Paid subscribers make this possible. Please consider upgrading your subscription to help us protect all churches. Facebook | X | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn | Threads | TikTok Who Needs to Read This With You Last week’s incident review of the San Diego mosque attack was for your security team. This is the companion piece, and it is for your pastor, your youth ministry leader, your children’s ministry director, and the parent who is wondering what their fourteen-year-old has been doing on his phone for the last six months. The two attackers left behind a document of roughly forty pages laying out exactly what they believed, who they followed, where they learned it, and what they thought they were accomplishing. That document is the most useful thing on the table right now, because it is the same playbook radicalizing other young men inside the same online networks at this very moment. If you can recognize the ideology, the symbols, and the language, you can spot it earlier in the children around you and intervene before this walks into someone else’s parking lot. I am going to lay this out plainly, including the actual words these networks use. Some of those words are slurs and some are coded language a normal adult would never recognize. You need to see them, because your youth leader is going to hear them coming out of a teenager in your congregation, and right now most adults in the church world do not know what they are listening to. What They Actually Believed These attackers were not random and they were not aimless. They had a stated belief system and they wrote it down across roughly forty pages. The label that fits what is on the page is white supremacist accelerationism, with a heavy incel layer running underneath it. White supremacist accelerationism holds that the existing political and social order is too far gone to reform, that white people are being deliberately replaced through immigration, and that the only path forward is to provoke societal collapse and a race war through acts of violence. The older attacker writes in the document that he is “an Accelerationist” who believes “accelerating towards the destruction of our current political system and towards an all-out race war for the purpose of a societal collapse is the only real way forward.” The younger writes that “the only solution to the current state of the world is to accelerate towards the complete and utter collapse of society” and that he wants to “burn this earth down and rebuild it into a new and better society.” Both name the same canon of books they want followers to read: Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto, James Mason’s Siege, William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf. That is the modern white supremacist terrorist reading list, and it is openly traded in their networks. The incel layer is the misogynist subculture they fused with the racial ideology. The older attacker identifies with online incel networks dating back to 2022, venerates Elliot Rodger and what he calls “the Incel saints,” and writes a long section directly attacking women. The younger attacker writes a similar section. This fusion of white supremacist accelerationism with the incel subculture is the same pattern that drove the Buffalo grocery store attack and the Allen, Texas mall attack. The recruitment is happening on platforms your kids are already using, and the document is open about that. The Saint Culture This is the single most important concept for a youth pastor or parent to understand, because it is the cultural marker that tells you a young person has crossed from edgy internet humor into actual radicalization. These networks elevate past mass killers to “sainthood.” They literally use the word. They build shrines to them, write hymns about them, post their photos as memes, and rank them by body count. The older attacker’s document includes a list of roughly thirty so-called saints. The younger attacker’s section lists about twenty more. Both authors place the Christchurch mosque shooter at the top, calling themselves “Sons of Tarrant.” If a child in your youth group ever says the word “saint” alongside the name of a mass killer, that is the warning sign. If you see the name “Brenton Tarrant,” “Patrick Crusius,” “Payton Gendron,” “John Earnest,” “Dylann Roof,” “Elliot Rodger,” “Robert Bowers,” “Anders Breivik,” “Stephan Balliet,” or “Brandon Russell” appearing on a teenager’s phone, social media, or notebooks in a reverential way, you are looking at active radicalization. These are not edgy jokes. Inside these networks they are religious figures. The “Sons of Tarrant” framing the San Diego attackers used is itself an attempt to launch a new recruitment brand. Their goal, stated openly in the document, was to convince other young men to follow them. The document is a recruitment instrument as much as it is an explanation, and that is why it is being mirrored across these networks now. Where They Live Online The radicalization ecosystem for the San Diego attack and most attacks like it sits inside two platforms: Discord and Telegram. Both have voice chat, video chat, encrypted servers, and the ability to live-stream to small private groups in real time. The image below is a screenshot from the San Diego live-stream itself. ***VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED**** [IMAGE 1]: Screenshot from the live-stream on Discord. The interface shown is Discord’s mobile voice and video channel screen. One participant has the camera on, showing what appears to be the interior of the attack vehicle. A second participant is listening with their camera off, identified by an anonymous handle and a hooded-figure avatar. The green border around the active speaker tile is Discord’s standard speaking indicator. This is what radicalization looks like in 2026. It is not a hooded man in a basement reading books. It is a teenager on his phone in his bedroom, on a Discord voice channel with eight or ten other young men who go by anonymous handles, listening to music and trading propaganda edits while one of them eventually decides to act and the rest watch it happen live. Discord is the daily-driver platform. Voice channels, video, screen share, small-group chat. The networks operate as private servers that are nearly impossible for an outsider to access, recruit through smaller public servers, and graduate promising members into the inner servers. The San Diego attackers were streaming the attack itself to a Discord channel of fellow believers when they were stopped. Telegram is the propaganda and reading library. Encrypted broadcast channels with thousands of subscribers, archives of every manifesto, edited videos of past attacks set to music, PDFs of every banned book, and step-by-step ideological training. Counter-terrorism researchers refer to the network of these channels as “Terrorgram.” The older attacker writes that he found his radical reading material on Telegram. There are several other platforms in the ecosystem your youth leader should at least know by name: 4chan and its successor boards (Sharty, Soyjak.party, 8kun, EndChan), where memes and propaganda are workshopped before being pushed to Telegram and Discord; Roblox and Steam group chats, where teenagers are first approached; and various less-known video-game-adjacent chat networks where children as young as twelve are pulled in by older operators. The 764 network specifically operates across many of these platforms. If a young person you know is suddenly spending six to ten hours a day on Discord, has multiple accounts under anonymous handles, refuses to let any adult see their server list, and has a Telegram app they did not have a year ago, that is the ecosystem. Not all of those kids are radicalizing. The ones who are, are in it. The Symbols You Will See These are the visual markers a youth leader, parent, or security team member needs to recognize on a phone case, a hoodie, a notebook, a school binder, or a Discord profile picture. They are not subtle once you know them, but they look like meaningless internet art if you do not. [IMAGE 2]: The Sons of Tarrant cover from the San Diego manifesto, showing the Black Sun (Sonnenrad) symbol with dog tags featuring the Kolovrat at center. The Black Sun, also called the Sonnenrad. Twelve lightning-bolt-shaped rays arranged in a circle around a center. Originally an SS occult symbol installed in the floor at Wewelsburg Castle by Heinrich Himmler. It is now the single most-used white supremacist symbol on earth and was central to the Christchurch attacker’s iconography. The San Diego attackers used it as the centerpiece of both their group logo and their second manifesto cover. If you see this symbol anywhere, it is not a coincidence and it is not aesthetic. It means what it means. The Kolovrat. An eight-armed Slavic sun wheel that looks like four or eight swastikas linked in a circle. Used inside the dog-tag center of the Sons of Tarrant logo. Sometimes claimed as a “pre-Christian heritage” symbol but in modern use it is a coded white supremacist mark. The swastika, often hidden. Direct swastikas are common in these networks, but they also get embedded into other imagery to dodge platform moderation. In the San Diego manifesto, swastikas are placed inside the eye sockets of a skull mask on one of the cover images. Look for it in skull eyes, in geometric patterns, inside other symbols. The skull mask and Atomwaffen aesthetic. Balaclavas, skull-printed face coverings, all-black tactical kit, propaganda imagery built around faceless armed figures. This look comes from the Atomwaffen Division and its successor groups. It is the visual language of accelerationist terrorism. If a teenager is suddenly drawn to this aesthetic in his profile pictures, his clothing, or his art, that is a flag. [IMAGE 3]: The “MisanthropistCEL” manifesto cover, s