Holocaust Museum Suspect a Neo-Nazi

Following the chilling news that a gunman opened fire in Washington D.C.'s Holocaust Museum today, resulting in the reported death of one security guard, police are now confirming that their suspect is James Von Brunn, a white supremacist from Maryland. According to the Washington Post, the 88-year-old Von Brunn—who is now in critical condition at a D.C. hospital—wrote books and maintained a website espousing white supremacy and neo-Nazi slogans. The New York Times reports that Von Brunn was convicted in 1983 of storming the Federal Reserve with a handgun, hunting knife, and sawed-off shotgun in an attempt to kidnap members of the board and "spread awareness of their responsibility... for the nation's economic difficulties." On his website, Von Brunn blamed his subsequent time in a federal prison to being "convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge." Von Brunn, who claims to be a Mensa member and WWII veteran, worked for decades in the insular world of anti-Semitic media. Von Brunn's online book Kill The Best Gentiles consists of "hundreds of pages of conspiracy theories that include Holocaust denial... and wild webs of fantasy seeking to link the Federal Reserve Bank, the Illuminati, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx in a grand, centuries-long story of Jewish plotting against white people," reports the Post. Von Brunn worked closely with America's most influential anti-Semitic writers, including the author of The Turner Diaries, famed for inspiring Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.