News/Commentary

Speculation about teen mosque gunmen comes from a heavy dose of mixed messages

May 20, 2026 | | Print Article

A top reporter on the right has alleged that the San Diego mosque shooters were a young transgender couple, but the evidence is limited.

On Monday, two shooters identified as “teenage gunmen” entered the Islamic Center of San Diego and opened fire, killing a security guard and two staff members before committing suicide.

The two “teens” have since been outed as 17-year-old Cain Clark and 18-year-old Caleb Velasquez, according to the New York Post.

Conservative journalist Nick Sortor has suggested that, based on how the two look in photos, they were a transgender couple:

In the tweet above, he accused local San Diego police of initially covering up the two’s identity to protect their alleged transgender status.

The only problem is that no other evidence has yet emerged to suggest or prove that Clark and Velasquez were transgender. If anything, evidence to the contrary has emerged, including how the two met.

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According to investigators who spoke with The Spokesman-Review, Clark and Velasquez were radicalized on the Internet, which is also where they reportedly first became friends before meeting up in the real world.

In addition, writings from both suspects were reviewed by the Associated Press, which found them to contain “hateful rhetoric toward Jewish people, Muslims and Islam, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, black people, women, and both the political left and right.”

What makes this shooting particularly confusing is what the AP reported at the time, which is that the shooters’ rhetoric targeted both the left and the right — meaning that, despite insistence from the left, this was NOT just some “right-wing” shooting.

Some have suggested they were anti-capitalist “Nazi Bolsheviks,” which would put them more to the left than the right.

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The evidence does fit the Nazi angle.

“A shotgun and gas can with an ‘SS’ sticker on the side were located at the scene where the gunmen’s bodies were discovered,” the Post notes. “The ‘SS’ sticker appears to represent the Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary organization led by Heinrich Himmler under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany.”

The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, analyzed Clark’s social media accounts and found photos of him “dressed in camouflage, a skull mask, before a Confederate flag, wearing emblems associated with Nazism ideology.”

There was also a racial element involved. One of the two — it’s not clear which one — left a suicide note “writing about racial pride,” a law enforcement source told the Times.

“They didn’t discriminate on who they hated,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Mark Remily said during a press briefing, adding that the manifesto left by the two “covered a wide aspect of races and religions.”

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However, people who’ve obtained and read their whole manifesto have claimed that the two were especially antagonistic toward Jews.

“As is with everything else Jews unsurprisingly have an overly massive amount of representation when it comes to control and influence of the media,” the two wrote. “This shows with mainstream News, Hollywood, social media, influencers and celebrities, TV advertising, books both fiction showing historical and current events and non fiction as entertainment.”

“This of course, is their main way of controlling the masses of the regular people, your everyday Joe if you will, because as we all know people today consume a lot of media so this game they play is within subliminal messages, repetition of their agenda, and controlling the narrative,” the pair added.

Vivek Saxena
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