Document posted by San Diego attackers points to white supremacy

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SAN DIEGO — Materials left behind by the two teenagers who attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego on May 18, killing three men before taking their own lives, revealed widespread hatred and anger at society at large, FBI Special Agent in Charge of the San Diego field office Mark Remily told journalists at a press conference Tuesday.“They didn’t discriminate on who they hated,” Remily said of the shooters. “It covered a wide aspect of races and religions.”A document currently being examined by investigators, which USA TODAY has reviewed, expresses disdain and anger toward many different groups. But experts in extremism and terrorism who have analyzed the document say it has, at its core, neo-fascist, white supremacist ideology.Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, attacked the Islamic Center on Monday morning. After a firefight with the center’s security guard, Amin Abdullah, they fled into a nearby neighborhood where they fired seemingly at random at a landscape gardener before driving a short way and taking their own lives. Authorities said they live-streamed part of the attack, posting it online along with their document, which contains entries attributed to both attackers.Entitled “The New Crusade,” the 75-page PDF, which was posted inside a private channel on the messaging app Discord, pays gushing tribute to Brenton Tarrant, who attacked two mosques in New Zealand in 2019, killing 51 people and injuring 89 more. The two young attackers in San Diego appear to have viewed themselves as “disciples” of Tarrant, who is idolized in online communities dedicated to mass violence. Analysis of the document reveals two driving forces behind Monday’s attack, experts told USA TODAY: First, the suspects appear to have desired infamy among an in-group known among domestic terrorism experts as “nihilistic violent extremists,” who worship mass shooters and delight in chaotic violence. Secondly – as was the driving force behind Tarrant’s attack – the San Diego shooters appear to have been motivated by the “great replacement theory,” a racist conspiracy theory that claims white people in America, Europe and elsewhere are being systematically “replaced” by non-white immigrants in an organized effort.“I think that’s at the core of it,” said Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. “The great replacement conspiracy theory is the ideological background that they’re falling back on.” Those two ideas exist within a worldview termed “accelerationism,” whose adherents essentially seek to “wipe the slate clean” by committing atrocities that they hope will lead to further acts of violence that eventually collapse society, creating a “New World Order.” Online communities dedicated to violence and goreResearchers who track extremist networks and individuals online have in recent years increasingly embraced the term “nihilistic violent extremists” or “NVE” to describe communities online whose members seem less driven by political or moral motives than they are by the desire to inflict the maximum possible death and pain to victims. This community is not new, but is growing and increasingly troubling to domestic terrorism experts. A 2022 USA TODAY story examined how members of this community refer to mass shooters like Tarrant as “saints.” “Successful” attackers are placed in a pantheon of fellow “saints,” with reverence for them proportional to how many people they killed.Chase Reid, CEO and co-founder of Aslan, a service that attempts to uncover violent actors operating online, runs a team that monitors spaces online where these communities congregate.“A lot of the crescendo towards violence is going to take place among their peers,” Reid said. “These communities are invisible, and they’re nebulous.” Along with several other extremism experts contacted by USA TODAY, Reid confirmed that the document penned by the San Diego shooters was posted to a private Discord channel. USA TODAY confirmed with a senior law enforcement official that the document is the same document referred to by Remily at Tuesday’s press conference. An analysis of the document written by the San Diego attackers by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism outlines the connections to nihilistic violent extremism:“They issue numerous references to previous non-white supremacist mass murders, like the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, suggesting that these hateful beliefs can be viewed as part of the broader ecosystem of nihilistic violent extremism (NVE), and by extension, the True Crime Community (TCC), an online subculture whose adherents have a deep fascination with mass murder, often to the point of glorification.”Underlying neo-fascist, white supremacist ideology While the document posted by the San Diego attackers seems aimed at impressing an “in-crowd” of online sycophants, it also shows clear support for neo-fascist, white supremacist ideas, particularly accelerationism, Kriner and other experts told USA TODAY.“There’s obvious, classic white supremacist, anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric,” Kriner said. In many respects, the San Diego attackers sought to replicate mass shootings carried out by other “accelerationists,” notably Tarrant, said Jared Holt, a senior researcher with Open Measures, a platform that monitors online extremism across social networks.“The perpetrators were explicit that they idolized the gunman who carried out that attack, shared his extremist ideology, and sought to use violence in furtherance of a political cause that seeks to hasten societal collapse and rebuild it in a fascistic and supremacist form,” Holt said. “Beyond the document, these factors clearly influenced the bulk of their plans, including the target they chose, the weapons they used, their attempt to broadcast the attack, and the clothing they wore.”A key theme of the writings of the San Diego attackers is continued and sustained reference to the “great replacement theory.”The words “replace” or “replacement” appear on 14 of the 75 pages of the document being studied by law enforcement. The writers urge readers to study a book entitled “The Great Replacement,” written by their apparent idol, Tarrant.This conspiracy theory, which has existed in Europe and the United States for over a century, posits that natural demographic shifts in the racial makeup of countries is, in fact, being orchestrated by malevolent forces. The goal of this organized “replacement” is allegedly to weaken white hegemony by flooding majority white countries with “docile” immigrants who are more likely to hold liberal values. Notably, the San Diego shooters chose to attack a mosque that is predominantly used by non-white San Diegans, including recent immigrants. The three victims of the attack were all non-white.