The Hatreds of the Mosque Shooters

Rod Dreher:

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. . . .

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.”

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.” . . .

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.” . . .

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).