By now, most people know the basic details of the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego. 17-year-old Cain Clark and 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez opened fire at the Islamic Center on May 18th, killing security guard Amin Abdullah along with Mansour Kaziha and Nadir Awad before fleeing the scene and taking their own lives.
Authorities say the two entered the property wearing tactical gear and carrying weapons covered in neo-Nazi symbols. More than one hundred children were inside the school attached to the mosque while the attack unfolded. Abdullah reportedly triggered the lockdown before being killed, which almost certainly prevented this from turning into a full-scale massacre involving kids.
And yes, I am still calling this a school shooting.
I don’t care if the intended target was technically the mosque itself. The building housed a functioning K-12 school. The gunmen reportedly moved through parts of the complex room to room while children hid nearby. At one point they were apparently within feet of where kids were sheltering during the lockdown. That crosses the line into attempted school massacre territory as far as I am concerned.
As I mentioned yesterday, investigators say Clark and Vazquez met through extremist internet spaces before realizing they both lived in the San Diego area. According to reporting from CBS News and the Anti-Defamation League, the pair were heavily immersed in what people online call the “True Crime Community,” or TCC.
Despite the harmless-sounding name, this is not a bunch of middle-aged women watching documentaries about serial killers while folding laundry. The modern TCC is basically a sprawling online subculture built around mass shooter fandom, gore videos, nihilism, and irony-tainted extremism.
These people collect manifestos the way sports fans collect trading cards. They make edits of killers set to music. They trade livestream footage from massacres. They obsess over body counts, tactical gear, weapons, and “saints” from previous shootings.
Some of them spend all day circulating clips of suicides, executions, murders, and terrorist attacks until human suffering just becomes another form of entertainment.
One of the main sites connected to this ecosystem is a gore forum that I won’t name because they don’t deserve the traffic. It’s where videos of real-world deaths and mass killings get passed around like memes.
Authorities say footage from the San Diego attack spread there almost immediately. The FBI has apparently been monitoring that website for years because shooters keep emerging from it over and over again.
If federal investigators know these forums are functioning like incubators for future mass killers, why does it constantly feel like the FBI only shows up after another pile of bodies hits the floor?
How many shooters now have connections to this same gore site? How many manifestos have to quote the same killers before somebody starts treating that place less like “a disturbing corner of the internet” and more like an active extremist recruitment pipeline? Because that is what it is.
The ADL’s report on the shooters makes it painfully clear that these two idiots were basically assembling themselves out of every violent online ideology imaginable. Their alleged manifesto was reportedly titled “The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant,” referencing the Christchurch mosque shooter from 2019. Investigators say the document was loaded with white supremacist accelerationism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, neo-Nazism, anti-Black racism, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and incel ideology.
Basically every form of terminally online hatred got thrown into a blender.
The report says the pair openly idolized previous mass killers, including the Christchurch shooter, the Charleston church shooter, the Buffalo supermarket shooter, the Poway synagogue shooter, the Tree of Life shooter, and, of course, the Columbine cowards. They allegedly quoted from earlier manifestos while describing those murderers as heroes and inspirations.
These kids were not original thinkers because none of these people ever are.
Modern school shooters increasingly resemble fandom communities more than political movements. Every new attacker copies aesthetics, language, symbols, and tactics from previous attackers while adding their own little remix to the pile. The manifestos become copypasta while the livestreams become propaganda clips. The killers become collectible characters for the next generation of broken little nihilists with minimal supervision sitting alone online at three in the morning watching execution videos.
Columbine helped create the blueprint for all of this.
Long before the modern TCC existed, there were “Columbiners,” people obsessively fixated on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Entire online communities formed around idolizing them, romanticizing them, archiving their writings, copying their clothing, and treating them almost like anti-celebrities. That culture never really disappeared. It just evolved alongside the internet itself until it merged with extremist politics, gore culture, livestream terrorism, and algorithm-fed nihilism.
Now you get teenagers like Clark and Vazquez who appear to absorb everything all at once. One minute they are consuming neo-Nazi propaganda, the next they are quoting Elliot Rodger, then worshipping Christchurch, then referencing Columbine aesthetics while hanging out on gore forums watching real people die for entertainment.
The ideology itself almost becomes secondary after a while. What matters is hatred, spectacle, and self-destruction.
And that is where accelerationism enters the picture.
Accelerationism is basically the belief that society is so corrupt and doomed that the only solution is to speed up its collapse through violence and chaos. A lot of white supremacist accelerationists believe acts of terrorism and mass murder will eventually trigger racial conflict and total societal breakdown. According to the ADL report, the shooters openly identified with accelerationist ideas and referenced other accelerationist extremist groups.
But beneath all the pseudo-political garbage, these two mostly just sound like miserable copycats who hated everybody, including themselves.
Their writings reportedly bounce from racism to misogyny to antisemitism to incel grievances to fantasies about societal collapse without any real coherent worldview beyond generalized resentment and violent self-pity. That is what makes these online ecosystems so dangerous. They turn lonely, angry teenagers into ideological scavengers picking up whatever form of hatred feels emotionally useful at the time.
Then eventually one of them decides they want to stop consuming massacre content and start producing it themselves.
And once again, innocent people end up dead because the warning signs were treated like background noise until it was too late.
(Sources)
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