Tragic Sequel

“The two teenagers who walked into a San Diego mosque with assault rifles on Monday 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 Atlantic (Gift Article): The Glorification of Mass Murder. “The San Diego mosque killings were part ideological, part performance.”

+ “The shooting, conducted by two teenagers who police said met on the internet, extends a pattern of bloodshed inspired by the web, where in recent years video-recorded slayings have been live-streamed onto Facebook and Twitch, reposted onto YouTube and X, and cut into memes across Reddit and 4chan. The videos so frequently cite one another that they’ve raised fears from extremism experts that they could motivate copycats. The speed of their virality has also made it challenging to fully take them offline.” WaPo (Gift Article): San Diego mosque attack followed a familiar online script.