"Sons of Tarrant" - The San Diego Shooting, Pt. 1
Analysing their manifestos, and discussing the new generation of Christchurch copycats
On the 18th of May last month, teenagers Cain Clark (17) and Caleb Vasquez (18) targeted the Islamic Center of San Diego in a mass shooting. With a helmet-mounted GoPro streaming to a friend on Discord, they shot and killed 3 people at the center before fleeing, with Clark later turning the gun on Vasquez and then himself. A screen recording of the livestream, their manifestos, and their online footprint blew up online, as now often happens in the wake of accelerationist attacks.
I wouldn’t usually cover American shootings like this, but it’s clear that the duo took particularly heavy inspiration from the Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant, even naming themselves the “Sons of Tarrant”. It is also illustrative of the new generation which grew up in the shadow of Christchurch and now are taking up Tarrant’s call to arms, and the communities these copycats are emerging from.
First, the manifestos, as Clark and Vasquez wrote individual ones which were combined into one document. When analysing manifestos left after these attacks, it’s important to keep in mind that they are first and foremost propaganda documents, primarily intended for the in-group, and are constructed to give off the author’s desired appearance. They are written with self-mythologisation and justification in mind, and cannot be taken as (wholly) truthful documents. The intro page for both is titled “THE NEW CRUSADE”, set above a sonnenrad (aka Black Sun) behind dogtags with fascist symbols with “SONS OF TARRANT” below, and “A SONS OF TARRANT DEBUT MANIFESTO” written in the footer.
Vasquez’s manifesto titled is “MisanthropistCEL”, with an image of a figure with swastikas for eyes and tactical gear, an assault rifle, and a helmet-mounted GoPro. While tactical gear was common in previous mass shootings, Tarrant’s outfit during the Christchurch massacre has been mythologised inside accelerationist networks and is often replicated by copycats (done so in this case by Vasquez and Clark during their attack).
Vasquez throughout the document is in direct conversation with Tarrant, his massacre, and his manifesto. It opens with a quote from Tarrant’s manifesto about deciding to “take action”, “to commit to violence”, and “to take the fight to the invaders myself”. He then includes a quote from Dylann Roof’s manifesto, and a portion of Payton Gendron’s manifesto, who livestreamed through Twitch his Tarrant-inspired attack targeting African Americans in a Buffalo supermarket in 2021, part of which reads:
“... I then found other fighters, like Patrick Crucius, Anders Breivek [sic], Dylann Roof, and John Earnest. These men fought for me and had the same goals I did. It was there I asked myself: Why don’t I do something? Finally I felt awakened. It was there I started to think about committing to an attack. To commit to violence. I would follow Tarrant’s lead and the attacks of so many others like him. ...”
Crucius was the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooter targeting Hispanic people, another terrorist inspired by Christchurch. Breivik was behind the 2011 Norway attacks, someone Tarrant called his “only … true inspiration”. John Earnest was one of the first Christchurch copycats, who days after the Christchurch massacre graffitied and attempted to burn down a California mosque, before shooting and killing multiple people at a nearby synagogue a few months later. That mosque was 30 minutes away from the Islamic centre Clark and Vasquez targeted.
Like other recent manifestos (especially from younger shooters), it is poorly written, rambling, and ideologically muddled. Vasquez first blames the Jews as the “Universal Enemy”, then rants about women, repeating many common incel points and complaining about how hard being short is. He then says he doesn’t “hate Muslims, at least not really”, before saying that Islam is Christianity’s enemy and that Muslims are invading America.
He repeats common white supremacist talking points about African Americans, and rails against immigration for destroying the American economy and culture. He rants against the left for not going through with their long-delayed revolution, the right for not being extreme enough, and “centrists/apoliticals” for being “slave[s] to your bread and circuses”.
The above section reads as somewhat muddled and contradictory, partly because like in other recent manifestos, it is a hodgepodge of personal grievances combined with regurgitated memes and talking points, cobbled together as justification for committing senseless violence. Some sections just read “[UNFINISHED]”. Vasquez instead seems to be much more interested in the violence itself. In a section titled “Goals and Objectives of the Crusade”, he writes:
What are you even hoping to achieve in all this? I’m so glad you asked. Before Tarrant there were a decent amount of people that fought in our interests but they were few and far in between, after Tarrant though is a much different story in the same year that Brenton Tarrant had done his attack on full display to the world many other Saints came out of the woodwork in a relatively short time frame such as John Earnest, Patrick Crusius, Phillip Manhaus, and Stephan Balliet.
The names mentioned in the last sentence are all other Tarrant copycats, with “Saints” referring to a practice in accelerationist circles of giving “sainthood” to shooters for their attacks. Vasquez then says that accelerationist attacks will eventually unleash cyclical violence, and implores the reader to make their attack as memetically impactful as possible, including live-streaming and making edits of shootings. He also recommends reading white nationalist texts, recommending Tarrant’s manifesto The Great Replacement above all else.
There are many good books and writings to further your knowledge of the movement, ideology, and problems our race faces today. Of these I recommend most The Great Replacement by Brenton Tarrant, in our day and age it is the most important and imperative thing to read. Other manifestos by the other Saints are also extremely important such as with Gendron and Earnest for their additional information of our causes but then still, if there was one singular thing to read it would be The Great Replacement.
He then recommends other influential accelerationist texts like The Turner Diaries, a thinly veiled instruction manual depicting a fictionalised white nationalist revolution in the United States, and Siege, a collection of writings by American accelerationist neo-Nazi James Mason, alongside Mein Kampf, the Henry Ford-funded anti-Semitic pamphlet The International Jew, and the Unabomber Manifesto.
Vasquez then describes the “Plan of Action”, giving vague details of their attack and including a list of desired outcomes. He lists dying as “the most important thing to me, I would’ve ended myself regardless but thought to at least do something to help my race instead of just selfishly wasting my life”. Another commonality of these recent attacks is suicidal thoughts in the perpetrator progressing into the desire to ‘take others with them’.
He also requests for people to “spread our message”, saying he’ll “post the links to all of our writings and of course the stream links to both our GoPro POVs” on various chan sites, another tactic pulled from Christchurch. However, we’ll discuss the livestream recording and the story behind it in the next article. Vasquez then explains the “Sons of Tarrant” label coined by Clark and Vasquez for this attack, asking others to use it to show Tarrant’s influence.
Dogwhistles and groups come and go constantly so there’s no telling what will stick and what will die out without gaining much traction, and so this is our attempt at making something like that and we just thought it sounded and looked cool. Who are or could be considered “Sons of Tarrant”, well we are, all previous disciples of Tarrant and others who were inspired by him, and maybe one day, you too. The goal of SOT is that it would create a sense of belonging and union to those who end up on the path of martyrdom similar to Terrorgrams’s “Sainthood”, you’re not just a lone wolf attacker, you’re one of many joining the fight for our race.
While there are many venerations of Tarrant throughout the manifesto, it’s particularly notable that Clark and Vasquez go as far to literally brand themselves as children of Tarrant, seeing him as the definitive start point of the form of violence they would emulate. Following a 400 word rant about the fanbase of Dutch YouTube animation series Onezellig (a show both Vasquez and Clark were big fans of), Vasquez lists his “Heroes and Inspirations”. He lists multiple fascists, white supremacists, school shooters, and others, but top of the list is Tarrant:
Obviously both of our biggest inspiration. Saint Tarrant revolutionized and brought forth a new age of White Terror bringing us many more Saints. We are proud and honored to be the next in the now long chain of his disciples and we hope to make him proud and honor his legacy. To me as I see it he’s the greatest Saint of them all and has done the most, combining his creation of the live-streamed attack, his high score, how iconic his gear and weapons were with the writing on them, his amazing manifesto, him propelling Eco Fascism and Accelerationism into the mainstream, how memeable his event was, and with everything else there’s no doubt or competition to this when you lay out all the facts he truly is the best. Hail Brenton Harrison Tarrant our hero, a true revolutionary.
Clark’s manifesto is similar so I won’t cover it in depth. His manifesto is titled “Death To The World”, set above a Black Sun emblem with a nuclear symbol in the centre, a likely reference to now-defunct far-right accelerationist group Atomwaffen Division.
Clark’s manifesto is formatted and structured very similarly to Tarrant’s, using a Times New Roman-style font with similar section headings. The first half covers politics, similar to Vasquez’s mix of white supremacy, nihilistic accelerationism, and incel talking points. When recommending readings, Tarrant’s manifesto “The Great Placement” is also top of the list. Clark then includes a “Possible questions about me” section, with large portions either copied or rewritten from Tarrant’s “Answering possible questions” section. Clark writes in response to “Who are you” that “I am the average white man, wanting to do the right thing.” Tarrant to the same question wrote “... I am just a regular White man, from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people.”
Among the other largely repeated answers like “Were/are you ‘right wing’” or “’left wing’”, or “Are you a part of any political groups”, there is an interesting change. In response to “Why did you carry out the attack?”, Tarrant gives a long nearly 2-page answer describing his symbolic and material goals with the massacre, and when responding to “What do you want?” directly after, he writes David Lane’s 14 Words phrase (”We must secure the existence of our people, and a future for white children.”) Clark instead uses the 14 Words to answer “Why did you do this”, and in response to “What do you want” he writes “I want to burn this earth down and rebuild it into a new and better society.”
When answering “Were you inspired by anything/anyone”, he lists Brenton Tarrant second, followed by a number of far-right terrorists and movement figures. He reserves first place for “Ashley Graves”, the sister character from a video game about sibling incest popular in edgy online spaces.
Back in March, I wrote about the long shadow of the Christchurch massacre 7 years on, and how the attack laid out a formula that could be emulated by copycats seeking infamy.
Tarrant took Breivik’s formula and updated it to be as memetically impactful as possible... Instead of a rambling 1500 page manifesto, Tarrant’s was only 74. It combined red herrings that doubled as media headlines... Throughout the manifesto were very explicit calls for others to follow in his footsteps, with the second half being various justifications for committing far-right terror attacks.
The use of memetics extended to the aesthetics of the shooting, including painting various slogans & dog whistles onto his guns and donning black tactical gear, starting his stream by saying “remember lads, subscribe to Pewdiepie”, and playing far-right meme songs like Serbia Strong.
It was honestly somewhat surreal to read Vasquez’s manifesto the day of the San Diego attack, and see what I had essentially written only two months before inside the manifesto of another Christchurch-inspired shooter:
To me as I see it [Tarrant is] the greatest Saint of them all and has done the most, combining his creation of the live-streamed attack, his high score, how iconic his gear and weapons were with the writing on them, his amazing manifesto, him propelling Eco Fascism and Accelerationism into the mainstream, how memeable his event was...
The 2019 Christchurch massacre was a huge escalation in the form and tenor of far-right terrorism, notable for how much the attack was designed for an online audience. Previous perpetrators, like Breivik, Bowers, and Roof had been radicalised online, but not in the newer strains of the far-right that had become prolific by the late 2010s.
In going from a long-time observer of online far-right culture to a perpetrator, Tarrant was the first far-right terrorist to explicitly lean into the detached and ironic mindset that had developed in these circles around acts of mass violence. Copycats quickly picked up his methods and aesthetics, and Christchurch became Ground Zero for this new wave of online-inspired accelerationist violence. It says a lot that Clark and Vasquez literally described themselves as the “Sons of Tarrant”.
However, I would argue that Vasquez and Clark come from a new and somewhat different generation of Christchurch copycats. The pair didn’t know each other until meeting online through the “True Crime Community” (TCC), a loose network of people and online spaces dedicated to true crime. The pair were seemingly deep in the more extreme subsects, ones often dedicated to celebrating and venerating violence above all else, especially mass violence. I don’t want to imply that these people are not sincere in their white supremacist or fascist beliefs, but they seem much more preoccupied with the violence first and foremost.
The TCC in recent years has been linked to dozens of attacks and foiled attacks across multiple continents, with the San Diego shooting now joining that list. The TCC, its obsession with Christchurch and its copycats, the terror attacks it is now churning out, and its influence on Clark and Vasquez, among other topics, will be covered in Part 2. We’ll also discuss who exactly they livestreamed their attack to, and whether they might have been egged on to do it.