An Amazon employee who coordinated closely with USAID, a Bloomberg engineer, a professor at Northwestern University, and an armada of tech bros donated large sums to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL)—a militant marxist political party in the United States in the news over its ties to Washington, D.C., shooter Elias Rodriguez.
The PSL confirmed Rodriguez’s affiliation with the organization in an X post, claiming the terrorist only had a "brief association" with the group.
During the 2024 presidential election, the party raised about $387,000 for its presidential candidate Claudia De La Cruz, according to federal election records. While the vast majority came from small-dollar donors, a select few Americans dug deep to support the PSL’s standard-bearer.
One such contributor is Marcone Cangussu, who maxed out with a $3,300 donation to De La Cruz's presidential campaign in September 2024. Cangussu, who hails from Atlanta, is a longtime senior account manager for Amazon, where he was directly responsible for the company's account with USAID.
Cangussu’s LinkedIn page describes him as an "[a]ccount executive for enterprise $44 million account covering USAID, USTDA, and State Dept working with Federal C-level and executive staff to develop agency level technology modernization and new applications." He has remained an active PSL member in the Atlanta area, local media reports show.
Alithia Zamantakis, who holds a doctorate in sociology from Georgia State University, gave $3,000 to the party in May 2024. She currently works as a "research assistant professor" at Northwestern University’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing.
"She is co-chair for the division of gender and sexual behavior, politics, and communities in the Society for the Study for Social Problems, former chair of the Sociologists for Trans Justice, [and] a member of the American Sociological Association Section on Sexualities Council," her faculty bio reads. Zamantakis is the author of Thinking Cis: Cisgender Heterosexual Men and Queer Women's Roles in Anti-Trans Violence.
Zamantakis makes no secret of her open affiliation with PSL on social media. She has a Palestinian flag in her bio on X, and her posts often contain advocacy for Hamas.
"With the full backing of the US government, Israel has launched a new and even deadlier phase in their genocide against Gaza ... But the global movement for Palestine will never stop fighting to end the massacre!" the PSL wrote in an X post Zamantakis retweeted just hours before the deadly shooting.
Washington Free Beacon readers may recognize Zamantakis as one of the Northwestern faculty members charged with obstructing police officers at the university’s encampment in spring of 2024. She described the response to her law-breaking as "a pretty mind-blowing experience to have your employer send their own police after you to arrest you within your place of employment."
Prosecutors ultimately declined to charge Zamantakis or the other faculty members arrested at the encampment.
Other PSL donors include individuals like Gregory Chen, a software engineer at Bloomberg who gave the party $2,666.67 in March 2024. Chen graduated from Columbia University in 2017, his LinkedIn profile shows, and is not the only Bloomberg employee to have ties to radical anti-Israel and anti-western groups.
Jason Kao, a reporter at the company’s news division, was arrested during the violent takeover of Columbia’s Butler Library on May 7, 2024. Bloomberg later told the Free Beacon that Kao no longer works for the outlet.
A trio of Washington, D.C., donors laid down $2,000 a piece for the party but were able to redact their names from FEC records.
Google software engineer Tahmid Rahman made a $2,000 donation to De La Cruz in October 2023, adding another $3,300 in June 2024. Rahman currently sits "on the hotels team" and previously worked on speech recognition and user location data for the company, according to his LinkedIn.
Among the other large tech-bro donors were Benjamin Gaudiosi ($3,300), a software engineer for Toast; Jose Garza ($3,300) a software engineer for Justworks; Noah Roberts ($3,000), a software engineer for Workday; Alex Hancock ($3,000), a software engineer for Google subsidiary Verily Life Science; and Givon Washington ($3,000), a data engineer for dv01.
Maura Vebeliunas, a quality control director at Reyes Coca-Cola Bottling, and Zachary Farber, a sales rep for Chicago Bulls Charities, also each gave $3,300 to the party.