The Averted Anti-Muslim Terror Attack Everyone Should Be Talking About

He wore tactical gear and a helmet-mounted camera on March 15, 2019.

As he livestreamed himself on Facebook, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, a thirty-year-old White Australian, entered Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. He shot and killed forty-four Muslims. He left, climbed in his car, talked to his online audience, and sped to Linwood Islamic Centre three miles away. He then murdered seven more Muslims. New Zealand police captured him as he drove to a third mosque.

His carnage didn’t conclude seven years ago. Tarrant aimed to inspire more terror. 

Thus, the livestream.

Thus, his posting a 74-four-page screed titled, “The Great Replacement.” 

Thus, his writing that the mosques had a “large group of invaders … that seek to occupy my peoples [sic] lands and ethnically replace my own people.”

Investigators found a printed copy of Tarrant’s screed, as well as homemade firearms, ammunition, components of explosives, and notes on making more firearms and bombs in two homes in Florida’s St. Johns County near Jacksonville, earlier this year. 

Someone had tipped off the sheriff’s office that 14-year-old Julian Davis and his friend, Charles Williams, 13, had discussed homemade weapons and armed robbery on Telegram. The sheriff’s office and St. Johns County School District investigated, searched the teens’ homes, and announced their arrests on August 7. Sheriff Robert A. Hardwick said, “We are thankful to have prevented a tragedy in St. Johns County.”

These White middle schoolers were likely planning a terror attack on Muslim Americans. They seemingly saw themselves as the Christchurch shooter saw himself: defending against the purported replacement and annihilation of White people.

Over the last fifteen years, there have been mass shootings of Muslims, of Black people, of Latinos, of Jews, of White progressives, of immigrants. Shooters believed in the same great replacement theory as critical masses of people, as popular media figures like Tucker Carlson, as authoritarian politicians like Donald Trump, as oligarchs like Elon Musk—all tanking democracy to accumulate ever more wealth and power and privilege.

Actually, these shooters believed in the most extreme great replacement theory: White genocide theory.

They imagined a political plot to bring on the genocide or extinction of White people. They deputized themselves to defend White people from this invented genocide by carrying out terror attacks against peoples of color and many White people.

I termed these globe-spanning terrorists of humanity great replacement soldiers in my new book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age.

These great replacement soldiers have usually been young. 

Dylann Roof, 21, killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. 

Ali “David” Sonboly, 18, murdered nine people at a McDonald’s patronized by immigrants and a nearby shopping center in Munich, Germany, in 2016. 

John Earnest, 19, opened fire and killed a Jewish woman and wounded three more Jewish Americans at a synagogue in Poway, California, in 2019. 

Patrick Wood Crusius, 21, targeted Latino shoppers and fatally shot 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019. 

Payton Gendron, 18, murdered ten Black shoppers and workers at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. 

Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21, shot dead three Black people in 2023 at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida, after being turned away from nearby Edward Waters University, a historically Black university. 

On May 18, 2026, Cain Lee Clark, 17, and Caleb Liam Vazquez, 18, shot and killed a security guard and two members of the Islamic Center of San Diego.

To be clear, there have been very young school shooters. Colt Gray, 14, murdered four people at a Georgia high school in 2024. But Gray, like other school shooters, primarily obsessed over school shootings, namely Columbine (1999) and Sandy Hook (2012), not great replacement theory.

No great replacement soldier has been as young as 14 and 13-years-old, making this recent averted terror attack in Florida unique.

And uniquely chilling.

Great replacement soldiers are seemingly getting younger and younger. Seventeen in San Diego, and now 14 and 13  in Florida. 

This, to me, demonstrates that the most dangerous political theory of our time—great replacement theory—is spreading deeper into human consciousness. 

This, to me, demonstrates the predictable outcome of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leading a movement to remove antiracist education that protects young people from ingesting the harmfully racist idea that Black and Brown people are coming to take over.

Florida has the nation’s fifth-largest Arab American population. Jacksonville has long been a hub for this community, with a thriving Syrian population dating back to 1890. Many of the city’s Muslim Arab Americans pray and fellowship at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida. 

Did the White teens plan to target this largest mosque in the region? Did they plan to target a mosque right there in St. Johns County: the Islamic Center of St. Augustine?

Their stockpiling of murderous weapons and ideas happened as Islamophobic great replacement theory is rising in the United States; worse now than at any point in recent history. The week after Abdul El-Sayed’s August 4 victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, anti-Muslim social media posts increased by twenty times the pre-primary rate, according to research by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH). On August 10, Donald Trump said to the press in the Oval Office that “we have jihadists being elected all over the place.”

These anti-Muslim posts often use the “language of ‘invasion,’ ‘conquest,’ and ‘Islamification,’” which “mirrors the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, recasting Muslims as a population threat engaged in deliberate civilizational conquest,” CSOH found.

An April report from CSOH found that over the previous 13 months, 89 elected officials published 1,111 Islamophobic posts on social media, introduced eight anti-Muslim bills, and established a “Sharia-Free American Caucus” that amassed 65 members. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) designated this caucus “an anti-Muslim hate group.”

One member of this hate group is Florida Congressman John H. Rutherford, a former police officer who represents St. Johns County and thereby these two White middle schoolers. 

Directly south of Rutherford’s district is the congressional district of Randy Fine, a leader of the Sharia-Free American Caucus, and perhaps the most anti-Muslim member of Congress.

“We’re going to stand strong against the Islamification of America,” Fine said during a town hall meeting with his constituents on February 23, 2016. During a December congressional hearing, Fine said, “I don’t know how you make peace with those who seek your destruction. I think you destroy them first.” On November 14, 2025, Fine imagined, “This isn’t immigration. This is a full scale invasion of mainstream Muslims overtaking America.”

These two White middle schoolers read Fine’s ideas echoed in the pamphlet of the Christchurch shooter. 

“This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people,” Tarrant wrote.

Tarrant’s manifesto stirred great replacement soldiers long before these Florida teens. 

“In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” the El Paso shooter wrote. 

The Buffalo shooter wrote, “Brenton started my real research into the problems with immigration and foreigners in our White lands.” 

The Dollar General shooter in Jacksonville expressed: “Brenton Tarrant: Main inspiration for my methods. . . and targets. Tarrant took the fight to his invaders, and I will take the fight to mine.” 

The San Diego shooters in May titled their manifesto: “The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant.”

Tarrant came of age in an Australian political discourse shaped by Sen. Pauline Hanson, the founder of One Nation, now the most popular party in Australia, according to a recent poll.

“In my first speech in 1996 I said we were in danger of being swamped by Asians,” Hanson said on September 14, 2016, after being reelected to Parliament for the first time in nearly twenty years. “Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.”

During the home searches, deputies found a black tactical vest chalked up with numbers, symbols, and acronyms at the home of Davis, the 14-year-old. The chalked-up vest seemingly operates as the manifesto of these middle schoolers.

They drew a huge Nazi Black Sun symbol in the middle of the vest. The teens inscribed, “RWDS,” an acronym for “Right Wing Death Squad.”

RWDS dates back to the squadrons that terrorized political opponents unleashed by CIA-backed Latin American military dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. One of Pinochet’s allies was Michael Kast, a Nazi lieutenant turned Chilean businessman who fled to Chile after World War II, like the upwards of 1,000 Nazis escaping accountability for their war crimes. Kast’s son, José Antonio Kast, a longtime defender of Pinochet, ran for president on great replacement theory. He took his oath of office as president of Chile on March 11, 2026.

The teens wrote, “88,” a numerical sign for “Heil Hitler.” They wrote, “14.” This corresponds to these fourteen words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” These words were written by David Lane, one of the nine founders, in 1983, of The Order, a short-lived neo-Nazi paramilitary organization.

The teens wrote, “hh – 51.” This stands for “Heil Hitler” and the number of Muslims Tarrant murdered in Christchurch, New Zealand: 51.

Students at Switzerland Point Middle School chalked all of this on a bulletproof vest they stored next to their guns, ammunition, and explosives. 

Thirteen and fourteen years young. 

The flood of great replacement theory, now in middle school.