It turns out that Richard Andrew Poplawski, charged with murdering three Pittsburgh police officers in an ambush, was a devotee of racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories and a participant in the neo-Nazi Stomfront website.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:
Poplawski posted dozens of racist and anti-Semitic messages on a far-right Web site over a span of 15 months, decrying race-mixing, sharing his thoughts on the best weapons and predicting chaos as the economy collapsed at the hands of “Zionist occupation,” investigators said.
“It seems to me that our enemies would like nothing more than to see us retreat peaceably into the hills so that they could continue raping the remainder of the land without having to worry about any ‘kooks’ putting up a fight,” reads one post dated Nov. 1, 2008. “I’ll subscribe to the camp that believes we are running out of time. A revolutionary is always regarded as a nutcase at first, their ideas dismissed as fantasy.”
An account kept on Stormfront, a gathering place for racial extremists and others from the far right, shows Mr. Poplawski’s increasing belief in a coming economic and political collapse in the days leading up to the time of the deadly standoff in which he is charged with killing three Pittsburgh police officers.
“I’ve been a longtime lurker on Stormfront, and I see myself probably ramping up the activism in the near future,” reads a Nov. 28 post on the account identified as his.
Details of Mr. Poplawski’s extreme racial and political views came to light yesterday when a leading researcher at the Anti-Defamation League delved into his postings at Stormfront, a white supremacist Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan leader in Florida.
The Post-Gazette also reported:
Believing most media were covering up important events, Mr. Poplawski turned to a far-right conspiracy Web site run by Alex Jones, a self-described documentarian with roots going back to the extremist militia movement of the early 1990s.
You may recall that a self-promoting, allegedly leftwing British politician was interviewed by Alex Jones a few years ago, and agreed with him that it was entirely possible the “military-industrial complex” would carry out a terror attack and blame it on Iran.
As I wrote at the time:
Politically Jones is something of a libertarian, but mostly he hovers in the ultra-paranoid creepy zone where far-left and far-right converge; he appears to have fans at both ends of the spectrum.
