The two teenagers who walked into a San Diego mosque with assault rifles on Monday evening wore patches displaying the Black Sun—a neo-Nazi iteration of the swastika—and had scribbled white-supremacist symbols in white correction fluid on their guns. They started shooting, killing three. Then they fled in a BMW one had stolen from his mother. In the car, 17-year-old Cain Clark apparently shot his accomplice, Caleb Vasquez, before shooting himself in the head. We know much of this, in graphic detail, because, within hours, Clark and Vasquez’s video-recorded rampage seems to have been posted on the messaging platform Discord, then on a website called Watch People Die.
The tragedy at the Islamic Center of San Diego in many ways followed an all-too-common script. With horrifying regularity, a young man carries out a mass shooting with weapons bearing neo-Nazi or hateful references scrawled in white. The shooter typically wears paraphernalia designed to promote accelerationism: the concept that only the collapse of society can usher in an Aryan utopia. There may also be a manifesto pulling from a familiar list of motives: anti-Semitism, grievance over supposed white genocide, admiration for past shooters (including Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a African Methodist Episcopal church in South Carolina and Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand).
Clark and Vasquez apparently put together just such a manifesto; theirs runs to 75 pages and suggests they were sincerely “motivated by militant accelerationism” to do their part to bring about society’s downfall, says Katherine Keneally, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s U.S. director of threat analysis and prevention. In addition to intense Islamophobia, the pair expressed, in detail, a hatred for Black people (described as “low IQ subhumans” in the manifesto), women (who “tend to cause all the problems in the world”), and Jewish people (“The Universal Enemy” responsible for all the world’s wrongs). The phrase “IT’S THE JEWS” appears four times. (Both the video and the manifesto I found have not yet been confirmed as genuine but are being reviewed by law enforcement. Researchers I spoke with at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-extremism think tank, obtained the same document and livestream recording.)
At the same time, Clark and Vasquez, by recording their heinous act, may have been trying to create a vibe for their own digital communities on Discord, a chat service that has become popular with gamers and extremists. Researchers refer to that as “memetic radicalisation,” according to the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, an academic initiative that researches how violent extremists use technology. Emphasizing extremism as an online vibe may also serve to draw nonwhite people to white supremacy. In November, Muhammad Nazriel Fadhel Hidayat, a 17-year-old Indonesian student, allegedly detonated several bombs at his school in Jakarta, injuring nearly 100 people but causing no deaths. Authorities recovered airsoft guns with neo-Nazi references scrawled on one in white and said that the Columbine high school shooters, as well as Roof and Tarrant, were among his influences.
Earlier this year, I asked Cody Zoschak, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, how the Jakarta student could get wrapped up in a subculture that hates nonwhite people. Zoschak suggested that the bomber may not have embraced all of the ideas of neo-Nazism, as descended from the Third Reich, but instead “understood it as a fandom” of the far right.
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The approach is popular in what researchers term “nihilistic violence” circles, which include the “True Crime Community.” The TCC (which is unrelated to the popular nonfiction genre) is an internet subculture that valorizes mass shootings, especially Columbine. Clark likely dabbled in the TCC. He listed “True Crime” among his “interests” in the purported manifesto.
In the 1990s, many white-supremacist communities functioned on the fringes of society, in hard-to-reach places such as East Texas and the Idaho panhandle. They might well have rejected someone like Vasquez even if they agreed with the vitriol contained in the manifesto. Vasquez acknowledged that white supremacists might dismiss him as a “larping spic” and, in the document, defined himself as “half Northern Mexican.” But Vasquez also noted he was of “70-85% of European genetic descent” from French and Spanish roots, suggesting that he felt he belonged in communities that consider white people superior.
Either way, with the rise of digital extremism, there is little barrier to entry. Fans of accelerationist violence can don whatever identity they wish online. And should mass killers seek to impress and potentially inspire those fans, they need only log on to the right Discord server.
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