The last day of Passover at Chabad of Poway

John T. Earnest was nineteen, a nursing student, and had written an open letter online explaining what he was about to do and why - the same conspiracy theory about Jews organising the replacement of white people that had been posted in Pittsburgh the previous October. He had already acted on it once: in March 2019 he set fire to the Dar-ul-Arqam mosque in Escondido, a few miles away, and wrote a slur and a reference to the Christchurch mosque attacks on the wall.

On 27 April 2019, the last day of Passover, he walked into the Chabad of Poway synagogue north of San Diego with a semi-automatic rifle. Lori Gilbert-Kaye, 60, was killed. The congregation's rabbi, Yisroel Goldstein, was shot in the hands and lost fingers; Almog Peretz and his eight-year-old niece Noya Dahan were wounded by shrapnel. Roughly fifty people were in the building. The rifle jammed, and an Army veteran in the congregation and an off-duty Border Patrol agent chased him out.

Earnest pleaded guilty to a 113-count federal indictment: fifty-four counts under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, fifty-five under the Church Arson Prevention Act and four firearms offences. He was sentenced to life in prison plus thirty years, and separately to life without parole in state court.

The Poway attack is on this map next to the Escondido mosque fire for a reason that the federal charges make explicit: the same person, the same weeks, the same stated belief. Antisemitic and anti-Muslim violence in the United States are routinely carried out by the same people acting on the same theory about who belongs here.