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Editor’s note: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, call 988 or text the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States.
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The rambling writings of the teenagers who attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego this week and killed three men and themselves are filled with vitriol against a variety of people whose patterns of violence leave no doubt.
Chief among them was the gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
Researchers who study extremism have long noted the resonance of the Christchurch attack among far-right attackers, attributing it to the level of violence, the documents the killer released about his views and actions, and especially his decision to livestream the massacre. Among those apparently modeled after the Christchurch attack was a gunman who killed 22 people at a Walmart in Texas months later.
“Part of the violent extremist communities we see online are driven by a desire to emulate the attacks that cause the most deaths — which is disgusting to say, but it’s reality,” said Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism group. “There’s this obsession, it’s just a gamification of attacks.”
Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vazquez, 18, attacked the Islamic center on Monday before being chased back outside by a security guard who exchanged gunfire with them as he initiated a lockdown that helped protect 140 children, authorities said.
The two killed guard Amin Abdullah and two other men before taking their own lives in a nearby car.
Works filled with hatred and dissatisfaction
They left behind a 74-page document, the same length as one written by Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant. Like Tarrant, it cites a range of far-right ideological inspirations, including the idea that white people are being replaced by other groups of people, and offers self-interviews detailing their motivations and goals.
They called themselves the “Sons of Tarrant.”
The works include hate speech against Jews, Muslims and Islam, as well as LGBTQ+ people, black people, women, and the political left and right. They say they are trying to hasten the collapse of society. Vazquez wrote in his segment that he had “some mental health issues” and was rejected by women.
Brian Levin, founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, noted that while white supremacist writings of the 1970s provided the narrative blueprint for dispersed terrorist attacks, neo-Nazis of decades ago favored an approach sometimes called “action propaganda” — attacks themselves believed to inspire copycats, even without written explanations.
The Internet makes it easier for attackers’ articles to spread, Levin said, and articles accompanying such atrocities have become more common since far-right attackers killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 and released a 1,500-page document. These writings often cite white supremacist texts from the past.
“This tactic of becoming yet another chapter in an ongoing chain of extremism shows not only that the movement is larger than it actually is, but also that it is resilient – that it is happening again with different actors of violence, some of whom have died in the process,” Levine said.
Spread of mass violence
The shooting is the latest in a series of attacks on houses of worship. Since the outbreak of war in the Middle East, threats and hate crimes against Muslim and Jewish communities have increased, forcing increased security measures.
Kennelly said she has mixed feelings about the media attention surrounding the attacks: The public needs to know what happened, but it also risks amplifying the killer’s message and spreading the spread of mass violence. She said she has struggled to answer questions about whether such attacks are motivated by nihilistic extremism, accelerationism, neo-Nazi or white supremacist ideologies.
“We try to put people in different buckets and we ask why, but we don’t look back and look at the how,” Kennelly said. “How do these kids end up on this path? What role does social media play in that?”
Healthy 17- and 18-year-olds should be excited about graduating high school or entering young adulthood, she said, rather than falling into extremist ideologies.
Another form of inspiration
While hateful extremism inspires teenagers to attack Islamic centers, it also inspires security guard Abdullah in another way: to defend it.
His friend Khalid Alexander said in an interview that Abdullah was increasingly concerned about negative rhetoric against Muslims, including by politicians.
“He recognized a direct correlation between the threats to the communities he was protecting and the type of anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-immigrant hatred being spread on television,” Alexander said. “So he was acutely aware of the dangers of his job. That’s exactly why he chose to do it.”
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Johnson reported from Seattle. Associated Press writers Julie Watson in San Diego and Safia Riedel in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed.