Cain Clark and Caleb Vazquez dragged guns into a mosque to kill strangers. The two teenagers entered the space carrying firearms, while the cache of over thirty guns and a crossbow found at their residences confirmed their arming, a chilling pattern of radicalization detailed by the FBI. Amin Abdullah, the mosque’s security guard, stepped into the lobby to meet the shooters as they forced their way in, opening fire and dying in the line of duty to hold the door and keep the pair from reaching the children in the classrooms just steps away. Mansour Kaziha and Nadir Awad joined him in the parking lot.
They were seventeen and eighteen years old. They met in the digital basement of our culture. They did not invent the hate they brought to the mosque; they merely acted as the final, violent laborers for a machine of dehumanization that has been running in the background for years. When the lead FBI agent in San Diego, Mark Remily, tells us that these boys “didn’t discriminate on who they hated,” we should hear more than a note on their pathology. We should hear an indictment of the environment that nourished it. The writings authorities recovered from the teens’ residences named their hatred for Muslims, Jewish people, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, and the political left and right. They were children of a “Sons of Tarrant” identity, obsessed with the same lie that has haunted the Christchurch attacker and so many others: the paranoid fantasy that white people are being systemically eliminated. They wrote their hate into the screen, and in the screen they found their permission to kill.
When a child’s conscience is overwritten by a screen’s feed that teaches him to hate the neighbor, the sin is not only his. We who built the digital architecture that feeds these boys their poison bear the mark of the whitewashed tomb. We who trade in the click of outrage and the algorithm of contempt should know what your trade produces. Dorothy Day wrote that we have killed hundreds of thousands with our own hands when she looked at the mushroom clouds over Japan, and you look at the body count produced by your code and call it a day.
There is a terrible familiarity to the pattern: the online recruitment, the isolation, the stockpiling of weaponry, and the eventual, bloody arrival at the doorstep of our neighbor’s sanctuary. We are told these attacks are happening in a string, occurring as threats and hate crimes against Muslim and Jewish communities have surged since the war in the Middle East began. The geopolitical winds have certainly accelerated the flame, but the wood was already stacked. We have allowed the language of elimination to become a staple of our political life, treating the dignity of our neighbors as a negotiable commodity rather than a sacred floor.
King wrote from Birmingham that we will have to repent not merely for the hateful words of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people, and this silence is what feeds the terror. We have built an infrastructure of radicalization that is both privatized and ubiquitous. Two teenagers amassed an arsenal of thirty guns, ammunition, and a crossbow without our society—our schools, our neighbors, our own families—noticing until the shooting started. The children in those classrooms survived only because a man stood between them and the ruin that was being brought to their door.
The perpetrators are dead and cannot be held to account, and so the account falls to the living. The conduct you have cultivated is evil, and the only answer is the refusal to cultivate it further. Romero ordered the soldiers to stop the repression, but he also opened his arms to them as brothers. A humane community does not build walls or algorithms to keep the unknown out. It builds tables. It brings the stranger to the table and feeds him before the table is set.
We are the enemies this feed has told us we are, and the only way to disarm is to look at the stranger across the street and see the face of the God we claim to serve. We owe the memories of Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad a society that does not force its most vulnerable to bear the costs of our own refusal to name—and stop—the spread of this infection. Until we are willing to break the altar we keep building for our own children, we will continue to see these tragedies unfold, each one more predictable than the last, and each one a confession of our collective failure. Sweep the lobby. Call the parents of the dead boys. Pray they have not yet forgotten they were children once.