Guy Christensen, a TikTok influencer with almost three-and-a-half million followers, came out in support of the shooting attack that killed two Israeli embassy employees.
“I do not condemn the elimination of the Zionist officials who worked at the Israeli embassy last night,” Christensen, a Gen-Z influencer who goes by YourFavoriteGuy on TikTok, said in a video posted Thursday.
“I want to urge you first to support Elias’s actions,” he added later, referencing the alleged shooter, Elias Rodriguez. “He is not a terrorist. He’s a resistance fighter, and the fact is that the fight against Israel’s war machine, against their genocide machine, against their criminality, includes their foreign diplomats in this country.”
The video represented a reversal for Christensen, who had earlier posted a video condemning the murders. The video supporting the attack later disappeared from TikTok and Instagram. He appeared to suggest that the platform had removed it: “also tiktok [sic] banned my vid LOL,” he wrote on a subsequent post.
With the video, Christensen joined a growing collection of voices openly supporting the attack. He may be the one with the largest audience.
For nearly all of the time since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and the war launched in Gaza, Christensen has been a constant, vocal pro-Palestinian activist. In a November 2023 essay, penned when he was still in high school, he wrote that this support began when he discovered “more than what the media was telling me.”
Pro-Palestinian historical revisions
Since then, videos condemning Israel and voicing support for Palestinians have populated his feed, helping him rack up followers in the process. In the video supporting the murders, Christensen, as in many of his videos, was decked out in pro-Palestinian paraphernalia. He wore a keffiyeh and a shirt that appeared to say “Jesus was a Palestinian.” A Palestinian flag hung behind him.
In his initial denunciation of the attack – which killed Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, a young couple who were attending an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee – he said, “I don’t support the slaughter of civilians. That’s not the way to go about it and bring justice.”
In the earlier video, he made clear that he still condemned the victims’ activities and affiliations. “These people deserve to be tried and punished and sentenced to jail for their facilitation of this genocide,” he said.
Christensen’s spent much of the video predicting that the attack would lead to a government crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists, which he compared to Kristallnacht, the mass Nazi pogrom that is considered by many to be the beginning of the Holocaust.
Some of the social media influencer’s followers said they agreed with that stance, but others rejected it. Many made the case that they believed the attack had been a “false flag” operation perpetrated by supporters of Israel to galvanize opposition to pro-Palestinian activism.
Similar comments were unfolding across the internet on Thursday. Pro-Palestinian activists and groups that denounced the shooting drew a flurry of rebuttals: “Condemn yourselves,” one popular account responded to Jewish Voice for Peace’s post decrying the attack on X/Twitter.
News stories related to the shooting, meanwhile, saw fights play out in their comments section. When the news site Block Club Chicago reported on a search of the alleged gunman’s apartment, for example, several responses included requests for Rodriguez’s legal defense fund.
The progressive radio show Democracy Now elicited comments likening Rodriguez to Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in December – reflecting a trend emerging across the internet.