Posted on 05/23/2026 5:24:06 AM PDT by Twotone
What kind of hatred motivated the teenage San Diego mosque shooters, who killed three men and died in a murder-suicide before capture? Well, take your pick.
According to the 75-page unfinished manifesto left behind by Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, the pair hated Muslims, Jews, blacks, legal migrants, illegal migrants, Latinos, Asians, industrial society, gays, trans people, Donald Trump, “MAGAtard boomers,” liberals, conservatives, moderates, and women.
Oh boy, did they hate women. “After the Jew the most evil creature in this world is the woman,” wrote Vazquez, in his contribution to the two-part document. He identifies himself as a short man on the autism spectrum. This, he believed, is why women ignored him.
“Being short, especially now more than ever, is nothing short [of] a torturous humiliation ritual. As someone who’s been short my whole life, trust me, I know from experience and they’ve never let me forget it.”
“When a girl is shy or introverted it’s cute, but I, as a guy, for being the exact same, am seen as weird and awkward,” he continued. “When a girl is autistic it is seen as quirky, but I, being an autist as a guy, am treated like a retard.”
The manifesto reads like what you might expect teenagers marinated 24/7 in intersecting currents of internet hate to produce: crude, stupid, self-pitying, and overflowing with rage at all the people these self-described National Socialist Ecofascists identify as the Enemy. Clark calls himself a Christian, but Vazquez, who is Latino, said, “my religion is the white race.” In fact, Vazquez acknowledges that some will consider him a Latino who pretends to be white, “but that’s honestly fine and I could care less.” Read The Evil of the San Diego Mosque Shooting
But above all the enemies hated by the duo sit the Jews, the summum malum of all the world’s wickedness. In fact, Vazquez calls racial minorities and Muslims “Bioweapons of the Kikes,” who control everything in the world. Wrote Clark, “Every problem in the modern world can be connected to the Jews.”
This is all grotesquely familiar. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguished modern antisemitism from its old Christian origins, explaining that Jews had become the omni-explanation for all the world’s problems.
Why Jews? Because of their historical position in modern Europe: as outsiders who served as a way for totalitarians to focus the hatred of the deracinated masses, and mobilize them. Reading the Vazquez-Clark manifesto is like revisiting Weimar Germany a century later. It is a world I have been immersed in for a book I am writing about that time and its lessons for our own. I cannot help hearing, in their hate-filled, disjointed formulations, echoes of the inchoate rage of the dispossessed young, the same passion to scapegoat others for their own anxieties, inadequacies, and failures, the same bottled-up frustrations exploding into murderous deeds, by which the powerless imagine they are finally asserting agency.
The Nazis taught their followers that war and violence were sacred, purifying acts. “All violence is good violence,” said Vazquez. Clark believed this too, writing that the “upcoming Race War will be another type of war, it will be the most beautiful one yet, cleansing this earth of the disgusting filth walking all over it.”
We would be fools to brush this off as the one-off deeds of radical racists.
(This concept was not confined to the Nazis. In The House of Government, his magisterial account of the Bolshevik Revolution, contemporary historian Yuri Slezkine described the Bolsheviks as an apocalyptic millenarian political cult, one that sought purification and renewal of Russia through mass bloodshed of the impure—with capitalists and the bourgeoisie playing the role that Jews did for the Nazis.)
There is nothing abstract about the hatred and murderous actions of Clark and Vazquez, and the threats and slanders they heaped on their long list of racial, religious, and political enemies. They murdered three Muslim men in a mosque before killing themselves, and were equipped to kill many more had not one of the three—an armed guard who was killed in the attack—driven them back. Ultimately, though, these young murderers expressed overwhelming hatred of a world in which they found no roots, no connection, nothing but kinship in an imaginary white race (to which one of them didn’t even belong). “[W]hy am I like this?” asked Vazquez in the manifesto.
“IT IS BECAUSE OF ALL THESE YEARS OF RIDICULE, REJECTION, BEING IGNORED, AND BEING TREATED LIKE A JOKE. To take a quote from one of my favorite films, ‘What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? I’ll tell you what you get. You get what you fucking deserve!’ You all thought it was hilarious to treat me like I was subhuman, to make fun of and tease me for every little thing. No matter how hard I’d try, I could never fix myself. There was always something to make fun of me for, and I hate you all for it.”
If these are supremacists, they have absorbed a large dose of victim culture to go with it, which is why they see themselves neither on the right nor the left, and sound like both and neither. That’s the heart of it, for both killers. The racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and all the rest is a construct built on a nihilistic, radically atomized base. And this is why we would be fools either to brush this off as the one-off deeds of radical racists, or attempt to make sense of their killings by slotting them into familiar categories. Read Caitlin Flanagan: Pray for America
That is, it might give us a sense of relief to believe that the killers were nothing but Muslim haters, antisemites, and so forth, because it would allow us to believe that if only we can counter these bigotries, we can stop incidents like the mosque shootings.
If only it were that easy. Of course we can, and we must, counter bigotry. But the bigotries held by Clark and Vazquez feel like symptoms of cultural collapse as well as aspects of the mental—even spiritual—wretchedness in which they lived. Details are still emerging about the lives of these young men, but both seem to have come from middle-class suburban homes, and been radicalized online.
In this, they are like countless young men of their generation across America. The hatred that drove them to kill innocent Muslims as part of a self-described “crusade” is part of the crisis that almost certainly led them down the rabbit hole of online radicalism in the first place: a crisis of meaning. That, and a closely related crisis of belonging.
This is what also drove their generational cohorts in Weimar Germany to seek salvation in the violent race cult called the Nazi Party—with which both Clark and Vazquez identified. “I owe it all to the Fuhrer,” wrote Clark.
Clark and Vazquez grew up in a society in which many sources of transcendent and personal meaning had grown feeble, or vanished. It valorized racial identity, except for whites, belittled masculinity, and was formed by digital culture—which emphasizes physical perfection while discouraging personal and communal bonds. Arendt said that by far the most important factor leading to totalitarianism is social atomization. If that’s true, then America today has recreated the psychosocial conditions of Weimar Germany, without the traumas of war and economic collapse.
It is early yet in the investigation, but what struck me reading the manifesto is that these hate-filled young California men, who did not appear to suffer from material want, ached to free themselves from their own impotence and self-hatred. I am not suggesting they lack agency or responsibility for their terrible crimes, only that I cannot help seeing in their murderous words and deeds the consequences of ideas that serve as common currency in online culture, taken to their logical ends.
Reading the manifesto is like revisiting Weimar Germany a century later.
“I want to burn this earth down and rebuild it into a new and better society,” wrote Clark. When I read that, I recalled with a shiver the answer a Zoomer conservative on Capitol Hill gave me when I asked him what the large tribe of Gen Z Groypers working in right-wing politics want.
“They don’t want anything,” he said. “They want to tear it all down.”
The Clark-Vazquez manifesto is the logical extension of the antisemitism that has been normalized in these circles of “educated” Zoomers of the left and the right. Last fall, I asked a group of U.S. college students why so many of their generation are antisemitic. One young man told me that it’s not through reading, but through relentless social media exposure to memes.
Clark understood this. In his part of the manifesto, Clark urged would-be imitators to take up memeing and shitposting, which “has done more to radicalize the masses than any book or manifesto ever could. . . . This is how we win.”
This is happening all over with Generation Z, the first generation to grow up fully immersed in digital culture, which simplifies and amplifies the passions as radically as that new technology, radio, once did. And we older people barely notice it.
Clark and Vazquez were Nazis, of a sort. A savage irony: One of the three Muslims killed at the Islamic Center of San Diego (whose members once included some of the 9/11 hijackers) was Amin Abdullah, a security guard praised for his heroism protecting schoolchildren from the terrorists.
Last year, Abdullah, wearing his security guard uniform in his X profile, praised a post in which a fellow Muslim posted an image of Hitler that included the caption, “Do you now understand why I did what I did?” In an X post from April this year, Abdullah, a 51-year-old Muslim convert, said of Jews: Hell Fire is waiting for them.
It seems that Abdullah had something in common with the men who killed him. Frighteningly, more Americans these days do than we care to think. Until and unless we address the twin crises of meaning and belonging in an age of digitally driven fragmentation, their numbers are likely to grow.
After reviewing the list hated things, I conclude the thing they actually hated was themselves. Boiling it down, trying to “identify” as something you aren’t, is rejecting...hating...the thing you are.
Who didn’t they hate? I think they covered everything.
Who didn’t they hate? I think they covered everything.
Imagine being a prosecutor and trying to charge someone with a hate crime who attacks a mosque because he hates Jews.
“According to the 75-page unfinished manifesto left behind by Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, the pair hated Muslims, Jews, blacks, legal migrants, illegal migrants, Latinos, Asians, industrial society, gays, trans people, Donald Trump, “MAGAtard boomers,” liberals, conservatives, moderates, and women.”
What about methodists?
CC
When you inject young bodies with hormones you get craziness. As a senior I was taking testosterone and it made me crazy. I had to back off.
And these National Socialists will be called "right wing"?!
They missed hating on the Amish. And now, thankfully, we’ll never know for sure.
What a couple of whack jobs.
They were crazies.
The question is, who pushed their hate buttons, aided in arming them, and then pointed them to the target.
And then sold them on the idea that this best be a suicide mission.
These guys didn’t know doodoo from shoe polish, either one could have been a better Governor of California than Greasy Head however, causing less collateral damage to the state.
Wait... I didn’t see Christians mentioned in this mix. Or did I miss it?
I had a kid at the highschool where I teach lose his mind on my because my particular brand of Christianity was not approved by he (or his family).
People are just losing their minds these days...
Oh, and ALSO at the school where I work — we had a massive murder plot foiled. The two potential shooters are now rotting in jail.
It’s crazy.
Were they trans? I’ve seen conflicting reports.
There is a meme going around on what should be called “Anti-Social Media” that portrays a WWII photo of a firing squad of Nazi soldiers executing Jews in front of an open trench.
The caption reads: “Weimar problems require Weimar solutions”.
In many ways the Western “Democracies” have become a sort of Weimar Republic and all that implies. Decadent, degenerate, cynical, weak. History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes someone once said.
“the pair hated Muslims, Jews, blacks, legal migrants, illegal migrants, Latinos, Asians, industrial society, gays, trans people, Donald Trump, “MAGAtard boomers,” liberals, conservatives, moderates, and women.”
Sounds like the world is now better off with their exits.
I read part of this “manifesto.”
You were/are a teacher. Your opinion is valued.
Teenagers don’t write like that.
They didn’t write it.
As we see in daily posts, it’s those wild and crazy Amish that are causing all the trouble.
Why don’t these jackwagons hate the Amish too?
Must be a conspiracy . . .
Trained to hate everything in Cauliphonya publik skools. A couple of Randi Biergarten’s brats.
Donald Trump, “MAGAtard boomers,”
liberals, conservatives, moderates, and women.
****
And that's why the story has gone down the memory hole.
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