How this NJ man’s hate-filled rants won him an ‘alt-right’ following (2024)

Editor’s Note: This story contains descriptions, some of which are detailed and specific, of online posts that included racist language, violent imagery, threats and verbal abuse.

He called himself the Gypsy Crusader. For his live video streams, he dressed up as the Joker, the Riddler and Super Mario. He sat himself in front of a Nazi flag and launched tirades of hate in all directions as he recruited new believers for the inevitable day of racial reckoning. For effect, he would wave weapons around.

His real name was Paul Nicholas Miller, 32, a once-promising kickboxer from New Brunswick, who by late last year had been banned from all mainstream social media platforms. Still he grew a sizeable following in the darkest corners of “alt-right web” communities. The more racist, antisemitic and violent his message, the more popular he became.

One of those watching Miller last fall was Carla Hill, who had a far different reason for tuning in. As associate director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, Hill and investigators like her are trained to detect very specific red flags as they scan the vast and nebulous world of online extremist activity in search of emerging threats.

Hill started tracking the livestreams Miller was posting on Telegram, a messaging platform that provides a safe haven for conservative and far-right group chats. Hill, who has been doing this work for 15 years, described to NJ Spotlight News the red flags that kept popping up: violent and provocative language; escalating racial and antisemitic targeting; active recruitment of followers; criminal history; wearing body armor and displaying weapons; participating in extremist activity in the real world.

“If you start checking off five, six, seven, eight, nine boxes, then it’s concerning,” Hill said. In less than a month of watching Miller’s “Gypsy Crusader” act, she had seen enough. In October 2020 she sent a report to the FBI office in Newark.

Hill detailed for the FBI in that report that Miller’s livestreams and postings were increasing in frequency, vitriol and followers. He had become an unflinchingaccelerationist,a label terror experts assign to those who believe that a race war will return America to white rule.

In his livestreams and social media posts, Miller often referred to the “Day of the Rope,” a white supremacist slogan that referencesWilliam Luther Pierce’sbook“The Turner Diaries.”In the novel, white supremacists engage inmass lynchingsof those perceived as “race traitors,” which includes journalists, politicians, and white people who are in relationships with nonwhite people. Miller, like many white supremacists and neo-Nazis, believed that the “Day of the Rope” is near.

“He was getting increasingly radical,” Hill said. “His online following became his identity.”

‘I am armed to the teeth tonight … I have two new guns.’

A few days after Hill contacted the FBI, Miller packed up and moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Hill kept tracking him and sent a second report, this time to the FBI in Florida, which opened a file on Miller. In later federal court documents, the FBI said it took particular note of a December 2020 video Miller uploaded on BitChute, a video-hosting service known as a refuge for far-right actors banned from YouTube. There, according to the FBI, he said:

“I am armed to the teeth tonight. … I have two new guns,” and then held up a handgun. “I hate the Jews. I want to gas ‘em,” he said. When another person on the video stream asked, “You gotta army?” he replied, “I’m trying to build one.”

Paul Miller provides one of countless modern-day American stories which illustrate how readily a young man’s disillusionment can rather easily be transformed into unbridled radicalism in today’s social climate. And Miller’s story shows how fragile that construct can be and how unceremoniously it can collapse.

Public records and a vast repository of his video streams and podcasts provide insight into Miller’s particular journey to radicalization. They reveal what appears to be a reasonably intelligent, though conflicted young man, who had experimented and struggled with his identity and purpose before he finally went all in to the extreme.

In his podcasts, Miller embraced the role of the outraged victim, blaming others for his misfortunes — Blacks, Jews, Latinos, members of the LBGT communities, progressive politicians and the deep state. By watching his videos in chronological order, viewers can see a progression. In his earlier postings, he was a bit strident, but polite — even deferential when approached by police. But as time passed, Miller appeared increasingly angry and radical. He immersed himself in several right-wing social media platforms, where he fed his growing outrage. Over time, Miller honed his script and provocative brand: He became the Gypsy Crusader. He livestreamed incessantly and soon became a star in the “alt-right” universe of white nationalism. Increasingly isolated, this virtual world became his source of income — he sold memorabilia like packs of Joker cards — and self-worth.

Miller’s preferred platform was Telegram, where he amassed over 40,000 followers, which is a lot for such a less-traveled platform. Today, you can still find many of his YouTube postings with over 500,000 views.

On the evening of March 1, Miller prepared for his daily livestream, dressed up this time as Mario, of Mario Brothers video-game fame. He had no idea it would be his last broadcast. For the next hour-and-a-half Miller livestreamed what can best be described as a racist improv session in which he spewed a torrent of racist/anti-gay/antisemitic banter, punctuated by Nazi salutes. It ranged from silly asides to serious attacks.

‘Mario hates the Black Lives Matter,’ Miller said to a Black woman, using extreme, racist language.

Miller turned to Omegle, an online chat website, because it provided a steady stream of new unsuspecting subjects to “troll” — particularly minorities and women — while at the same time allowing him to recruit others to join the cause. When Omegle users log on with a webcam and microphone, they are randomly matched with another user they can then chat with or reject. Most of the users who connected with Miller on this day were young adults and teenagers. Many of them were Black and Muslim.

“Mario hates the Black Lives Matter,” Miller said to a Black woman, using extreme, racist language in a fake Italian accent. Then, in the Omegle session later posted to BitChute,Miller held out a Nazi flag, saying, “Mario likes the white people.”

To a teenage girl who said she was Jewish, he responded, “Get back in the oven,” you f—ing Jew!” To a gay visitor, he asked, “How long have you been a f—–? To a teenage boy from Dubai, he said, “Mario hates the Muslims.”

Early the next morning, according to published reports,a squad of armored agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forceconverged on Miller’s home in a quiet neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale. Racist rants are not illegal. But a convicted felon owning weapons is.

Inside, they found 848 rounds of ammunition for three different-caliber weapons, according to court documents. They also found parts to an unregistered firearm. And inside his clothes dryer, agents said in federal court filings, they discovered disassembled parts for a rifle with a 10.5-inch barrel.

When confronted by the FBI, Miller told them it was he who was the actual victim in fear for his life: “I’m scared, I’m living alone, I don’t have anybody with me,” he told investigators, according to an FBI affidavit. “Somebody’s going to, these people are trying to kill me.”

Miller’s pivot from agitator to victim is well-known to those who study hate.

“Victimhood is a core ideology of white supremacists, who believe that ‘white men built this country’ and their birthright is constantly in the process of being taken away,” Mitch Berbrier, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, & Social Science at the University of Alabama, said in aninterview with Healthline. “Victimhood is a powerful organizing strategy for all sorts of groups. As a result, a lot of public rhetoric involves what some sociologists have called ‘victim contests.’”

Miller called himself ‘a political prisoner,’ his life ruined by his ruthless and unjust enemies.

Miller was arrested and placed in jail, where he has remained. On June 22, he pleaded guilty to three felony weapons charges, according to court records, and is scheduled for sentencing on Aug. 30. He faces up to 30 years in prison, but under his plea deal, he said he expects one to two years in prison. At his plea hearing he expressed remorse. But earlier that same day, in a video phone call with an unidentified interviewer recorded in his jail cell and later posted to YouTube by user “7yoz,”Miller called himself “a political prisoner,”his life ruined by his ruthless and unjust enemies.

Michael Cohen, Miller’s criminal defense attorney, declined to comment to NJ Spotlight News for this report. Miller’s mother did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, Miller had beeninspired to do online trollingby Australian white supremacist Philip Hedley, an avid (former) YouTuber, who popularized Omegle trolling in extremist circles.

The first warning sign came on Nov. 22, 2006, when an 18-year-old Miller was arrested for aggravated assault and possession of a weapon.

There is no universal profile for radical extremists, but there are some frequent indicators. Miller’s path to extremism is marked by several setbacks in his life and is complicated by a number of contradictions. His father is of Roma (also known as Gypsy) descent, and his mother is Mexican — not exactly the requisite Aryan stock for a neo-Nazi.

The first warning sign popped up on Nov. 22, 2006, when an 18-year-old Miller was arrested for aggravated assault and possession of a weapon, a Remington AirMaster pellet gun. Miller told federal investigators in March that he was convicted of firing a pellet gun out a window and hitting people, according to recent federal court records. New Jersey court records show one of his victims had a Latino surname.

In January 2007, Miller was arrested in North Brunswick where he was charged with dealing drugs, according to a review of New Jersey state court and local police records. In the booking report he is described as “a confirmed gang member.” Two months later, he was arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover cop in New Brunswick. He was also charged with selling marijuana, ecstasy and heroin. Miller pleaded guilty in Middlesex County Superior Court to the charges in 2007 and was sentenced to five years’ probation with the stipulation he acquire his GED and undergo random urine monitoring.

A year later, Miller appeared to have found purpose and belonging in the strict and rigorous training of Muay Thai, an ancient martial arts discipline. From that, he found success as a promisingamateur kickboxer, who was about to turn professional when a serious car accident ended that dream. He adjusted, though, and became kickboxing instructor at the gym where he trained. He supplemented his income with odd jobs.

According to a website calledRoma Gypsy Post, Miller also got “involved in Politics for the Good of the Roma communities of America and Europe.” Later, he became an active Republican. Soon, though, he began to doubt the validity of mainstream thought. To combat “fake news,” for example, Milleranointed himself a conservative, confrontational journalist, posting politely confrontational episodes on YouTube.

None of these pursuits endured. His worldview became fueled by anger and conspiracy theories.

Miller’s trajectory toward extremism also provides an example of the symbiosis that nourishes opposing radical ideologies. Social psychologists say that tension provides each side with a sense of first victimization, then blame and moral confirmation — a dynamic that can escalate to an extreme belief system, even violence. Terrorism experts call it reciprocal radicalization.

“You can’t understand terrorism by studying just the terrorist,” says Clark McCauley, a social psychologist, author and co-director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College. “Almost nobody everdecidesto go radical. It’s the back-and-forth between you and them that moves you. … It happens gradually over a period of time. Slowly, you change your view of the world and your place in it. You change your view of who’s dangerous and who’s on my side.” That trajectory applies to both extremes, left and right, McCauley said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News.

According to Miller himself, that back-and-forth reached its tipping point on Oct. 12, 2018 —the day he became “woke,” he said last year in one of his vlogs. On that evening, he attended an event at the Metropolitan Republican Club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Gavin McInnes was speaking. McInnes is founder of the Proud Boys, a far-right, neo-fascist organization that promotes and engages in political violence. Miller went there as a journalist without a portfolio. “I came there to cover the show and hang out with some friends,” he said. One of them was “a Jewish girl,’” he said, “cause I was friendly with the Jews at that time.”

‘I wanna go over there and instigate it, but the cops are here so we’ll be nice.’

The event was sold out; Miller couldn’t get inside. Instead, he shot video outside and livestreamed it on YouTube to show about 20 antifascist and left-wing protesters rattling barricades and shouting, “No Nazis, no KKK, no fascists USA.”

If Miller didn’t consider himself radical at that time, as he would later claim, he appeared headed in that direction. In thevideo he posted livefrom the event he said, “I wanna go over there and instigate it, but the cops are here so we’ll be nice. … I wanna f— them up real bad.”

Miller claims “some leader of antifa” knocked his phone out of his hand as he was shooting the street scene. A short time later, Miller was heading home, he claims, when the leader and 10 of his antifa followers attacked him. Police arrested three protesters and charged them with assaulting Miller and stealing his backpack. Two of those cases were resolved in a non-custodial pretrial diversion program; charges against the third were dropped.

“It was my first time seeing antifa up close,” Miller would later say in one of his video sessions. That is “how the radicalization started.” On that night in Manhattan, Miller saw his virtual enemies and allies in real battle, and according to him, it was then he decisively chose sides and embraced a new worldview.

Miller’s wasn’t the only brawl that night. In separate encounters, Proud Boys brutally beat protesters in plain view. Days later, 10 Proud Boys were arrested and charged with beating four protesters in a separate brawl that night. Nine of them pleaded guilty, and two were found guilty at trial. One of them was John Kinsman, a Proud Boy who lives in Morristown, whom prosecutors called “the single most vicious of all the attackers.”

In the blink of an eye, Miller was being pursued by national media outlets.

“I know enough about history to know what happened in Europe in the thirties when political street brawls were allowed to go ahead without any type of check from the criminal justice system,” said Supreme Court Justice Mark Dwyerat Kinsman’s sentencing.

In the blink of an eye, Miller was being pursued by national media outlets. “They tried to kill me,” he toldNewsweek, two days after the altercation in Manhattan. “These were terrorists.” A few days later, he sat down for aninterview with the One America News Network, in which he detailed his victimization and heroism.

Miller’s story quickly gained traction on Telegram and other encrypted platforms preferred by the far right. Miller, the courageous victim, was about to become a star. He even got an endorsem*nt from McInnes, already a superstar in those circles: “They jumped the journalist because they sensed he was pro-Trump. It was a hate crime.”

Over the ensuing months, Miller’s narrative expanded.

He claimedhe was frequentlythreatened and “doxxed” — publicly shamed online — by people he said were affiliated with antifa and Black Lives Matter. He claimed as a result he lost his gym membership, and with it, his profession as a personal trainer after an onslaught of harassing phone calls to the gym owner, which prompted him to kick Miller out. The same tactics cost him his part-time job pumping gas, he said.

That is when the Gypsy Crusader was born.

‘That is why I became so f—ing radical.’

“That is why I became so f—ing radical.That is why I want these f—ing n—-s, and these f—ing Jews, and these f—ing communists to face the f—ing wall,” he exclaimed in a BitChute posting last October. “Who was gonna stand up for me? There was no one. … There are people who will take it all away from you. …”

This exemplifies a stage of radicalization McCauley calls “unfreezing” — when old connections and ideas are unfrozen, and then replaced by new connections and ideas, which are refrozen in a new social network.

In one of his academic papers, Albert Bandura, a noted psychologist and professor at Stanford University,described this process of breaking down barriers

as “moral disengagement,” which can operate through a variety of processes, including attribution of blame to victims and dehumanization of victims.

Miller broadened his grievance with online rants about Blacks, Hispanics and liberal politicians. He claimed allegiance to the Boogaloo, a loosely organized extremist movement that supports a second American Civil War. He started to praise Hitler and “The Turner Diaries” during his vlogging sessions. He went all in.

“I have no trouble believing that Mr. Miller veered even farther right after 2018,” said Moira Meltzer-Cohen, a lawyer who represented the three protesters arrested in the scuffle with Miller in New York City, “but he was at that event, and in that scuffle, precisely because he was already deeply down a particular kind of far-right rabbit hole. He was already talking on social media about QAnon and, in particular, hom*ophobic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories.”

‘If somebody messes with me, they’re gonna be in for the beating of their lives.’

At the time, her investigators, Meltzer-Cohen told NJ Spotlight News, found a wealth of revealing postings by Miller on various platforms, mostly Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, all of which have since been taken offline. In summaries of those postings, according to excerpts that Meltzer-Cohen shared with NJ Spotlight News, those investigators wrote: “Every planned parenthood should be burned to the ground. … Antifa members jihadist and feminazis want violence they don’t understand they are screwing with the wrong people. … We are headed for a civil war. … Won’t be long before we have to fight back. … If somebody messes with me, they’re gonna be in for the beating of their lives.”

“So, based on what we know about the way social media auto-curates, that what you’re exposed to online is based on what you have already sought out and liked, I feel comfortable saying that if anything further radicalized him it was more likely an algorithm than a minor fight that he picked as a result of his already very far-right worldview,” Meltzer-Cohen said.

Miller, in his posts, was outraged that theFBI went to his parents’ homelast May, looking for him regarding comments he had made online.

Miller appeared particularly incensed by analtercation last year between Black Lives Matters protesters and his motheroutside her New Brunswick home. Tormel Pittman, one of the protesters, posted this about the incident: “I decided to walk at a North Brunswick demonstration this morning, While we were walking this Latino lady stood on her porch … yelling ‘No Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter’ while pumping her fist.”

That protest was followed up, Miller claimed, with a phone threat to burn down his parents’ house.

Miller was articulating what social psychologists refer to as a “grievance” — the foundation of radicalism. That grievance often triggers “narcissistic rage,” which in turn prompts aggression. There are two types of aggression, McCauley explains — emotional and instrumental.

“Emotional aggression is associated with anger and does not calculate long-term consequences. The reward of emotional aggression is hurting someone who has hurt you. Instrumental aggression is more calculating — the use of aggression as a means to other ends. Terrorist aggression may involve emotional aggression, especially for those who do the killing, but those who plan terrorist acts are usually thinking about what they want to accomplish. They aim to inflict long-term costs on their enemy and to gain long-term advantage for themselves.”

So, where did Miller fit in that paradigm? “Emotional for sure at the beginning. By the time he is a vlog success, probably some instrumental,” McCauley said in the interview with NJ Spotlight News. “Unfortunately, (it is) often an escalating trajectory of hostility, which can get to violence.”

“(Miller’s) case reminds me ofTamerlan Tsarnaev— remember him? The Boston Marathon bomber, the older brother?” said McCauley, the editor of“Putting the Capitol Breach in Context,”a special edition of the journal “Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict.”

Tsarnaev too was a boxer trained in martial arts, a New England Golden Gloves heavyweight champion, who was considering turning pro. He lost in the national competition in “a decision that drew boos from the audience… He went back into training, fully expecting to win next year.

“…Then, whoever runs the Golden Gloves made a new rule: To compete in the Golden Gloves, you had to be born in America. He was born in the Caucasus. This took away his whole meaning in life. … After that, he started getting in various kinds of trouble,” and soon turned to Islam, McCauley said. “He blamed a system set against immigrants. So if he couldn’t be a winner as American, his foreign and Muslim identity was what was left.” He became “more and more radicalized. … You can see how it could escalate from there.”

Today, the radicalization process has been supercharged by social media outlets, which provide a never-ending supply of conspiracy theories and social attacks.

“Now, no matter how rare and weird your opinion, you can find people out there who agree with you and you can interact with them,” McCauley said. “Then you can form your own group with your own group dynamics and your own political identity.”

In his academic paper “Psychology of Terrorism,

” Randy Borum, a professor and coordinator of Strategy and Intelligence Studies at the University of South Florida, spells out how that can play out: “The result of this devaluation of others — what some have termed ‘malignant narcissism’ — muffles their internal voice of reason and morality,” he writes.

“Furthermore, whatever sense of ‘esteem’ has developed in that process is extraordinarily fragile. This makes the individual particularly vulnerable to any slights, insults or ideas that threaten to shatter the facade of self-worth.”

As for Miller in 2018, the enemy initially was comprised of specific people — members of antifa and Black Lives Matter — who were attacking him. Then it expanded to include all Blacks, Jews, hom*osexuals — and soon, the United States government.

And that is precisely the trajectory that Miller followed. After the 2018 episode in Manhattan, he abandoned his lone-wolf journalistic pursuits and decided to become a crude, but effective online raconteur of hate. After stalling out as a kickboxer and a journalist, Miller “found an angle where he has another talent to develop,” McCauley said.

‘We all gotta sacrifice for something, you know what I mean?’

Miller became an overnight hit in extremist circles. The more abhorrent his message, the more attention he received. Soon he was banned on most mainstream social media platforms including Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and more. He turned to darker websites and his fans followed him to DLive, bitwave.tv, and reuploaded to BitChute. His favorite was Telegram.

Not only did he troll unknown teenagers on Omegle, but he also called for the murders of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. He celebrated the mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque by white supremacist Brendan Tarrant, and has expressed a desire to engage in violent insurrection himself.

Ironically, his fame also attracted unexpected enemies who considered him an unworthy spokesman of the cause due to his Roma heritage. Last year, he was targeted by a group that included members of theneo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division. One member of the group even went to Miller’s house several times to scare him. Miller claims to have received numerous threats from the group and to have been followed by members of the group. In January, numerous calls were made to local police about an unconfirmed break-in and robbery at his apartment in Fort Lauderdale.

In November, a dispirited Miller took to YouTube and returned toportraying himself as the victimas he speculated about the prospect of being killed.

“We all gotta sacrifice for something, you know what I mean?” he said. “I’m old. I’m getting old. I’m 32 years old, I don’t have children, I don’t have a girlfriend. If they kill me, what is lost? Nothing. Nothing is lost. The only thing that it will do is accelerate what must happen, that’s it. My life was worth something.”