FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – A South Florida man known to dress up as comic book villains and post online about starting a race-based civil war in the United States was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison.
Paul Miller, 33 of Fort Lauderdale, had pled guilty in June to charges of possessing a firearm as a convicted felon in 2018, possessing ammunition as a convicted felon in 2021, and possessing an unregistered short-barreled rifle in 2021.
U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal set the sentence Tuesday, which includes three years of supervised release after the prison time.
Miller was taken into custody after an early-morning FBI raid in the 1300 block of Southwest Sixth Street in Fort Lauderdale on March 2.
According to the arrest affidavit, a federal search warrant conducted at Miller’s address led to law enforcement finding firearm parts that could be assembled into an unregistered short-barreled rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Prosecutors say Miller admitted that he bought the ammunition and tried to build his own rifle in part to learn about firearms manufacturing in preparation for a coming civil war.
The Anti-Defamation League had identified Miller as a “volatile white supremacist-accelerationist,” citing videos across several online platforms where he was seen taunting with vulgar language, anti-Semitic rants, racial and homophobic slurs, sexist narratives and a deluge of hate speech.
In some of the videos, he was dressed up as the Riddler or the Joker.
Miller had been convicted of three separate felony offenses in New Jersey prior to applying for a concealed weapon license in Florida in 2018 and falsely claiming that he had never been convicted of a felony, authorities said.