“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.
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.”
👀 
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.”
Every single person on this website has said something in private at some point in their lives that, when stripped completely of context and publicized without their consent, would make them look worse than this single cherry-picked instance of personal weakness. Klippenstein, for all the value I think he has as a journalist (compared to his peers anyway), is still an American liberal anticommunist. He dug through a decade of private chats specifically looking for the most controversial things he could find, and this is the worst thing he could find to say about a committed communist sacrificing his life for the cause of Palestinian liberation.
^^^^ This guy is going away to prison for his whole life. He obviously shouldn’t have done it, and shouldn’t have said that stuff about his friend’s brother either. But the least we should do is extend a bit of grace and show him solidarity.