Paul Nicholas Miller has pushed harassment 'raids' and sold racist paraphernalia online while in federal custody. Miller, who goes by “Gypsy Crusader” online and has amassed a following of thousands, will shout spurious statistics about Black crime rates or how Jewish people control the economy, USA Today reports. He’ll shout at anybody, from adults to young children, about how non-white and LGBTQ people have ruined America. He’ll unfurl the swastika flag that serves as his backdrop. Miller punctuates his onslaughts by “firing” a toy gun that reveals a red-and-black flag with racial slurs. When he meets a fellow neo-Nazi online, using Omegle, a chatting website that allows strangers to video chat with each other at random, he’ll greet them with a Nazi salute and shout “white power.” While Miller isn’t very different from other trolls who have created their own racist gimmicks to sell merchandise and cultivate attention from a legion of online fans, he is different because he wages a campaign of hate while in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Miller, 34, was arrested in 2021 on charges of illegally possessing firearms after the FBI raided his home in Florida. He was sentenced later that year to serve 41 months in federal prison but was released in January after spending less than two years locked up. He was under supervision while in community confinement but once people began to question the prison bureau about his activities, he was sent back to prison.
Throughout the spring, Miller posted incessantly across the extremist far-right internet. His account on Gab, a social media service popular with extremists, has more than 10,000 followers. His hundreds of posts, going back to his release in January, are mostly videos of his racist and harassing webcasts, interspersed with ads for merchandise. Miller was perhaps most active on Telegram. On at least two accounts, he posted videos and appeals for donations. He shared clips of Black people looting stores or getting into fights. His posts had recently become obsessed with LGBTQ issues, particularly stories about people transitioning genders, which he made clear he found abhorrent. Miller has been engaged in all this activity while still serving time for the crimes he committed in 2021. Because he wasn’t physically in a prison, Miller had far more access to the internet, and could get away with a wide variety of activities that might be contrary to his parole, said Kimora, an expert in probation and a professor at the John Jay School of Justice in New York. It’s not clear whether federal authorities knew the details of the harassment “raids” that were happening before Miller’s arrest, but they knew he was an online threat. The U.S. Attorney’s Office, in an announcement about Miller’s sentencing, noted that he “had made hundreds of internet posts publicizing his animosity towards various minority groups and his support for the initiation of a race-based civil war in the United States.”