The Washington Post has a story on James W. Von Brunn, the accused Holocaust Museum shooter, and his life-long connections with paleocon and libertarian extremist causes and people: Holocaust Museum Shooting Suspect Had History of Hate, Signs of Breaking Point.

John de Nugent, an acquaintance who describes himself as a white separatist, noticed the change when they last spoke two weeks ago.

“He said his Social Security had been cut and that he was barely making it,” de Nugent said. “He felt it was the direct result of someone in Washington looking at his Web site.”

In one of his e-mail blasts expressing his white supremacist views, the man police sources say shot and killed a security guard yesterday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum told readers that they shouldn’t expect to hear from him again. Von Brunn was shot and critically wounded by museum guards.

He was about to give away his computer, his primary connection to the fringe world of radical racists. He was living hand to mouth.

The e-mails were getting violent in tone: “It’s time to kill all the Jews.”

Todd Blodgett, a white supremacist turned FBI informant (who worked for paleo-kook Willis Carto), told the Post that Von Brunn attended meetings in support of the fascist British National Party:

Von Brunn sometimes spoke of having fought for the wrong side in World War II, Blodgett said, and the two men sometimes attended meetings in Arlington County of the American Friends of the British National Party, which raised funds for the British white supremacist group.

Now that Von Brunn has apparently snapped and killed someone, his friends are worried that he’ll make them look bad. Yes, really.

De Nugent called von Brunn a genius but described the shooting as the act of “a loner and a hothead.”

“The responsible white separatist community condemns this,” he said. “It makes us look bad.”

(Hat tip: David Benzion.)