The Trifecta
Or: What happens when everything fails at once
Let’s start with the “news of the weekend,” because apparently we’re all supposed to feel good about it. Trump has won the war with Iran — or so he tells us. Never mind that Iranian state TV called his announcement a “humiliating retreat,” or that his own aides were privately floating a resumption of major combat operations as recently as two weeks ago. We started a war, wasted billions of dollars, depleted munitions we could have sent to Ukraine, killed God knows how many people, and the net result is that the regime we were trying to kneecap comes out ahead. The hawks — Graham, Cruz, the whole chest-beating chorus — aren’t spinning it. They’re pissed. They wanted blood and got a photo op.
And lest we forget, there’s Todd Blanche — the desperate ass clown — trying to sell the January 6 slush fund to Congress to compensate those poor, mistreated tourists, almost 500 of whom have been convicted of a variety of offenses since their pardons. Even many Republicans have grown a spine and are calling bullshit on that one.
The Democrats, who couldn’t find their footing in a flat parking lot, have been handed a gift and will probably drop it. But Trump is doing the heavy lifting for them.
(And Don — hey, man. I know you’re out there reading this. Surely, even you can see what a colossal clusterfuck this is?)
Now let’s talk about what happened in San Diego last Monday, because it deserves every bit of your attention — and it connects directly to something I wrote in March that I wish had already become ancient history.
Three men are dead. A security guard at the Islamic Center of San Diego was the first to fall, and two others — Mansour Kaziha and Nadir Awad — were drawn out of hiding and killed in the parking lot. Roughly 140 children were inside that mosque, seconds away from something I don’t want to put into words. The killers were Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17. They livestreamed it. They wore SS insignia, etched “Race War” into one of their handguns, and left behind a 75-page manifesto that opened with an antisemitic diatribe and cited the Great Replacement theory — the same sewage that has been normalized, amplified, and monetized by the platforms I’ve spent years trying to hold accountable. They modeled themselves after the Christchurch shooter and called him a hero.
And here’s the part that should make every parent, every lawmaker, and every platform executive lose sleep: we knew.
In January 2025, Chula Vista police filed an emergency gun violence protective order against the Vazquez household after court records described Caleb as having been observed idolizing Nazis and mass shooters. Law enforcement moved to confiscate weapons from the home of his father, Marco Vazquez. The FBI flagged Caleb in an eGuardian alert that same year. The system registered the threat, printed it out, filed it away, and apparently waited.
In my essay “Accessories to Murder,” I wrote about Colin Gray — the father of the Apalachee High School shooter — who became the first parent charged not with involuntary manslaughter, like the Crumbleys, but with murder. The Crumbleys set the precedent: you should have known. The Gray indictment went further: you chose this. Colin Gray bought his son the gun, knew what his son was, and four people died at Apalachee High School because of it. Now look at what Marco Vazquez chose. He kept a house full of guns and watched his son’s radicalization unfold close enough to trigger a protective order — and three men are dead on a Monday morning in San Diego. Marco Vazquez needs to go to prison for a long time.
Shitty parenting. Online radicalization. A house full of guns. The trifecta.
Which brings me to something I learned this week that I can’t shake.
In preparation for a conversation with attorney Laura Marquez-Garret at the Social Media Victims Law Center, I asked my colleague Eric to go looking for something I’ve spent years trying to eradicate: videos of Alison’s murder still circulating on the major platforms. What he found was remarkable on one count and infuriating on another. YouTube was clean — every one of them gone. I don’t know whether Google finally grew a conscience or whether our FTC complaints helped provide the nudge. Maybe both, maybe neither, maybe something else entirely. I’ll take the result and keep asking the question.
