What the San Diego Mosque Shooters Wrote About Women Should Alarm Us All
There is a line in the document the San Diego mosque shooters left behind that nobody quite knows what to do with. After listing Jewish people as the No. 1 enemy, one of the teenagers wrote that women came in at No. 2. Above Muslims. Above Black Americans. Above the very congregation he was about to attack.
That detail, surfaced in NPR’s May 27 reporting on the 75-page manifesto, deserves a long pause. Two teenagers walked into the Islamic Center of San Diego on May 18 while roughly 100 children were inside. Three men, Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha and Nadir Awad, threw themselves at the gunmen so the kids could live. And tucked into the killers’ written justification was a section calling women “the No. 1 enemy” after Jews, using a slur lifted straight out of incel forums that translates roughly to “female humanoid organism.”
We have been told for years that mass political violence is about race, or religion, or immigration. It is all of that. But according to Alex DiBranco of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, who spoke to NPR, misogyny now functions inside the white nationalist movement the same way antisemitism does. It is the connective tissue. The conspiracy theory that glues everything else together. Women, in this worldview, are the secret architects of cultural collapse, the reason the world will not give certain men the dominance they believe they are owed.
If that sounds fringe, consider the pattern. Heidi Beirich, cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told NPR that this strain of woman hatred “did not exist in white supremacist circles, say, 10, 15 years ago.” Now, she says, it has “completely infected” that world. The 2011 Norway killer, who murdered 77 people according to NPR’s reporting, blamed feminism for what he called the Muslim invasion of Europe. The Christchurch shooter, whom the San Diego teens called themselves “Sons of” in their writings, ran on the same fuel. Buffalo. El Paso. Colorado Springs. Jacksonville. Different targets, same operating system.
Now the part that should make us uncomfortable. The 2025 United States Counterterrorism Strategy, released by the White House this month, names three top terrorist threats: narcoterrorists, Islamist terrorists and violent left wing extremists. The phrases “far right,” “white supremacist” and “neo Nazi” do not appear in it, according to Colin Clarke of the Soufan Center, who reviewed the document for NPR. Joe Biden’s name shows up seven times. Lebanese Hezbollah, a proxy of a country we are currently at war with, appears twice.
Think about what that means. Two American teenagers radicalized online, dressed in Christchurch cosplay, livestreamed killing three men inside a house of worship in front of an audience of children. And the federal document meant to guide how we spend resources to protect ourselves does not list the ideology that drove them as a threat at all.
We do not get safer by pretending the people who actually kill us are not the people who actually kill us. According to the ADL’s analysis of the San Diego manifestos, the two shooters used a racist slur for Black Americans at least 32 times between them. That document is sitting in plain view. The FBI can read it. The White House can read it. The question is whether anyone with the power to move resources is willing to act on what it says.
Call your representatives. Ask them, on record, why violent far right extremism was scrubbed from the national threat list. Ask what they plan to do before the next mosque, the next synagogue, the next grocery store, the next gay bar. The pattern is not hiding. We just have to make someone look. Go beyond the headlines…
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