trump’s first term, attended the event and said the evening’s panel was on “multi faith efforts to address the humanitarian situation in Israel & Gaza.”
Lischinsky and Milgrim had everything to live for — marriage, maybe kids, loving families and friends, and promising careers.
And now they’re both dead because some bastard shot them and shouted “Free Palestine” as they left the museum.
Over on the website of the American Jewish Committee, the location of the Young Diplomats Reception is “shared upon registration.” We all know why that is; if people know where a group of Israelis or a group of Jews are gathering, the best-case scenario is that some antisemitic yahoos show up and protest, and the worst-case scenario is that one or more antisemitic yahoos show up with a gun. It’s a hard fact of life for Jews, or non-Jews who hang around with Jews in the year 2025: Even in our nation’s capital, any gathering is an opportunity for some murderous lunatic to gun you down, claiming to act in the name of fighting oppression.
Both victims were found unconscious and not breathing at the scene, D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith told reporters during the news conference.
Smith said police believed the shooting was carried out by one person and that a suspect, identified as Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, was in custody.
Rodriguez was observed pacing back and forth outside the museum before the incident, she said. After allegedly shooting the couple, he entered the museum, where he was detained by security, she said. Police initially said at the news conference that Rodriguez was 30, but later confirmed he is 31.
Asked whether her department had any indication that such an attack would occur, Smith said police had not received intelligence “with respect to any type of terrorist act or hate crime.” She added that D.C. police had no previous interaction with Rodriguez. “We don’t see anything in his background that would have put him on our radar at this time. . . .”
Police believe the suspect targeted the event but had not singled out any individual before arriving at the scene, according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “He just got whoever came out at that moment,” the person said.
The arrest was caught on video; the perpetrator doesn’t seem all that upset as he is pulled away and chants, “free, free Palestine.” He seems pretty pleased with himself. He did what he set out to do.
Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, posted on X, “The subject is currently being interviewed by DC Metro in conjunction with our FBI JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] team. . . . Early indicators are that this is an act of targeted violence.”
An “Elias Rodriguez” of Chicago was identified as a member of the “Party for Socialism and Liberation” in Liberation, the newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The Party of Socialism and Liberation is Communist, and the organization contends, “The idea that the capitalists’ grip on society and their increasingly repressive state can be abolished through any means other than a revolutionary overturn is an illusion. . . . The aim of the PSL is to abolish the corrupt, rotten and anti-people capitalist economy, state and governmental system, and replace it with one dedicated to meeting the needs of the people — a socialist system. . . . The standing army and police must be disbanded and replaced by the armed people, organized in workers’ defense councils.”
Got that? These folks want to ban existing law enforcement and set up a system where they have the guns and keep order.
Ironically, the Party for Socialism and Liberation is not a supporter of the Second Amendment and private citizens’ ownership of firearms:
The 2nd Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights as a license for racist vigilante militias — with the overt and covert backing of the United States government — to carry out a reign of terror against Native populations. . . . In Cuba, for instance, guns have not disappeared — in fact, nearly the entire population is trained on how to use guns — but those guns are stored safely in each community, and local organizations (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) stand ready to distribute them as necessary.
Rodriguez was quoted in that Liberation article as saying, “The wealth that Amazon has brought to Seattle has not been shared with its Black residents. . . . [Amazon’s] whitening of Seattle is structurally racist and a direct danger to all workers who live in that city.”
Did you notice that socialists deem everything from Jews leaving an event to your Amazon deliveryman a “direct danger”? The only thing they don’t think is a direct danger is themselves firing guns at other people who are unarmed.
The webpage with Rodriguez’s comments was taken down by Liberation magazine, but you can still find it here. You see, trying to erase history is an old habit of the Commies.
Mere hours before the shooting, the Party of Socialism and Liberation posted on X, “A new campaign launched by Palestinians in the diaspora and in the region is aiming to gather 1 million signatures to show the massive opposition that exists around the world to the U.S.-Israeli massacre in Gaza.” Last month, the PSL newspaper claimed, “In full coordination with the Trump administration, Israel has resumed its genocidal war with a terrifying goal: expel all Palestinians from Gaza in a blood-soaked crime of historic proportions.”
This morning, the Party of Socialism and Liberation is insisting they barely knew the guy, and have no clue where he would have possibly gotten the notion that gunning down Jews was a good idea.
“We reject any attempt to associate the PSL with the DC shooting. Elias Rodriguez is not a member of the PSL. He had a brief association with one branch of the PSL that ended in 2017. We know of no contact with him in over 7 years. We have nothing to do with this shooting and do not support it.”
Sure, fellas, it’s just terrible that a guy who was identified as a PSL member in a PSL publication is killing young Jews outside a Jewish event right after the PSL has spent the past two years insisting that Israel is committing a genocide of historic proportions.
It’s odd, I don’t recall anyone chanting, “Globalize the intifada, but not in a way that makes our movement look like a bunch of violent antisemitic raging maniacs!”
As I wrote on the anniversary of October 7, when it comes to the so-called “anti-Zionist” movement, the antisemitism is the point:
These folks don’t really care about human rights in some far-off land. They just want someone to hate; more specifically, someone whom it is socially acceptable to hate. These people would likely insist that they’re not racist, homophobic, or sexist. They just appointed themselves the arbiters of who is “normalized or welcomed on our campus” and have decided that the kinds of people who go to Hillel must be treated like extremist criminals, driven out and barred from returning.
These snot-nosed punks found someone they can openly hate without too much of a negative social or legal consequence.
John Podhoretz, writing in Commentary this morning:
What we’re going to see over the next couple of days is predictable. Jewish institutions are going to scramble to increase security, as Jews huddle together for comfort. And as the hours and days pass, the shooting will be analyzed by the mainstream with an eye toward “explaining” the root causes of the crime and the criminal’s motivations — which is to say, a search for a way to excuse. We’ll hear that the real danger in the wake of this monstrous act will be a rise in Islamophobia rather than that this event is the culmination of the past 18 months of open anti-Semitic and Jew-hating action in the streets of major cities and on the campuses of our most prestigious academic institutions.
And we Jews will be arming ourselves.
ADDENDUM: Remember during the Biden years, when “modern monetary theory” was all the rage? The gist was that “because the dollar is the world reserve currency and the Treasury can sell bonds at low interest rates, Uncle Sam can spend and borrow limitlessly with no economic risk.” So, the new Biden administration and the Democrats went on a spending spree to the tune of $4 trillion, and prominent left-of-center economists promised, “Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”
And then inflation went up to 9.1 percent in 2022, the highest in four decades. Because, at the heart of it, some brilliant and well-educated people can be really stupid. When push comes to shove, they see what they want to see, and nothing else.
I thought of that when reading Veronique de Rugy’s warning about how the current spending spree and promise of more tax cuts and higher deficits in the future are lowering demand for U.S. treasury bonds:
Today, the U.S. Treasury’s $16 billion sale of 20-year bonds saw weak demand, reflecting growing investor concern over the nation’s rising debt. So much for the theory that we can put as much debt for sale out there and it will go.
The auction’s poor reception triggered a drop in stocks and the dollar, while Treasury yields rose. The outcome signals increased anxiety in the bond market about Washington’s worsening fiscal trajectory. (Remember that in some corners of the administration, “liberation day” theory was supposed to help lower interest rates, which would lower the cost of refinancing our debt. It’s not working.)
Why is everyone in Washington who is way more responsible for our nation’s finances than you or me so utterly convinced that there won’t be negative consequences for spending a trillion or two each year more than we take in?