The Internet Built These Killers

Two San Diego teenager shooters did not invent a worldview. They downloaded one.

Photo by Beatriz Reynolds on Unsplash

The two teenagers who opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego mosque left a 75-page manifesto that is the clearest and most chilling portrait yet of what online radicalization is doing to kids.

Eighteen-year-old Caleb Liam Vazquez of Chula Vista and 17-year-old Cain Lee Clark of San Diego livestreamed the attack to Discord. Their 75-page document contained both of their separate manifestos, with a title built like a flag: The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant — a tribute to Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who slaughtered 51 Muslims in two New Zealand mosques in 2019.

These two boys did not invent a worldview. They inherited one — assembled, piece by piece, from the open sewer of the modern internet.

That is the part of this story that should keep parents awake. The *Sons of Tarrant* manifesto is not the work of a single ideology with a single grievance. It is, in every meaningful sense, the kitchen sink — every poisonous current of the last fifteen years of online life poured into two adolescent skulls and then poured back out as a body count.

Inside the document, the two shooters identify as accelerationists. The younger boy labels himself a “Christian Ecofascist Accelerationist.” The older one writes plainly that he wants a race war and the collapse of the political order, with a white ethno-state on the other side. They invoke white-supremacist, neo-Nazi organizations, such as the now-defunct Atomwaffen Division; the Telegram-based Terrorgram network, and The Base. They cite William Pierce’s Turner Diaries— a 1978 white supremacist dystopian novel depicting a violent race war and the overthrow of the U.S. government— and James Mason’s Siege— a collection of neo-Nazi newsletters from the 1980s advocating for leaderless resistance and lone-wolf terrorism—as if those books were scripture. They open with a sonnenrad, the Black Sun, an ancient Indo-European sun wheel symbol that was appropriated by Nazi SS mystics in the 1930s. They identify openly with National Socialism and Nazism.

That is only one strand of the manifesto. There are many others, and they are not separate strands — they are braided together.

The first eight pages of the older shooter’s section are given over to portraying Jews as what he calls “the universal enemy.” The younger one writes that “every problem in the modern world can be connected to the Jews,” and frames the destruction of Jewish life as the precondition for everything else he wants. They venerate the Tree of Life shooter who murdered 11 worshippers in Pittsburgh in 2018 — quote his now-infamous post, “screw your optics, I’m going in” — and salute the killers of the 2019 Poway, California and Halle, Germany, synagogue shootings, and the December 2025 attack on Hanukkah celebrants at Bondi Beach in Sydney that killed 15.

The reading list they recommend to the next generation includes Mein Kampf, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — a forgery that has been spreading a false narrative of secret Jewish world domination since the Russian tsar’s secret police printed it more than a century ago.

But this is not only an antisemitic document. It is also a violently anti-Muslim one — the boys borrowed Tarrant’s word, invaders, which is why they picked a mosque. It is a viciously anti-Black document; the n-word appears at least 32 times across the two writings, surrounded by the usual pseudo-scientific garbage about IQ. It is a misogynist document, written by two self-described incels who worshipped 2014 Isla Vista killer Elliot Rodger and called him “Saint Elliot.” It is an anti-LGBTQ+ document that openly calls for the killing of gay and transgender people. It contains anti-Trump passages alongside its fantasies about race war, which is the giveaway that you are dealing with a worldview untethered from any conventional political axis. And it is, finally, a nihilist document — the two sections are reportedly titled “MisanthropistCEL” and “Death to the World” — that treats mass murder less as a politics than as an aesthetic.

Notice what that is. It is not one ideology recruiting one type of kid. It is the entire menu, served at the same table, and these two ate the whole thing.

Reporting indicates that Vazquez and Clark first met each other online and were radicalized there together. That detail matters. The 18-year-old reportedly says he had been active in incel forums since 2022, which means he started at roughly 14. By the time he was old enough to vote, he had assembled a personal pantheon that included Tarrant, the Charleston church shooter, the Buffalo supermarket shooter, the Poway Chabad shooter, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the Halle attacker, Omar Mateen of the Pulse nightclub, the Antioch High School shooter Solomon Henderson, and the boys who shot up Columbine in 1999. He did not stumble onto these names. They were handed to him — in fandom-style edits, in memes, in private Discord channels, in Telegram drops, in the long quiet hours of a kid alone with a phone.

This is where the public conversation keeps falling short. People ask, reasonably, what the harm really is when a teenager spends hours a day in the algorithmic slipstream of TikTok, in the most aggrieved corners of YouTube, in the manosphere podcast circuit, on Discord servers that began as gaming hangouts and ended as recruitment funnels, on so-called “gore sites” like WatchPeopleDie where the threshold for human empathy is beaten out of the user one clip at a time. The answer is sitting in a coroner’s office in San Diego.

The pipeline is not theoretical anymore. We can map it. Gore site to incel forum to accelerationist Telegram channel to private Discord to manifesto template to livestream to next manifesto. The *Sons of Tarrant* document is explicit about closing the loop: the two killers describe their attack as a “crusade” and beg readers to join a decentralized “Sons of Tarrant” movement by circulating the livestream, the manifesto, and the edits. That is the same playbook Tarrant himself ran in 2019, which is why his name is now functioning as a brand.

This is what online radicalization looks like in 2026. Not a robed cell in a basement. Not a charismatic leader on a stage. A teenager, a feed, an algorithm, a Discord, and a chorus of dead men he has been taught to call heroes.

There is no clean policy answer that fits in a column, and I am suspicious of anyone who pretends otherwise. But we can be honest about what we are watching. The platforms that monetize this material know exactly what they are doing. The influencers who launder antisemitism and misogyny as “edgy” comedy know exactly what they are doing. The politicians who wink at the Great Replacement narrative — which sits in the middle of this manifesto like a load-bearing wall — know exactly what they are doing. The kids do not always know. That is the whole point of the funnel.

Sons of Tarrant is not a one-off horror. It is an honest table of contents for the machine that produced it. We should read it that way — and we should respond accordingly, before the next 75-page document is already half written, in a bedroom we do not yet know about, by a kid who is, right now, scrolling.