Six Weeks After Christchurch, an American Teenager Answered the Brochure

On Saturday, April 27, the last day of Passover, a nineteen-year-old walked into the Chabad of Poway, north of San Diego, with a rifle. He killed Lori Gilbert-Kaye, who was sixty. He wounded three others, including an eight-year-old girl and Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who was shot through both hands and lost a finger. The rabbi kept talking to his congregation afterward, standing on a chair, with his hands wrapped.

Lori Gilbert-Kaye died in the lobby. Accounts from the congregation are that she put herself between the gunman and the rabbi.

I. THE SAME DOCUMENT, THE SAME BOARD

Before the attack, an open letter of some four thousand words was posted to 8chan under his name. Its central claim, in its own phrasing, was that Jews were carrying out a "meticulously planned genocide of the European race."

Same theory. Same website. Same format, right down to posting the document minutes before, to the same audience, in the hope of the same result. Six weeks after Christchurch, the template was working exactly as designed, and the boards where it circulates had not been meaningfully disturbed in the interval.

There is a detail that removes the last of the doubt about lineage, and it predates Poway by five weeks.

On March 24, nine days after Christchurch, someone tried to burn down the Dar-ul-Arqam mosque in Escondido, about fifteen miles from Poway. The fire failed. Federal investigators photographed what was left on the wall: graffiti referencing the Christchurch attack. He later admitted to that arson too.

So the sequence is documented and it is short. A New Zealand attack in March. An attempted mosque burning in California nine days later, with the New Zealand attack named at the scene. A synagogue shooting five weeks after that, by the same person, citing the same theory. This is not a coincidence of angry young men. It is transmission, and it has a paper trail.

II. TWO TARGETS, ONE THEORY

Note that he attacked a mosque and a synagogue, and that this is not a contradiction requiring explanation. It is the theory operating normally.

In the replacement thesis, Muslims and immigrants are the instrument, the population being moved into place. Jews are cast as the hand doing the moving. That is why the Charlottesville marchers chanted about Jews while complaining about immigration, why the Pittsburgh gunman attacked a synagogue over a refugee agency, and why this one could target both faiths inside six weeks without ever changing his mind about anything. The dossier lays out that structure: it is a single machine with two output ports.

III. THE COUNT SO FAR

Six months. Pittsburgh, October 27: eleven dead. Christchurch, March 15: fifty-one dead. Poway, April 27: one dead, three wounded, and only that low because the rifle malfunctioned. Sixty-three people, killed by three men who each wrote down the same theory first and posted it to the same kind of forum.

Meanwhile the theory itself continues to be discussed on American television as a demographic observation, and by American politicians as a warning about the electorate. Nobody in that conversation has to endorse a shooting, and none of them do. They only have to keep supplying the premise, and let the boards handle distribution.

Lori Gilbert-Kaye had gone to synagogue on the last day of Passover to say the memorial prayer for her mother.