Last month’s deadly shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego was not just part of a troubling nationwide increase in extremist violence, but the latest in a long and well-documented history of white supremacist and neo-Nazi hate in San Diego County.
The alleged shooters in the attack — an 18-year-old male from Chula Vista and a 17-year-old male from San Diego — left behind a 75-page manifesto expressing hatred for Muslims, Jews, Latinos, Black people, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and women. Law enforcement officials say they were radicalized online. On both counts, they have company in San Diego history.
Even before the attack at the Islamic Center, which left three dead, or the Chabad shooting in Poway in 2018, San Diego had a well-established history with neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology thanks to Tom Metzger. The notorious former county resident, neo-Nazi leader and Klansman founded White Aryan Resistance in 1983.
The scene at an active shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego on May 18, 2026. (Photo by Adrian Childress/Times of San Diego)In the ‘70s, Metzger joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by David Duke. He eventually became the Grand Dragon of the State of California, but by the ‘80s, Metzger had a falling out with Duke and founded WAR in 1983. Over the next several decades, Metzger operated out of Fallbrook and was involved in criminal activities until his death in 2020. Although his influence in the white supremacist movement waned, the terroristic ideologies that he helped popularize endured.
“Even though Metzger is no longer here and his movement is no longer active, the politics have not gone anywhere. They’ve remained and have become more normalized”, said Ricardo Favela, an educator who helped organize against Metzger in the early ‘90s when he was a student at Fallbrook High School. “The difference between the ’90s and now is that we’ve seen his message become more mainstream.”
Favela, who joined Mexicanos Unidos en Defensa del Pueblo, a Latino youth group formed to protect against white vigilantes and law enforcement, said the rhetoric he organized against then now appears as routine messaging from the Trump administration and other conservative politicians in the GOP.
“What we grew up with back then in Fallbrook is what we’re seeing applied now at a state and national level,” he said. “We’re seeing it normalized and institutionalized, which further emboldens people, whether it’s through acts of violence or through policies.”
Nor are racially motivated attacks new to San Diego. On July 18, 1984, the San Ysidro McDonald’s Massacre rocked the region. James Huberty, 41, fatally shot 21 people, including five children and an unborn child, and wounded 19 others.
Dressed in a black T-shirt and military fatigues, Huberty entered the restaurant carrying an assortment of weapons, unloading hundreds of bullets into the bodies of unsuspecting, predominantly Mexican patrons and employees. Huberty’s rampage lasted approximately 77 minutes before a SWAT sniper killed him.
At the time, the attack was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, and Huberty’s crimes were described as an isolated instance of violence and attributed to mental illness. But Huberty’s neighbors and his own wife would later say that he had expressed his hatred for children and for Mexicans. He blamed Mexicans for the loss of his job as a welder in Ohio.
Roberto D. Hernández, a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at SDSU, dedicated a chapter of his book “Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative” to the shooting, the circumstances that brought Huberty to San Ysidro, and the attack’s relation to the history of racial and colonial violence in the region.
He said it is common to dismiss hate crimes and white supremacist attacks as ‘lone wolf’ incidents, occurring outside of any historical context.
“It’s always simpler to look at individual characteristics and personality traits than to look at the connective tissue of history. This is a long historical racial colonial dynamic that is constantly playing out,” Hernández said.
Metzger himself openly advocated for lone wolf attacks in the ‘90s after he was found civilly liable for the 1988 racially motivated murder of Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw by three skinheads in Portland, Oregon. They were members of WAR.
After the lawsuit, Favela said, Metzger began calling for such attacks so the white supremacist movement itself would be protected, while individuals could still carry out acts of violence. Metzger even published ‘Laws of the Lone Wolf’, a tactical guide that advised extremists to operate alone or in small cells.
“While this was a tactic to protect white supremacist organizations, it is important to place these attacks within a broader historical context,” Favela said. “Lone wolf attacks are symptoms of a sector of white society struggling to maintain its place in their perceived racial order. Violence directed at racialized peoples is how the racial hierarchy was established in California since the Gold Rush and continues to be part of the culture to this day.”
A victim with a police officer outside the McDonalds in San Ysidro, where a gunman killed 21 people in July 1984. (File image by rmarpul via YouTube)Metzger wasn’t San Diego’s only white supremacist figure to advocate for lone wolf attacks.
Alex Curtis, a Metzger associate, was one of the white supremacist movement’s earliest popular internet figures in the ’90s. Curtis used the web and his newsletter, the “Nationalist Observer,” which he ran out of San Diego, to network with other white supremacists throughout the country and facilitate materials to radicalize others the same way that the alleged teen mosque shooters were radicalized.
In 2000, Curtis was arrested following “Operation Lone Wolf,” a San Diego police and FBI joint investigation into his criminal activities.
The alleged mosque shooter from Chula Vista, in particular, was so open about idolizing Nazis and mass shooters that his interest flagged the attention of school officials and classmates, leading law enforcement to unsuccessfully ask a court to permanently keep him away from his father’s guns.
Hernández said that the failure to act or take proactive steps when the alleged shooters were already on law enforcement’s radar is indicative of a longstanding inability to address and confront white supremacist violence not just in San Diego but across the U.S. as a whole.
“Even though there’s this long history of violence in the region that’s informed by white supremacy, the state is really just reacting to it. It never really proactively takes steps in stopping it,” he said. “Even in their failure to stop it, the result is to build up more state surveillance. Build up more police presence, but never fully addressing the racial colonial parts that inform this violence.”
An archived publication out of Fallbrook that includes a racist comic and an application to join the KKK. (Image courtesy of Lucas Cruz/Aztlán Archives)For many community leaders, the attack on the Islamic Center is not an act of lone wolves or random, disaffected individuals, but the end result of long-neglected history that has yet to be reconciled.
“This is just a continuation of American history. This attack on the mosque is just one of many acts of violence that have happened throughout this country’s history”, said Khalid Alexander, founder of the nonprofit organization Pillars of the Community, who knew all three men killed in last month’s attack. “The kind of people who attacked the mosque are the same kind who planted the church bombs in Alabama.”
The federal government’s own counter terrorism strategies do not treat white supremacists as an urgent threat though though in a statement before a House committee in 2019, the FBI recognized that “domestic terrorists are individuals who commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as racial bias and anti-government sentiment.”
President Donald Trump’s 2026 terrorism strategy, however, includes an emphasis on narcoterrorists, legacy Islamist terrorists and left-wing extremists and anti-fascists — but makes no mention of white supremacists or far-right domestic terrorism.
Alexander said that the shooting, along with the swell of Islamophobia, as well as other white supremacist rhetoric that has been normalized by mainstream politicians, represents an inflection point in the struggle against racism, locally and nationally.
“We recognize that the struggle against oppression and white supremacy is just as powerful and just as American as the actual oppression itself,” he said. “It’s becoming clearer that people need to take a side. Either you’re fighting against the worst tendencies and roots of this nation, or you’re a part of it.”
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