← The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams
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Welcome to the watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. On May 18, two teenagers armed with rifles, body armor, neo Nazi insignia, and live streaming equipment opened fire on the Islamic center of San Diego, which was the largest mosque in the city. Three people were killed in this terrorist event, which included the security guard, Amin Abdullah. So he engaged with these attackers and used his own firearm. He tried drawing them away from the part of the mosque that was a school and it had 140 students in at the time also. So there was an individual, he was kind of a caretaker on the compound. He worked in the gift shop. He'd been there for years. His name was Manzoor Abdul Kaziha. He also helped draw the attacker's attention towards him and away from the school building. The last individual killed was Nadir Awad. He lived across the street. He heard the shooting and he responded because his wife was actually a teacher in inside the school. And unfortunately he was also killed. And then the two active shooters, Cain Lee Clark, who is only 17 years old, and Caleb Liam Vasquez, who's 18, they later died from self inflicted gunshot wounds after they fled the scene. So this is an interesting attack because it's not just about the violence itself. It's actually actually what the attackers believed. Because according to investigators in the manifesto that was recovered, these shooters were not just simply motivated by hatred. They were accelerationists. And unless you've been in counterterrorism or intelligence or really done research into extremist circles, there's a good chance you never heard that word until this past week. And when it comes to accelerationists, it's one of the most dangerous ideological currents that are driving this Current wave of extremist content, domestic terrorism. And it's now this new threat we really need to pay attention to because part of it is to incite others. And now this attack will do that, you know. So as we noted, these two shooters, Cain and Caleb, arrived at the mosque compound with multiple firearms, tactical gear, body armor, and then these symbols associated with neo Nazi and accelerationist movements on their weapons they put like SS symbols and phrases like race war. And then even on their tactical gear they had Stonenrod imagery. And that's often called the black sun. And it's a symbol now heavily associated with modern white supremacists and then these accelerationist circles online. So it's widely seen in this wave of thinking. So portions of this attack were livestream. And again, that's to get copycats or to incite others to this pathway of violence. And then after the shootings, authorities recovered dozens of firearms and weapons from the residences connected to these suspects.
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it's the manifesto I want to spend time on today because that shows us the broader picture, you know, of what actually happened here. So when we talk about the manifesto, this is a document that's about 75 pages long and it's titled the New Sons of Tarrant. Now, the title alone tells investigators really what they're working with and the ideology behind this attack, because it directly references Brendan Tarrant. If you don't know him. He was the Christ Church mosque shooter. And there he killed 51 worshipers in New Zealand back in 2019. I mean, this was a horrific event at the time. And this matters because if you've seen any of this online, like propaganda, the imagery around these networks, Christchurch, fundamentally changed modern extremist circles. So it wasn't just an attack. And if you look at it as just an attack, you're not seeing all these kind of, what I like to say, ripples that have occurred since the attacker created essentially a blueprint for attackers like him to follow. So going forward, he wants plenty of the same incidents to occur. So he had, of course, his manifest, he livestreamed, he had this kind of meme driven propaganda strategy that still exists today. And then there was this like digital mythology designed to inspire kind of all these copycats or at least inspire others to go down a similar pathway. So according to investigators These shooters appear to have modeled themselves after his framework. And, I mean, they even say it, you know, in the title of their document. So what exactly is accelerationism? I think a lot of people are like, oh, the government's just throwing out a word to cover up some sort of domestic terrorism. But this is a real thing, It's a real movement, and obviously it's a real threat. So at its core is the belief that society is irreparably broken and must be pushed toward collapse through either violence, chaos, polarization, or fear. So the goal is not any sort of reform. The goal is ultimate destruction. Accelerationists believe that acts of terror can trigger, like this wider societal breakdown, things like race conflict, political instability, civil unrest, government crackdowns, eventually creating the conditions for a new world order, order to emerge from this collapse. That's kind of the ultimate goal. So that's exactly the wording and the thought process we see through the entire manifesto. There's people who picked a page here and there, didn't understand even what they're seeing. Some used a high to analyze it for them. But this document was essentially the accelerationist playbook. If you've ever looked at any of their messaging or their materials online now, you didn't even have to guess from the text that they were accelerationists because one shooter specifically said, I'm an accelerationist. And he wrote that accelerating society towards collapse and race war was the only way forward. Right? That was the view. The other call themselves a Christian eco fascist accelerationist. That's a lot to say. Claiming society could only be changed through violence, sabotage, and revolution. Those statements are important because they show the attack was not simply fueled by some generalized hatred. It was ideological, it was strategic, and the violence itself was the mechanism to bring them into this kind of future goal state that they think we should be in now. Now let's talk about why accelerationists are, like, especially dangerous compared to other extremist movements or other domestic terrorists. And it's historically, extremist organizations often want followers, recruits, political leverage, and even some want territorial control. The acceleration movement is completely different. They don't believe society should be saved at all. Right. They don't even want to play a part in it. They are often driven by nihilism as much as ideology. So that means less restraint, less interest in any sort of compromise, and less interest in persuasion. So this has a far greater fascination with, like, the spectacle of things, the collapse, or this mass casualty violence, because they want it recorded and shared and spread among other people who share the same ideology and want as we all know, the same end state now within this manifesto, besides the shooters just saying they're accelerationists, there's some key pieces that are super important. And one is the fact that then the manifesto praises these prior killers and, like, almost puts them in this category of saints. So the killers we're talking about in this case are Brenton Tarrant, obviously, from the title of this manifesto, Dylann Roof, Robert Bowers, John Earnest, and Elliot Rodger. Now, this reflects something that investigators and extremist researchers have. Have increasingly called like, the saints culture. If you've not seen this inside this, like, online extremist ecosystem, you'll see these attackers, and they'll look almost like they're in Greek mythology, like the gods or the creatures, right? And it's this interesting propaganda, but it's extremely visual. And then, as you can imagine, this gets shared among the followers. And they spend a lot of time studying the manifestos from these attackers. They analyze every single piece of the attack in quite astute detail. They share the details with each other. They talk about body counts from these attacks, almost like competitive or like you're doing rankings if it was like a college sports team, team. And then this imagery spreads and these propaganda posters, like, bring more people kind of into this movement. It's very interesting the way it's being done. So the attackers aren't just consuming, like, your standard extremist content. So it's not like they're just looking at how ISIS says, here's how to make bombs, or here's how to use a knife, or here's how to do a box truck attack. They're just trying to join this lineage and maybe one day, you know, be one of these saints, right? Or have their imagery shared and inspire others to do something. You know, it's a very interesting way to look at things. You know, one of the biggest mistakes people make. And luckily, it's gone away a lot because of the success ISIS has had online. But it's this fact that, oh, this modern radicalization doesn't really happen that well online. You need to have organized meetings and secret compounds. And that's just not how it works. Even these two shooters met online while radicalizing. So when we're talking about online, though, what does that mean? Does people just think, okay, well, where is this occurring on the Internet, there's obviously encrypted chats. There's this meme culture that goes around, and a lot of it does have this saints messaging in it. There's gore sites, right, where they show these active Shooter attacks, there's extremist forums, there's live stream ecosystems. That's a huge important piece of this. If anyone comes in cases where you work or where you worship or where your kids go to school and they're asking questions about if anything, there is live stream, right? That's a huge red flag. It's something we're constantly telling people. Another thing is there's kind of this algorithmic reinforcement loops. We just know that ourselves. If I'm looking up something online, I'll get 12 more of the same type of story they have now. Their algorithms based on where they're always seeing this content and it's reinforcing their thinking. It's also making them feel, oh, a lot more people think like me. There's a huge community of us out there and they get to belong to that large community. This situation is very difficult for intelligence agencies to counter effectively. First off, just the domestic terrorism fight is very political. The last administration was like, we're only going to focus on right wing terrorism. And then the new administration is like, we're only going to focus on left wing terrorism. But here we have a massive plot that luckily didn't turn out to be what it was supposed to be. But people died and this was Neo Nazism. So we're not going to ignore these Neo Nazis, but that falls under kind of the right wing terrorism. So we're already in a problem here where our current counterterrorism strategy doesn't even cover these two individuals. And that's a huge problem. We have to be honest about it, right? We need to be paying attention to both sides of the coin. Anyone attempting to cause danger to the American public should be targeted. They should have dollars going towards this, you know, and it should be something we work on. It should not go fly by night by some politicians whim, right? That's not going to keep anyone safe. Now another problem here, which is really interesting, is that these ideologies are a little decentralized, right? It's not like, oh, this is an Al Qaeda terrace and we can map up the entire string to write who their leader is, who the spiritual advisor is, etc. Here it's again decentralized. It's hybridized. So it has a bunch of different attack methodologies in it and it's constantly evolving. Let's just walk through some thinking of what this means. You'll have Neo Nazism and then it blends with insult ideology. We saw it in this case, this hatred towards women. Then there's this accelerationism and it blends with eco fascism. And one of the terrorists here in this case said part of their identity was that they're an eco fascist. Then we have conspiracy theories, and they merge with the nihilism. So this is really what we're seeing. This is a modern extremist manifesto that was laid up for us. And it looks so chaotic in the thinking because the ideology itself has become modular. And it almost took pieces from all these different movements and brought them together to advance accelerationism. And now when we're talking about fighting this, either counterterrorism professionals or law enforcement, there's another difficult reality, especially when it comes to this attack. Many of the warning signals were very apparent well before the attack occurred. We had obsession here with prior attackers. We had this manifesto writing. We had this apocalyptic rhetoric. We had the isolation. We had the fascination with collapse narratives. We had this planning around the live streaming. We had violent symbolism all over the place. We had, of course, one suspect's mother even contact and say, hey, I'm missing a firearm. I believe my child has this sort of suicidal ideation. We've also heard that one of the shooters was potentially in this psychiatric hold prior to the attack. And then also that the FBI might have been onto one of the shooters a year prior to the event. So this might not be even the first time one of these names came up. So this is a problem. There are breadcrumbs leading up to this event, and we have a problem where we're not seeing them. We can't deal with this after the fact. We have to be proactive in these cases. When we talk on acceleration as a whole, it thrives on amplification, polarization, and this idea surrounding societal fracture. The followers believe every act or every kind of chaotic event that they can kick off will bring a society closer to collapse. So that makes understanding this ideology more than just like an academic exercise. It's understanding this future landscape around this. And when you understand this thinking, you realize, wow, how much they could put in place and how many people they can harm to trying to bring us to this little bit of an insane end state. So when we talk about what happened at this mosque in San Diego, it's not simply just another mass shooting. It was an attempt to be a piece of propaganda designed to inspire future violence and other actors to do the exact same thing. And so we need to understand how this entire ecosystem works. I told you, these two methods online. So that means there's other people in their network, right? There are other people consuming now the content that they made the content that they put out. And this is really becoming kind of one of those defining counterterrorism challenges for the next decade, because we understand people who join al Qaeda, we understand people who join ISIS or Hamas. This accelerationist piece, yes, there are some great experts out there, but there's so few of them. And we really, like I pointed out already, don't even have a counterterrorism strategy that even addresses this. So we are behind the curve on it, and we have to get smart and quickly. Thanks for being here today on the watch floor.