**HISTORY REPEATS: San Diego Massacre Mirrors ‘Tragedy of Errors’ That Sparked the Zoot Suit Riots — Expert Says We’re Ignoring the Same Warning Signs**

HISTORY REPEATS: San Diego Massacre Mirrors ‘Tragedy of Errors’ That Sparked the Zoot Suit Riots — Expert Says We’re Ignoring the Same Warning Signs

SAN DIEGO — As the city grapples with the latest mass shooting—a targeted attack in a crowded Gaslamp Quarter bar—one historian is drawing chilling parallels to a 1943 flashpoint that San Diego tried to forget.

“Look at the Zoot Suit Riots,” says Dr. Eliza Ramos, a military historian at UCSD. “Back then, servicemen and locals scapegoated Mexican-American youth for rising crime and ‘foreign influence.’ Today, the shooter’s manifesto targets immigrants and ‘outsiders.’ The language is different—incel rage versus wartime patriotism—but the pattern is identical: economic anxiety, dehumanizing rhetoric from media, and a society that refuses to see the powder keg until it explodes.”

The twist? Ramos points out that the 1943 riots were provoked by a false rumor that a zoot-suiter gang had assaulted a sailor. This week’s shooting was also preceded by a viral social media post—a doctored video claiming “caravan invaders” were attacking locals. The shooter allegedly commented, “History says we have to burn it down first.”

“San Diego is a border city with a long memory of racial violence,” Ramos adds. “But we keep teaching the Zoot Suit Riots as a ‘lesson learned.’ Clearly, the lesson was never learned—it was just archived.”

Authorities have not confirmed the shooter’s motive, but the hashtag #ZootSuitRedux is already trending.