After the deadly shooting at a San Diego mosque, National Public Radio’s “extremism correspondent” Odette Yousef was back on her beat with a new angle against the sole class that she actually considers extremists: The “far right.” She examined the teenager killers’ “manifesto” and found a new victim class: “For far-right extremists, the rise of a new enemy: Women.”
Evidence tied to last week's deadly attack on a California mosque illustrates a violent ideology and playbook that is all too familiar to counterterrorism and extremism experts. A 75-page typewritten document, attributed to the teenage suspects, and a livestreamed video showing the attack show extensive grounding in far-right, neo-Nazi thinking.
Yousef, whose beat reporting is notorious for only finding extremism on the right while denying or ignoring its clear presence among left-wing killers, believed she found a new angle.
But one facet of the ideology behind this attack has, so far, been left out of much mainstream coverage.
"He just flat out says he hates women and that they're the devil and they're destroying everything. And this is an important thing, because that kind of misogyny did not exist in white supremacist circles, say, 10, 15 years ago," said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Beirich was referring to the first part of the written document, authored by one of the two suspects.
Yousef’s source grasped around for examples “of misogynistic conspiracism," including the old "Gamergate" controversy.
Yousef herself glided easily from the mosque shooting to attacks on “inclusive agenda,” including the current rage of alphabet identity:
This panic over the "feminization" of society also plays a role in the extreme hostility toward LGBTQ+ people, and to inclusive agendas, said DiBranco.
"What's basically at stake at the core is they feel like they had a system in which cisgender white men were supreme and had unshaken dominance. And now these other forces, what they call 'cultural degeneracy,' are undermining that control that they felt … they had and that they felt … they had a right to," she said.
While the primacy of anti-women, or anti-feminist, conspiracism stands out to extremism experts, the attack at the mosque in San Diego has otherwise followed a predictable pattern. In fact, even as some conservative voices on social media falsely claimed that it was "staged," evidence so far suggests that the attack is one of the most ideologically clear-cut to have taken place in recent years.
A shame Yousef can find no examples of "ideologically clear-cut" left-wing terror. Has she run a story fretting over the many Democratic voters who claim the multiple attempts on President Trump’s life, including the last one that ended the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, were staged? NPR archives suggest no.
Under the subhead “Turning a blind eye to far-right violence,” she suggested Trump was unfairly targeting left-wing and Islamic ideologies.
This month, the White House released the 2025 United States Counterterrorism Strategy document, outlining its priorities and approach to protecting the homeland. It highlights three major terrorist threats to the U.S.: narcoterrorists, Islamist terrorists and violent left-wing extremists. Nowhere does the document mention far-right, neo-Nazi or white supremacist threats.
Give the attempts by leftists on Trump’s life, the murder of conservative spokesman Charlie Kirk, multiple examples of shootings by transgenders, and the constant threats against Jews in America by Islamists and others, it seems like attention to those threats is overdue.
In addition to the omission of far-right terrorism, the document's mention of "violent secular political groups" that are "radically pro-transgender" and of political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood have raised eyebrows.
"I'm not sure … why gender should factor into a counterterrorism strategy, but there it is," Clarke said.
Why not "gender"? The Nashville school shooter that killed six people, including three children, identified as transgender, for one, as have others recent killers. And the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood is not a benign “political movement” but whose branches supports terrorists like Hamas.
Amidst the violence, NPR took time to whine about Republican partisanship, citing Biden's name appearing seven times in a Trump anti-terror strategy document.
