On the morning of Monday, May 18, two teenage boys, Caleb Vazquez and Cain Clark, walked into the Islamic Center of San Diego and killed three people. Then they killed themselves. They were teenagers. They had apparently never met in person before. They found each other online.

Before they went in, they livestreamed it. Because that's how this works now.

Investigators found a 75-page document the two appear to have written together. Neo-Nazi iconography. Incel rage. Accelerationist ideology: the white supremacist belief that mass violence is a tool for collapsing society faster, toward some imagined racial reckoning. Hatred aimed at Muslims, Jewish people, Black people, Latino people, women, the LGBTQ community. According to the NBC News report on the attack, the FBI special agent in charge noted that they essentially didn't discriminate on who they hated. They hated everyone who wasn't them.

I want to be precise about this, because precision matters. These were not monsters who appeared from a void. They were boys radicalized incrementally, online, over years, by an ecosystem that gave them purpose, community, and a framework for their rage. That's not an excuse. It's a diagnosis. And if you don't understand the diagnosis, you can't treat the disease.

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One of the sharpest things I've read about this kind of violence comes from a national security researcher quoted in the NBC piece. The framing goes like this: each attack functions as content. The kill count is a press release. The manifesto and recording are merchandise that keeps circulating after the perpetrators are dead. The next attacker finds it, absorbs it, adds his own signature, and produces the next entry. There's no organization holding this together. It's held together by the recurrent production and circulation of violent content as community currency.

Read that again. This is a franchise. The Christchurch shooter built the template in 2019. He livestreamed it. He wrote a manifesto. The video spread across platforms. It got edited, remixed, and posted again. And two kids who were ten and twelve years old when Christchurch happened grew up in a world where that attack was content they could consume, reference, and aspire to.

Domestic extremism researcher Cynthia Miller-Idriss described the suspects' writings as a messy combination of ideological impulses, the kind of thing produced by a young man who spends far too much time online incubating in hateful spaces, then follows something like a choose-your-own-adventure path toward assembling a rationale for violence. It's not a coherent ideology. It's a collage of grievances given shape by an ecosystem that rewards escalation.

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Here's what I know about the profile, because I've read enough about this to recognize it: isolated, entitled, and angry. Not poor. Not stupid. Not incapable. Just completely unmoored from any real-world accountability structure, fed a diet of ideological validation by platforms that profit from engagement, and given a community (a sick one, but a community nonetheless) that told them their anger was righteous and their isolation was someone else's fault.

That's the fuel. Isolation plus entitlement plus a community of resentment. What the online extremist ecosystem provides that the real world wasn't providing is a sense of brotherhood, of shared purpose, of being part of something bigger than yourself. Those are legitimate human needs. The pipeline hijacks them.

So what do we actually do about it? Not as a government. As men.

You talk to them. Not at them. You don't lead with a lecture about white supremacy. You lead with presence. You show up. You ask what's going on. You don't pretend the anger isn't real. It usually is rooted in something real, even if the conclusion being drawn from it is poison. You acknowledge the legitimate grievance and then you redirect it toward something that doesn't end in a mosque.

If you know a young man who is isolated and spending his entire life online, in communities you don't recognize and can't name, that is the emergency. Not when the manifesto appears. Now. The intervention is not a pamphlet. It's an invitation to do something real. Come lift. Come to the range. Come to the cookout. Get him off the screen and into a room with actual human beings who will both accept him and call him on his bullshit, because that combination (acceptance and honest accountability) is the thing the pipeline fakes and the real world can actually provide.

The self-improvement piece matters here too, and it has to come with humility. Part of what the pipeline sells is a shortcut to significance: you're a soldier in a race war, therefore you matter. The counter to that is not telling someone they don't matter. It's pointing them toward things that are genuinely hard and genuinely worth doing. Learning a skill. Getting in shape. Being useful to someone. Serving something larger than yourself. These things provide the same feeling of significance the pipeline is selling, but they require you to actually earn it. And earning things requires humility. Knowing you're not there yet. Staying coachable. Taking correction without collapsing.

That's the work. It's slow. It doesn't scale the way a viral manifesto does. But it's the only thing that actually works.

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We Can't Reach All of Them. We Can Reach Some.

I'm not going to pretend that brotherhood and barbecue are going to deradicalize every lost kid on the internet. Some of them are too far gone. Some of them will build toward something terrible regardless of who tries to reach them.

But some of them are still reachable. Some of them are in the early stages: angry, isolated, starting to find their way into communities that are going to make it worse. Those are the ones worth fighting for.

You don't fight for them with a think piece. You fight for them with your time. Show up. Be solid. Be the guy in the room who's genuinely strong, not performing it, not using it to dominate, just steady enough that people can lean on you without worrying you'll buckle. Be someone worth emulating.