The Mosque Shooters’ Manifesto

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The obligatory mass-shooter manifesto has been recovered in the wake of Monday’s San Diego mosque shooting carried out by two teenage losers, and predictably, it is a testament of nihilistic rage directed at just about everybody and everything.

Law enforcement and the media are now in possession of the 75-page document compiled by Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vasquez, 18 (or 19, depending on the source), who killed themselves after shooting three Muslim victims dead outside the Islamic Center of San Diego. Investigative journalist Amy Reichart reports that the manifesto revealed the two to be not trans lovers, as many were quick to claim on social media, but straight incels – “involuntary celibates,” a subculture of mostly males bitter about their inability to find relationships with women.

Regurgitating a theme that commonly circulates on the internet these days, thanks in no small part to a handful of rabidly antisemitic influencers on both the Left and the Right, Clark and Vasquez identified Jews as “the Universal Enemy.” “After the Jew,” they added, “the most evil person in this world is the woman.” In addition to hating them, gay and trans people (whom they call “deranged”), blacks, immigrants both legal and illegal, and Islam (not Muslims per se, they assert), the two despised President Trump and his MAGA supporters. This no doubt disappoints many on the Left who hoped giddily that Right-wing Islamophobes were responsible for the shooting. Clark and Vasquez even encouraged others to assassinate Trump and Vice President Vance.

That didn’t stop some from trying to exploit the murders by pointing the finger at conservatives anyway. A hijab-wearing spokesperson at a press conference held in San Diego the day after the shooting had the nerve to complain about rising “Islamophobia” in America since 9/11. She told the media, “The state-funded demonization of Muslim Americans and the climate of anti-Muslim bigotry fueled by the president and his white Christian nationalist allies has put a bright red target on our community. The truth cannot be ignored.”

Apparently the truth can be ignored, because this is an absurd smear. There is no “state-funded demonization of Muslim Americans.” The San Diego mosque shooting notwithstanding, there is no climate of “anti-Muslim bigotry” in America. There is no such thing as Islamophobia, the “irrational fear of Islam.” There most certainly is, however, a growing, justifiable frustration among American patriots who are fed up with surging Islamic supremacism, Islamic antisemitism, the demonstrable threat of spreading sharia, and outright Islamic terrorism not only in this country but throughout the Western world.

Based on their own statements in the manifesto, the Jew-haters Clark and Vasquez were more likely to attack a synagogue than a mosque; in fact, the manifesto confirms that they hoped to have opportunities to hit “a diverse selection of targets,” but proximity may have prompted them to target the Islamic Center of San Diego first (it’s in the same neighborhood as the house where Clark lived).

The killers each wrote a section in the manifesto under his own name. Both teens idolized Brenton Tarrant, the mass shooter at New Zealand’s Christchurch mosque in 2019 – indeed, the manifesto is titled, “The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant.” Both were avowed white supremacists who promised a “white revolution” is coming. They were fond of neo-Nazi symbolism like a fuel can marked with the SS symbol, and the Black Sun and Atomwaffen insignia Clark wore during the livestreamed attack. Clark described himself as “the average white man wanting to do the right thing,” and Vasquez declared that “my religion is the white race.”

In terms of politics and religion, Vasquez labeled himself neither Left nor Right but a “Third Positionist,” an ideology rooted in National Socialism and eco-fascism. Clark defined himself as a “Christian Ecofascist Accelerationist” who believed that the “only way to the liberation of the white race is through violence, sabotage, and revolution… I believe we need to accelerate the collapse of modern society so we can rebuild it into something better.”

Christian Ecofascist Accelerationism, of course, is not Christian at all. There is nothing in Christianity that calls for radical environmentalism, a fascist theocracy, or the violent overthrow of the status quo in order to establish a racial utopia on earth.

Clark expressed no remorse in the manifesto and stated that he never intended to survive the mosque attack. He and Vasquez were prepared to kill others and themselves – and they did – and for what cause, to what end? At least ostensibly, it was to incite chaos, to foment outrage and resentment and revolution, to nudge society closer to a race war. They hoped to inspire others to take up their torch. Yes, there was a psychological component as well, because these were disturbed, deeply unhappy young men without hope who found mutual reinforcement in each other and in a dark echo chamber online, and who spiraled downward into darkness instead of toward the light.

At the outset of this article I called this act one of nihilistic rage, but to be more precise, nihilism is about meaninglessness, and this attack was purposeful. But the point remains that for whatever reason – I don’t know anything about their backgrounds or home lives – these young men had a God-shaped void in their lives, and it was filled with hatred, a seething resentment toward almost everyone and even life itself. Their manifesto testified to a hunger for death and destruction because they were defined by what they hated, not anything they loved. This dark impulse can be starved of oxygen only by a society, by communities, by families oriented toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. It can be neutralized only by rejecting the utopianism of violent revolution, and acknowledging our shared, flawed humanity. It can be countered only by choosing love and life.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.