The Ideology Is Always Late: San Diego and the Developmental Roots of Violence

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On May 18, 2026, Caleb Vazquez and Cain Clark walked into the Islamic Center of San Diego and murdered three men. The victims were Muslim. The shooters were not jihadis. They were, by their own family’s account, young men radicalized by neo-Nazi and mass shooter imagery online, one of them on the autism spectrum, both of them lost.

And yet the psychology was familiar to me.

In 2008, I published a paper called Jihaditism? Parallels between Autism and Terrorism in the journal Mentalities/Mentalités along with my colleague Norman Simms z”l. We argued that jihadi terrorism manifests behavioral and psychological patterns that parallel autistic states — specifically the failure to achieve a satisfying, sustaining, meaningful human connection, and the resulting collapse of the capacity to recognize the other as a human being. We were writing about jihadi terrorism. But the developmental argument we were making was never ideologically specific. It couldn’t be. Because the ideology is always late.

The ideology is always late

This is the point that political analysis, counter-terrorism strategy, and media coverage consistently miss. By the time a young man is watching neo-Nazi content online, by the time he is rehearsing mass shooter fantasies, by the time he walks into a mosque with a gun — the ideology is already downstream. It is the packaging. It is, as I have written elsewhere, the address the hatred finds. But the hatred itself was formed much earlier, in a place that has no words yet, no politics, no religion, no target.

The first three years of life are pre-symbolic. These are the “unseen years.” They precede language, precede narrative, precede the capacity for conscious ideology. What is laid down in those years is not a belief system. It is a template for processing the other — whether the other is safe or threatening, whether difference can be tolerated or must be annihilated. When that template is formed under conditions of disrupted attachment, maternal unavailability, chronic mis-attunement, or early trauma, the result is a self that cannot fully recognize the humanity of the other. The other becomes an object. A screen for projection. A threat to be eliminated.

No ideology is required for that. The ideology comes later, and it comes as a relief — because it gives structure, certainty, brotherhood, and an enemy to the unbearable inner chaos that was already there.

The Vazquez family understood this

What was striking about the Vazquez family’s statement after the shooting was how clearly, and how painfully, they named the developmental and relational dimensions of what happened. Their son was on the autism spectrum. He struggled to accept parts of his own identity. He was isolated. He found online spaces that normalized hatred and gave his isolation an address. They warned against the danger of those spaces — not because the content caused the violence, but because it organized and directed a vulnerability that already existed.

This is precisely the dynamic I described in 2008, and that I have continued to develop across six books on the psychology of the jihadi. The content of the ideology — whether jihadi extremism, white nationalism, or any other totalizing system — is secondary. What is primary is the pre-verbal developmental arrest, the self that never fully separated from the early relational matrix involving the mother and cannot tolerate the existence of the other who has.

There is another detail in this case that deserves attention. The Vazquez family owned 26 guns. They had voluntarily moved them to a storage facility before the shooting because of their own concerns about their son. This is, in its way, a tragic admission — that families who arm themselves heavily often do so in the same households where they already sense, however dimly, that something is dangerously wrong. Tragically, this has frequently been the case. The gun is the cultural solution offered to the very anxiety that the gun itself compounds. It is worth asking how many mass shootings have unfolded in homes where the arsenal and the alarm were present simultaneously, and where no bridge existed between the private knowledge of a family and the public systems that might have intervened.

The other as boundary object

In my work I have argued that the target group — whether Jews, Muslims, infidels, or any other designated enemy — functions as what I call a boundary object for the undifferentiated self. It is not chosen for what it is. It is chosen for what it exposes: the developmental achievements — individuation, autonomy, the capacity for genuine connection across difference — that the hater has been denied and cannot bear to witness.

In the jihadi case, the Jew is often that object. In the San Diego case, it was the Muslim. The reversal is striking and worth sitting with.

Why does the object change?

Why does the object change? Because the object was never really chosen. It was assigned — by the cultural surrounding, by the online ecosystem, by whoever got to the isolated, undifferentiated self first with a narrative that named the enemy and promised belonging. The pre-verbal developmental arrest does not arrive with an ideological address pre-attached. It arrives as raw, unorganized rage and longing — a self that cannot bear its own boundarylessness and needs an outside to hate in order to feel cohesive inside. What fills that need is largely a matter of availability and exposure. The jihadi finds the mosque that radicalizes him. The white nationalist finds the forum that recruits him. The autism spectrum young man in San Diego found neo-Nazi content and mass shooter glorification in the online spaces he was already inhabiting in his isolation. The developmental vulnerability is the constant. The ideology that captures it is the variable. This is why the same psychological profile can produce a jihadi in one context and an anti-Muslim shooter in another. The flag is interchangeable. What precedes it is not.

But the underlying structure is the same. The object changes. The roots do not.

What this means

It means that counter-terrorism and counter-extremism strategies that focus primarily on ideology — on deradicalization programs, on counter-narratives, on monitoring online content — are necessary but insufficient. They address the conscious level of a phenomenon whose roots are pre-conscious and pre-verbal. You cannot argue someone out of something that was never argued into them.

What can reach the pre-verbal developmental arrest — slowly, in the right relational conditions — is the experience of being genuinely recognized as a subject by another who remains distinct. This is what secure attachment provides in infancy, and it is precisely what was missing. By the time these young men are radicalizing online, that window has long since closed. It is what no online platform, no ideology, and no act of violence can ever provide, though all of them promise it.

Three men are dead in San Diego. Their names were Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad. They were not symbols. They were subjects. The tragedy is that the young men who killed them had lost, somewhere in the unseen years, the capacity to know the difference.