Three men were shot dead at the largest mosque in San Diego. The suspects had a gas can with an SS lightning bolt symbol painted on it. They had "hate speech" carved into one of their guns. A suicide note about "racial pride." And this is exactly where the rhetoric of the last decade has been pointing.
The Islamic Center of San Diego was attacked yesterday during midday prayer. Two teenage shooters, ages 17 and 18, ambushed worshippers outside the mosque.
Three men were killed.
One of them, Amin Abdullah, was a security guard and a father of eight who reportedly placed himself between the shooters and the worshippers inside. Police are calling him a hero. He saved lives by losing his own.
Investigators found anti-Islamic writings in the BMW where the two teenagers later died by suicide. They found a gas can with an "SS" sticker, stylized as the lightning bolts of Heinrich Himmler's paramilitary SS. They found "hate speech" written directly on one of the firearms. The suicide note reportedly references racial pride.
None of this is ambiguous. None of this requires a "we may never know the motive" disclaimer.
CAIR's California director said it directly:
"Numerous politicians have spent the past year claiming that all 'mainstream Muslims' should be destroyed, that American mosques and elementary schools should be shut down, and that American Muslims should be expelled from our nation."
That is a direct summarization of the rhetoric coming from Trump, his administration, MAGA pundits, and a substantial portion of the American conservative movement, every single day, for years.
Trump campaigned on a Muslim ban. His administration has called Islam fundamentally incompatible with America. Right-wing media spent the entire Mamdani election cycle calling a Muslim mayoral candidate a terrorist on a loop.
Christian Nationalists are openly arguing that America is and must be a Christian nation, with non-Christians as second-class citizens.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration is being repurposed as an evangelical revival. Stephen Miller and his allies have built their political identity around stripping rights from immigrants, Muslims, and brown Americans.
Hate is taught. CAIR said it. The imam said it. Every faith leader who has ever buried a worshipper killed in their own house of God has said it.
Two American teenagers do not wake up one morning and decide independently to murder Muslims at prayer with an SS-branded gas can in their car. They are taught. They are radicalized. They are handed a worldview by the adults around them, by the politicians on their screens, by the algorithms that feed them.
Three men are dead. Eight children no longer have a father. The blood is on the trigger fingers of two teenagers. The fingerprints are on every politician and pundit who built the road they walked down.
world.
