A Terrible Shooting in San Diego; Potential Motor Oil Shortages Loom–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: May 18, 2026

Indy Digest: May 18, 2026

Today’s news out of San Diego is horrifying and heartbreaking.

The Times of San Diego reports:

Five people are dead—three victims and two teenage suspects—following a shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego.

Police Chief Scott Wahl during an afternoon press conference said the victims at the largest mosque in San Diego County were three adult males, one of whom was a security guard at the center.

He said the shooters were teens, ages 17 and 19. They were found in a car in the middle of the street a few blocks away, dead of apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

Wahl said it appears the security guard prevented the attack from getting worse.

“We are considering this a hate crime until it’s not,” said Mark Remily, the special agent in charge of San Diego’s FBI office, said of the ongoing investigation.

Students and education staff on site at the part of center that houses Bright Horizon Academy are all safe and accounted for, Wahl said.

“I’ll tell you what got me,” Wahl said. “Seeing the kids come running out, just thankful to be alive.”

(As an aside: I’d also link to the Alden-owned San Diego Union-Tribune, but their coverage of the shooting is blocked by a paywall. I fully defend their right to have a paywall—they’re a business, and news is very expensive to produce and disseminate—but it’s pretty standard for paywalled news outlets to offer free access to urgent breaking news. Alden and the Union-Tribune apparently decided not to do so here, which is tacky.)

As of this writing, the motives of the shooters at the Islamic Center of San Diego are unknown. But it’s far from a surprise that an Islamic center was attacked.

We’re currently at war with a country that’s almost entirely Muslim. The person “leading” this war is Pete Hegseth—someone who has a history of heinous anti-Muslim rhetoric.

In a Dec. 1, 2024 article, The New Yorker published an extensive report on Hegseth’s background. I won’t link to it here—again, a paywall—but here’s a piece from The Guardian that covers some of the same ground:

The New Yorker reported that a colleague at Concerned Veterans for America complained that he and another man repeatedly shouted “Kill all Muslims!” during a drunken episode at a bar while travelling for work.

Hegseth has previously endorsed the doctrine of “sphere sovereignty,” a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism (CR). The philosophy calls for capital punishment for homosexuality and strictly patriarchal families and churches.

The defense secretary attends Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a church linked to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination co-founded by the pastor Doug Wilson, who has openly advocated a theocratic vision of society in which wives should submit to their husbands and women should be denied the vote. Wilson recently led a worship service at the Pentagon at Hegseth’s invitation.

Robert P Jones, president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington, said: “This is not one or two comments. It’s not a kind of one-off behavior. This is like a longstanding publicly demonstrated orientation that Hegseth has. It’s not just a glorification of violence but a glorification of violence in the name of Christianity and civilization.”

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) says it has received more than 200 complaints from service members about military commanders invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical “end times” to justify involvement in the Iran war. Such language could also be offensive to Arab allies and provide Iran with the fodder it needs to justify its own holy war against the US.

Jones warned: “It casts this not as anything related to the public—is it about a nuclear program? Is it about sponsoring terrorism?—which are legitimate political concerns. It takes it out of the realm of politics and casts it as a holy war of a supposedly Christian nation against a Muslim nation.”

I need to reiterate: As of this writing, the motives of the shooters at the Islamic Center of San Diego are unknown. There’s no known link between these shooters and anyone. I also need to point out that the president, when asked about the shooting, said it was a “terrible situation.”

But it’s important to remember the U.S. military is in the hands of a Christian nationalist—who has indicated a desire to focus not on defense, but on war.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• An update to a story mentioned in this space on Thursday comes via this Associated Press headline: “Justice Department announces a $1.7B fund to compensate Trump allies in a deal to drop IRS suit.” Details: “The Trump administration announced Monday the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies of the Republican president who believe they have been unjustly investigated and prosecuted, an arrangement that Democrats and government watchdogs derided as ‘corrupt’ and unconstitutional. The ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ of $1.776 billion is part of a settlement that resolves President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. It will allow people who believe they were targeted for prosecution for political purposes, including by the Biden administration Justice Department, to apply for payouts, creating what acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called ‘a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.’ ‘The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,’ Blanche said in a statement that made no mention of how investigations and prosecutions of Trump’s political opponents under his watch have exposed the Justice Department to the same claims of politicized law enforcement that he said he opposed.” Unbelievable …

• A memo purportedly leaked by AutoZone has been raising a lot of eyebrows. Carscoops/MSN reports: “Over the past week, reports about looming motor oil shortages have started popping up from multiple directions. The most pointed of them surfaced today, when a person posted what looks like an internal memo to the Southeast region of AutoZone stores. In the memo, the writer says, ‘Realistic, middle-of-the-road estimates are for our average available supply in this product category (lubricating fluids) to drop by 40%.’ That figure continues to pop up, and it basically means one thing. Oil changes, transmission fluid changes, really anything that lubricates your car is about to get more expensive. We reached out to AutoZone for comment, but haven’t received a reply at the time of writing. Shops on the ground are already bracing for it. Speaking to a local repair store here in Little Rock, Arkansas, a general manager tells Carscoops that ‘they are being very secretive about all that. They say the price is for sure gonna go up, but they don’t know how the mainline volume will be affected yet.'”

• The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department is the first in the state to use a new system meant to stop and capture automobiles involved in chases. The Los Angeles Times explains: “It was on a Sunday morning in mid-March when Riverside County sheriff’s personnel attempted a vehicle stop at Perris Boulevard and Iris Avenue in Moreno Valley. The driver sped away. But deputies had a trick up their sleeve—a secret weapon that is part grappling gun, part lasso. The device, known as the Grappler, was released from where it was installed on the front bumper of a sheriff’s vehicle and onto the fleeing suspect’s back tires. Within seconds, the vehicle was halted off the 60 Freeway exit at Country Village Road, and the suspect was left as powerless as a rodeo calf on its side. ‘That move, that grapple, prevented him from driving on the wrong side and potentially from crashing into another vehicle,’ said Riverside County Sheriff’s Lt. Jason Santistevan. For the deputy, that success confirmed the effectiveness of a system he had persuaded the department to adopt. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department joins a growing number of law enforcement agencies trying out a relatively new technology in an attempt to curb chases and the injuries and deaths that can follow.”

• ProPublica reports that a think tank crunched the numbers and came up with a disconcerting statistic regarding the immigration sweeps that have taken place since the second Trump administration began: “Far more American children have likely been separated from their parents during immigration sweeps than previously understood, according to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Brookings. The report published Monday estimates more than 100,000 U.S. citizen children have had a parent detained since President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign began last year. The analysis cites reporting from ProPublica on the detention of parents, which can often lead to family separations. During Trump’s first administration, a policy of family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border ended after widespread outrage. Now, the breakup of families is happening amid sweeps by immigration agents across the country. About 400,000 people have been detained by immigration agents since Trump returned to office, Brookings noted. But it’s nearly impossible to know how many family separations that has caused, since the administration does not track it.”

• Here’s yet another instance of a large company wiping out a swath of valuable comment. The New York Times reports: “An archived website of FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism publication known for its polling analysis and election models, is now redirecting readers to ABC News, its owner and former host. As a result, many thousands of articles stretching back to FiveThirtyEight’s founding in 2008 are no longer accessible on the ABC website, according to Nathaniel Rakich, a former senior staff editor at the publication. ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight, which was founded by the election analyst and forecaster Nate Silver and specialized in data-driven analyses of elections, sports and other subjects, in March 2025. But an earlier stand-alone version of the publication, fivethirtyeight.com—discontinued in 2023, when FiveThirtyEight merged with ABCNews.com—had been archived and remained accessible online. It is not clear why or precisely when the content was removed, though comments about a lack of access began appearing online on Friday morning. ABC News declined multiple requests for comment.”

• And finally … today’s recall news involves … ice cream! The NYT says: “A California dairy company has issued a recall for five ice cream flavors, warning customers that some tubs may be contaminated with metal. The company, Straus Family Creamery, recalled some of its organic ice cream, which was sold in 17 states (including California) since May 4. It said it ordered the recall because of ‘the potential presence of metal foreign material,’ without giving further details. The warning applies to its vanilla bean, strawberry, cookie dough, Dutch chocolate and mint chip flavors with specific ‘best-by’ dates in late December 2026. It did not say how many tubs were affected but said the issue was with a ‘small number of production runs.’”

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