The Distance Between Rhetoric and Violence in America
Homeland Security Recruitment Tweets
Sometimes there is no distance between intuition and fact. As soon as I heard the news, I suspected that the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego had something to do with the current political environment.
Accordingly, it was no surprise to hear that the two teenagers who shot and killed a security guard and two community members outside the mosque on May 18 met through online white supremacist sites.
It was no surprise to hear that the perpetrators, 17-year-old Cain Lee Clark and 18-year-old Caleb Liam Vazquez, recorded a live video of their actions and left behind a manifesto.
The world has changed.
Forty-two years ago, when James Huberty killed 21 people and injured 19 in McDonald’s in a San Ysidro McDonalds’, twenty miles away, he left no manifesto to tell the world why he did what he did.
Nearly all of Huberty’s victims’ names were Hispanic in origin.
Whether this mattered to Huberty is not known. But he must have been aware of the complexion of the community in which he lived. He had also lived for a brief time in Tijuana, a time marked by financial and personal strain.
You cannot not be aware of Tijuana in San Ysidro. The city rises from the hills directly to the south, visible from the grounds where the McDonald’s once stood. The border was close enough to see.
It is sad and ironic that the internet can connect you anywhere in the world while physical barriers are rising everywhere to separate the world’s peoples. In the US, the Trump administration is making use of $46.5 billion in border wall expenses to make a final push towards sealing off the border, sometimes with double rows of fencing, in culturally and environmentally sensitive areas of the American Southwest.
At the same time, roving bands of Border Patrol and ICE agents are pushing aside the Constitution to meet their arrest quotas and deposit the undocumented in human warehouses aka detention centers. Racist language from the Patriot Front in the Department of Homeland Security’s online recruitment tweets betrays the ethnic cleansing M.O. of this effort:
According to The Intercept, there are increasing concerns among local police agencies that such efforts on the part of the Trump administration will incite violence. Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that the Council on American‑Islamic Relations (CAIR) documented 8,683 civil‑rights complaints involving Muslims in 2025, the highest ever recorded.
The distance between rhetoric and violence is shorter than we imagine.
