If these are supremacists, they have absorbed a large dose of victim culture to go with it, which is why they see themselves neither on the right nor the left, and sound like both and neither. That’s the heart of it, for both killers. The racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and all the rest is a construct built on a nihilistic, radically atomized base. And this is why we would be fools either to brush this off as the one-off deeds of radical racists, or attempt to make sense of their killings by slotting them into familiar categories.

That is, it might give us a sense of relief to believe that the killers were nothing but Muslim haters, antisemites, and so forth, because it would allow us to believe that if only we can counter these bigotries, we can stop incidents like the mosque shootings.

If only it were that easy. Of course we can, and we must, counter bigotry. But the bigotries held by Clark and Vazquez feel like symptoms of cultural collapse as well as aspects of the mental—even spiritual—wretchedness in which they lived. Details are still emerging about the lives of these young men, but both seem to have come from middle-class suburban homes, and been radicalized online.

In this, they are like countless young men of their generation across America. The hatred that drove them to kill innocent Muslims as part of a self-described “crusade” is part of the crisis that almost certainly led them down the rabbit hole of online radicalism in the first place: a crisis of meaning. That, and a closely related crisis of belonging.

This is what also drove their generational cohorts in Weimar Germany to seek salvation in the violent race cult called the Nazi Party—with which both Clark and Vazquez identified. “I owe it all to the Fuhrer,” wrote Clark.

Clark and Vazquez grew up in a society in which many sources of transcendent and personal meaning had grown feeble, or vanished. It valorized racial identity, except for whites, belittled masculinity, and was formed by digital culture—which emphasizes physical perfection while discouraging personal and communal bonds. Arendt said that by far the most important factor leading to totalitarianism is social atomization. If that’s true, then America today has recreated the psychosocial conditions of Weimar Germany, without the traumas of war and economic collapse.

It is early yet in the investigation, but what struck me reading the manifesto is that these hate-filled young California men, who did not appear to suffer from material want, ached to free themselves from their own impotence and self-hatred. I am not suggesting they lack agency or responsibility for their terrible crimes, only that I cannot help seeing in their murderous words and deeds the consequences of ideas that serve as common currency in online culture, taken to their logical ends. Read more»

Rod Dreher | “What the San Diego Mosque Shooters Believed” | The Free Press | May 21, 2026

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