Two teenagers entered a San Diego mosque with assault rifles marked with neo-Nazi Black Sun patches and white-supremacist symbols. They began shooting and killed three people before fleeing in a stolen BMW. In the car, one teenager shot his accomplice and then shot himself in the head. A video-recorded rampage appeared online shortly afterward. The attack followed a recurring pattern of mass shootings involving weapons marked with hateful references and accelerationist ideology. The attackers allegedly produced a 75-page manifesto describing militant accelerationism and motives including anti-Semitism, claims of white genocide, admiration for prior mass shooters, and detailed hatred toward Muslims, Black people, women, and Jewish people.
"The two teenagers who walked into a San Diego mosque with assault rifles on Monday evening wore patches displaying the Black Sun-a neo-Nazi iteration of the swastika-and had scribbled white-supremacist symbols in white correction fluid on their guns. They started shooting, killing three. Then they fled in a BMW one had stolen from his mother. In the car, 17-year-old Cain Clark apparently shot his accomplice, Caleb Vasquez, before shooting himself in the head."
"We know much of this, in graphic detail, because, within hours, Clark and Vasquez's video-recorded rampage seems to have been posted on the messaging platform Discord, then on a website called Watch People Die. The tragedy at the Islamic Center of San Diego in many ways followed an all-too-common script. With horrifying regularity, a young man carries out a mass shooting with weapons bearing neo-Nazi or hateful references scrawled in white."
"The shooter typically wears paraphernalia designed to promote accelerationism: the concept that only the collapse of society can usher in an Aryan utopia. There may also be a manifesto pulling from a familiar list of motives: anti-Semitism, grievance over supposed white genocide, admiration for past shooters (including Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a African Methodist Episcopal church in South Carolina and Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand)."
"Clark and Vasquez apparently put together just such a manifesto; theirs runs to 75 pages and suggests they were sincerely "motivated by militant accelerationism" to do their part to bring about society's downfall, says Katherine Keneally, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue's U.S. director of threat analysis and prevention. In addition to intense Islamophobia, the pair expressed, in detail, a hatred for Black people (described as "low IQ subhumans" in the manifesto), women (who "tend to cause all the problems in the world"), and Jewish people."
Read at The Atlantic
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