Crooks and Liars provides an emerging portrait of Richard Poplawski: a white-supremacist radical

Thanks to some sleuth work on the Internet, we’re starting to learn more about Richard Poplawski, the 23-year-old who killed three police officers yesterday in Pittsburgh, evidently out of fear that his guns were going to be taken away.

It appears that what police may be looking at is a budding white supremacist who frequented one of the most popular neo-Nazi websites and harbored an apocalyptic dread of the federal government.

The Anti-Defamation League provides an in-depth review:

Following the Super Bowl victory of the Pittsburgh Steelers in early February 2009, Poplawski used the celebrations that occurred in Pittsburgh as an opportunity to “survey police procedure in an unrestful environment,” and reported the results of his reconnaissance to fellow Stormfronters. “It was just creepy seeing busses [sic] put into action by authorities, as if they were ready to transport busloads of Steeler fans to 645 FEMA drive if necessary.”

This last comment was a reference to popular right-wing conspiracy theories about Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)-constructed prisons and concentration camps for U.S. citizens. Such conspiracy theories had long been staples of the militia movement, but received a reinvigorating shot in the arm following the election of Barack Obama as president. Almost overnight, right-wing conspiracists across the country revived all of their 1990s militia conspiracy theories about the “New World Order,” planned gun confiscations, and government plots against the citizenry. Once more, wild speculations about SHTF (“s–t hits the fan”) and TEOTWAKI (“the end of the world as we know it”) scenarios became rampant.

Although it is easy to get distracted by political affiliations (some bristle at the Missouri warning, which included third party bumper stickers as a clue) there are probably more clear indicators of unlawful and dangerous intent.

As early as November 2008, he inquired on a Pennsylvania firearms discussion forum about the legality of sawed off shotguns and mentioned that he had purchased body armor from a friend. In February, he posted to the same forum that “a group of friends and I are considering purchasing a lot of military surplus rifles.”

It is hard to process the situation and imagine what the two officers were thinking when they were invited by a woman to enter her home and confront her son, a violent and extreme right-wing youth with a troubled past including failure in military training.

Four months of online activity after November of 2008 indicate he was sliding from violent tendencies to paranoia and hatred.

By March 2009, Poplawski apparently felt himself at a crossroads of sorts. In his longest and most revealing post on Stormfront, Poplawski confirmed his belief that Jews controlled the U.S. government and his conviction that some sort of collapse of the “economic and social order” of the United States was inevitable, “poisoned by design by the moral decadence that is a direct byproduct of [Jewish control].”

The challenge is to identify these misguided and delusional threats and isolate them as individuals who need help, without restricting or scaring the groups they join that are itching for a reason to fight. That seems to be what the US DHS intended with their April 7th report, available here. From a historical perspective unemployed young men have always been an issue for countries in economic slump. The current American climate has veterans returning to no jobs while huge spending bills float through to special interests. The susceptibility of these young trained men to extremist groups is the topic, and the question is how to predict when rational, slow anger might be provoked into violent action and against whom. A January report by the DHS profiled the threat from left-wing extremists. Apparently both reports were initiated under the Bush administration.