On January 21, the day after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, Keith Luke of Brockton, MA, was arrested after allegedly shooting three black immigrants from Cape Verde. Two of the three died. Luke also reportedly told police he planned to attack a synagogue and “kill as many Jews as possible.” He later carved a swastika into his forehead while awaiting trial in jail.

 

Less than three months later, on April 4, Richard Andrew Poplawski shot four Pittsburgh police officers, killing three, after responding to a domestic dispute at his home. Poplawski had posted racist and anti-Semitic views on websites and warned of America being controlled by a cabal of Jews. The three deaths were the most suffered by law enforcement in a single act of violence by a domestic political extremist since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

 

In June there were three violent incidents by white racists. On June 10, James von Brunn walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and gunned down an African-American security guard. Von Brunn had been active in the white supremacist movement for more than four decades.

 

Two days later, the executive director of Minutemen American Defense (MAD), an anti-immigrant vigilante group that patrols the Arizona-Mexico border, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder for killing a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter. Shawna Forde was helped by MAD Operations Director Jason Eugene “Gunny” Bush, and Albert Robert Gaxiola, a local member of MAD. Bush supposedly has ties to the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations in Idaho, a group from which Forde wanted to recruit.

 

On June 25, Dennis Mahon and his brother Daniel were indicted in Arizona in connection with a mail bomb sent in 2004 to a diversity office in Scottsdale, AZ, that injured three people. A former imperial dragon of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan, Dennis Mahon remaine actives in extremist circles until his arrest.

-Noel Brinkerhoff