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Two teenagers who launched a deadly assault on an Islamic Center in San Diego earlier this week made clear through hate-filled writings that they drew inspiration from previous acts of extremist violence, particularly the gunman who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
Experts who research extremist movements have long observed how the Christchurch massacre continues to influence far-right attackers, pointing to the scale of carnage, the manifesto the perpetrator published, and notably his choice to broadcast the killings live online. The influence extended to a gunman who later murdered 22 people at a Texas Walmart.
“Part of what we’re seeing in violent extremist communities online is wanting to emulate the attacks that have had the most kills — which is a disgusting thing to say, but it’s the reality,” said Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-extremism organization. “There is this obsession and it’s just sort of gamifying of attacks.”
Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vazquez, 18, launched their assault on the Islamic Center Monday but were forced back outside by a security guard who engaged them in gunfire while implementing lockdown procedures, helping safeguard 140 children inside, according to authorities.
The attackers murdered the security guard, Amin Abdullah, along with two other men before ending their own lives in a nearby vehicle.
Their written manifesto spanned 74 pages — matching the length of Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant’s document. Similar to Tarrant’s writings, it referenced various far-right ideological influences, including theories about white people being displaced by other populations, and featured self-conducted interviews explaining their motivations and objectives.
The pair identified themselves as “Sons of Tarrant.”
Their manifesto contained hostile language targeting Jewish people, Muslims and Islam, along with the LGBTQ+ community, Black people, women, and both political sides. The writings suggested they aimed to hasten societal breakdown. Vazquez wrote about struggling with “some mental health issues” and experiencing rejection from women.
Brian Levin, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino, observed that while white supremacist literature from the 1970s provided a framework for decentralized terrorist attacks, neo-Nazis from earlier decades preferred what was sometimes termed the “propaganda of the deed” — where the attack itself was meant to inspire imitators without written explanations.
Digital platforms have simplified the distribution of attackers’ writings, and since a far-right perpetrator killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 while releasing a 1,500-page manifesto, written documents have become increasingly common alongside such violence, Levin explained. These writings often reference earlier white-supremacist texts.
“This strategy of being another chapter in a continuing chain of extremism not only telegraphs that the movement is bigger than it is, but also its resilience — that it is reoccurring with a different set of violent actors, some of whom die in the process,” Levin said.
This attack represents the most recent in a string of assaults on religious facilities. Threats and hate crimes against Muslim and Jewish communities have increased since Middle Eastern conflicts began, prompting enhanced security measures.
Keneally expressed conflicted views about media coverage of such attacks: While the public requires understanding of events, coverage also risks amplifying the perpetrators’ messaging and spreading the influence of mass violence. She noted her difficulty with questions about whether such attacks stem from nihilistic extremism or accelerationist, neo-Nazi, or white supremacist beliefs.
“We’re trying to put people in buckets and we’re asking the why, but we’re not going back and looking at the how,” Keneally said. “How did these kids end up going down this route? How is social media playing a role in that?”
At ages 17 and 18, she noted, healthy teenagers should be anticipating high school graduation or beginning adulthood, not embracing extremist ideologies.
While hateful extremism drove the teenagers to assault the Islamic center, it motivated the security guard, Abdullah, differently: to protect it.
During an interview, his friend Khalid Alexander explained that Abdullah had grown increasingly worried about anti-Muslim rhetoric, including from political figures.
“He recognized a direct kind of correlation between the threat of the community he was protecting and the types of, really, hate that was being spewed on television in an anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-immigrant feeling,” Alexander said. “And so he was keenly aware of the dangers of his job. And that’s exactly why he chose to do it.”
