Tag: patriot front
Behind Fascist 'Warrior' Facade, Patriot Front Is Just Another Grift

Behind Fascist 'Warrior' Facade, Patriot Front Is Just Another Grift

One of the constants of the world of right-wing extremists is that their leaders all find ways to turn their authoritarian activism into a moneymaking operation that wrings funds out of their gullible followers. Even if these leaders buy their own bullshit—and most of them do—they also are assiduous in creating revenue streams generated from the eager suckers who lap it up.

Take Patriot Front, the neofascist marching gang that recently drew national headlines for being busted outside a Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, for example. A recent examination of the organization’s operations by Mackenzie Ryan of The Guardian found that Patriot Front’s ability to spread its brand of hate politics by operating as a “white nationalist pyramid scheme” that recruits angry young men with a vision of creating a “warrior elite,” the reality of which is remarkably buffoonish.

“No other white supremacist group operating in the US today is able to match Patriot Front’s ability to produce media, ability to mobilize across the country, and ability to finance,” Anti-Defamation League researcher Morgan Moon told Ryan. “That’s what makes them a particular concern.”

The man atop Patriot Front’s pyramid is Thomas Rousseau, the 24-year-old Texas man who founded Patriot Front in 2017 out of the ashes of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, under whose banner he had marched in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017, alongside James Alex Fields, the man who later that day drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Fitting his politics, Rousseau runs Patriot Front in remarkably authoritarian fashion: ordering his followers to follow exercise regimens and to participate both in online ideological discussion and real-world “actions” that both spread the group’s propaganda and line Rousseau’s pockets.

Most of its recruitment begins online, in gaming chat rooms, message boards, or social media channels where they seek out young white males seething with various resentments. Part of its marketing, as Stephen Piggot of the Western States Center told Ryan, involves creating video packages aimed at younger audiences. Simultaneously, he says, much of their appeal involves the group’s emphasis on translating the ideology into real-world action.

Recruits are particularly drawn in by Patriot Front’s emphasis on creating “young warriors” and a “warrior elite,” Moon said. This includes an emphasis on fitness and diet, and is manifested in the real-world paramilitary training sessions it organizes.

Once recruits sign on, they’re quickly drawn up in Patriot Front’s authoritarian operations. They’re required to attend monthly online meetups and street demonstrations, and to meet a weekly activism quota that the group’s top lieutenants, called network directors, monitor with spreadsheets. Should a recruit fail to meet those requirements, Rousseau expels them, Moon said.

A data leak of Patriot Front chat rooms published earlier this year by the journalism collective Unicorn Riot revealed these operations in detail. Rousseau and his network directors oversaw the chats, organized by region. They organized real-world “actions” in the chatrooms, such as pasting propaganda stickers and fliers around the downtown areas of cities where they lived, as well as hoisting banners with their slogans and logo over freeways on overpasses.

The “actions” included a number of criminal acts of vandalism, such as defacing memorials, statues, and murals in highly public places. These included a memorial to George Floyd in New York City, as well as other works of public art that provoked their ire, such as a mural supporting Black Lives Matter in Olympia, Washington, and depictions of Black heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman.

They also clearly believed they could do so with impunity. “As our recent actions have shown we can walk down busy avenues at prime time in Seattle and deface the largest most well protected mural in shitlib Olympia without so much as being accosted once,” one member who apparently participated in the Olympia vandalization wrote.

A more recent Unicorn Riot report exposed how members of Patriot Front participated in a likely hate crime by vandalizing an LGBTQ youth center in Springfield, Illinois, in November 2021. Video recordings made by the group’s members showed them stenciling their logo over a rainbow mural on one side of the Phoenix center, a nonprofit that provides housing and support to at-risk LGBTQ youth.

The video shows them applying the stencil, fleeing the scene, and then discussing how they targeted the building because “it’s a gay and trans youth center.” They also reveled in the distress they expected to create: “Those f*gs are gonna lose their mind,” boasted one of the vandals.

In all, Patriot Front records showed the group responsible for at least 29 acts of destruction of public art honoring Black, Mexican, Asian, and LGBTQ people. According to the ADL, Patriot Front has been responsible for up to 14 hate incidents a day.

Rousseau and his lieutenants set quotas for members to engage in various “actions,” including regional group quotas of at least “10 big actions a month.” Acts of vandalism are recorded in a spreadsheet.

The group also monitors its roughly 220 members’ personal lives and is fanatically controlling. Members are required to regularly log their weight and fitness regimen, follow an apparently disordered diet obsessively, and update their superiors on their “bad habits,” such as pornography and junk food. Leaders pointedly chastise members for failing to participate in enough chats or meetings or to file their mandatory fitness updates.

On top of all these demands, Rousseau charges his followers a premium for the same Patriot Front propaganda material that he then requires them to spread, according to Southern Poverty Law Center researcher Jeff Tischauser. Network directors are required to push members to buy new flyers and then spread them monthly.

“In this sense, Patriot Front is close to a white nationalist pyramid scheme,” Tischauser observed.

The scheme has created some internal turmoil. Researchers say Patriot Front chats they have obtained include complaints from members about the constant expense of buying new stickers, stencils, and other propaganda materials that Rousseau both requires they buy while charging them a premium.

There have been other cracks in Rousseau’s façade, notably the June arrests of 31 Patriot Front marchers in Coeur d’Alene—all of whose identities were publicly exposed—while attempting to create a riot at the city’s annual Pride in the Park event. The court cases arising from those arrests got under way this month, with Rousseau among the defendants.

“They got kind of the opposite of what they wanted: they weren’t able to disrupt the LGBTQ Pride events, and they got a whole lot of mainstream media attention,” Piggot said.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

White Nationalists Arrested In Riot Plot Near Idaho Pride Event

White Nationalists Arrested In Riot Plot Near Idaho Pride Event

By Joseph Ax

(Reuters) - Police in northwest Idaho arrested more than two dozen members of a white nationalist group on Saturday and charged them with planning to stage a riot near a LGBTQ pride event, authorities said.

Lee White, police chief in the city of Coeur D'Alene, told reporters 31 members of Patriot Front face misdemeanor charges of conspiracy to riot and additional charges could come later.

A local resident spotted the men, wearing white masks and carrying shields, getting into a U-Haul truck and called police, telling the emergency dispatcher it "looked like a little army," according to White. Police pulled the truck over about 10 minutes after the call.

Video taken at the scene of the arrest and posted online showed about 20 men kneeling next to the truck with their hands bound, wearing similar khaki pants, blue shirts, white masks and baseball caps.

Police recovered at least one smoke grenade and documents that included an "operations plan" from the truck, as well as shields and shin guards, all of which made their intentions clear, White said.

"They came to riot downtown," he said.

The men come from at least 11 states, White said, including Texas, Colorado and Virginia.

Patriot Front formed in the aftermath of the 2017 white nationalist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when it broke off from another extremist organization, Vanguard America, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

An Inside Look At Patriot Front’s Clownish Fascism

An Inside Look At Patriot Front’s Clownish Fascism

A data leak of internal communications for the explicitly fascist group Patriot Front published by Unicorn Riot last month did more than simply expose its members to public identification on social media—though that has been happening apace, much to the chagrin of both the people whose identities have been revealed as well as those who haven’t but are in line to be.

Most of all, it opened a window into the world of these young, white male extremists, and how they are working to establish their organization within the American body politic. Besides revealing embarrassing personal details such as their porn habits and the amateurish combat “training” sessions for members, it also gave researchers a clear view of their recruitment methods and targets, as well as the breadth of their reach within the mainstream—including the military.

The leak—published by Unicorn Riot, a journalism collective focused on right-wing extremism—featured thousands of pages of internal conversations within some 400 gigabytes of data. This data originated on Patriot Front’s internal Rocket.Chat boards for members and prospective recruits.

The portrait that emerges, as Gizmodo observes, is of an organization “highly focused on the recruitment of ardent nationalists and segregationists, and of Hitler-worshiping fascists who’ve grown tired of concealing fantasies of enacting his Final Solution.”

Patriot Front grew out of the now-defunct neofascist Iron March online forum, which spawned a range of violent neo-Nazi offshoots, from the murderous Atomwaffen Division and the domestic terrorist group “The Base“ to the West Coast-based Rise Above Movement, to the Vanguard America organization. That organization marched at Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where one of its members, James Alex Fields, mowed down an antifascist counterprotester, Heather Heyer, with his car afterward.

Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, was photographed standing with Fields and other Vanguard America marchers. He was a Vanguard America member at the time. However, Patriot Front grew out of a desire to reorganize and dedicate white supremacists after Charlottesville, with an open embrace of fascism along the way.

One of Patriot Front’s fliers—its primary recruitment tactic—reads “Fascism: The Next Step for America.” Its manifesto declares: “Our national way of life faces complete annihilation as our culture and heritage are attacked from all sides.”

A report examining the data from Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center found that one in five of the young men applying to join Patriot Front have ties to the U.S. military. Of the 87 applicants on the chat, 18 of them (21%) claimed to have current or former military experience; one of these, claiming to be an ex-Marine, told the chat that he is currently employed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The chats showed that the applicants were drawn to the organization for a variety of reasons:

The Patriot Front applicants, listed by number, who claimed ties to the military expressed a variety of motivations for seeking entrance to the group. Applicant 441215, who said he lived in San Diego and served as a former Marine and current DHS employee, told Patriot Front that he “found out about the Jews while in the marines.” … Applicant 252979, who claimed to be a member of the Army Reserve, used derogatory language about LBGTQ people and stated he “first saw” them while in the military. Applicant 681985 claimed to have served in the military from 2005 to 2013 and live in Salt Lake City. He said that he started as a Republican, but after his first deployment he started watching Alex Jones and entertaining conspiracies related to 9/11. After his second deployment, he said he “shifted focus and questioned things” while becoming a national socialist.

As we’ve explored recently, one of the primary dangers of commingling far-right extremism with military service is that the people who by training and nature are skilled at handling weapons and materials and are knowledgeable about engagement tactics are being radicalized into their seditionist extremism, the kind we saw on display at the Jan. 6 insurrection. The chats revealed this danger explicitly: One applicant who claimed to have served as an Army Ranger listed “great land-navigation, great physical fitness, able to clear rooms” as well as “basic medical training” as skills he would bring to Patriot Front.

Another applicant boasted of experience in “Marine martial arts,” adding that he had been “trained in firearms.” Others claimed they had worked in military intelligence, had backgrounds in computer networking and programming, and were conversant in signals intelligence. One who said he was an ex-Marine claimed to be a leader of a hate group, the Kansas Active Club.

Rousseau and senior members called “network directors” oversaw the chats, organized by region. They organized real-world “actions” in the chatrooms, such as pasting propaganda stickers and fliers around the downtown areas of cities where they lived, as well as hoisting banners with their slogans and logo over freeways on overpasses.

The “actions,” as Gizmodo notes, included a number of criminal acts of vandalism, such as defacing memorials, statues, and murals in highly public places. These included a memorial to George Floyd in New York City, as well as other works of public art that provoked their ire, such as a mural supporting Black Lives Matter in Olympia, Washington, and depictions of Black heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman.

They also clearly believed they could do so with impunity. “As our recent actions have shown we can walk down busy avenues at prime time in Seattle and deface the largest most well protected mural in shitlib Olympia without so much as being accosted once,” one member who apparently participated in the Olympia vandalization wrote.

Most recently, on Jan. 21, Patriot Front organized a march in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the anti-abortion “March For Life.” About 40 of them formed a phalanx that eventually was forced to separate from the main crowd by counterprotesters and police.

Unicorn Riot reported that Patriot Front secured a police escort for that march by placing a “false” 911 call about themselves:

Thomas Rousseau directed member ‘Benjamin WI‘ to call police “from a burner [phone]” as Patriot Front left their nearby camp for D.C., pretending to be a concerned citizen. Rousseau said this step was taken to “soften the police up before our big visual contact on the bridge, and provide a little confusion and misinfo that’s within the realm of honest dialogue.”

Rousseau and his lieutenants set quotas for members to engage in various “actions,” including regional group quotas of at least “10 big actions a month.” Acts of vandalism were recorded in a spreadsheet.

The group also monitors its roughly 220 members’ personal lives and is fanatically controlling. Members are required to regularly log their weight and fitness regimen, follow an apparently disordered diet obsessively, and update their superiors on their “bad habits,” such as pornography and junk food. Leaders pointedly chastised members for failing to participate in enough chats or meetings or to file their mandatory fitness updates.

This kind of routine humiliation was evident in several of the “training” videos that were uncovered in the leak:

Another leak unrelated to the data—published this week by Daily Dot—also reveals that Patriot Front members toured Europe in 2019, connecting with other far-right groups there and participating in several marches, including the anniversary of Poland’s Independence Day in Warsaw. A man who says he infiltrated the group for three years provided Daily Dot with a document detailing the excursion.

Among the groups Patriot Front leaders connected with in Europe were the National Independence in Poland; CasaPound and Forza Nuova in Italy; Verrogs in Latvia; Nordic Resistance Movement in Sweden; and the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany and its affiliate, Junge Nationalisten.

Patriot Front members recorded how they ate at regional restaurants and visited such tourist destinations as the Vatican. When they were in Sweden, members of the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement served them a traditional Swedish Christmas dinner. A Junge Nationalisten member also gifted the American fascists with Nazi paraphernalia.

This is how the unapologetic young fascists of Patriot Front, offspring of the white nationalist alt-right, are planning their long-term future: recruiting and organizing in remote corners of the internet, spreading propaganda, and building an authoritarian army of willing dupes—some of them with serious military training—while connecting globally with fellow participants in the rising tide of far-right extremism.

On paper, it sounds frighteningly impressive. However, the data leak revealed their amateurish clownishness both in their personal lives and as an “operationally secure” organization. The members who are having their associations with the organization exposed to the world are finding that out now.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Bust of York in Portland, Oregon.

A Wave Of Fascist Vandalism That Can’t Be Ignored

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Unapologetically fascist organizations like Patriot Front pose something of a dilemma: They are numerically small but intense, and rely on highly public stunts as a way of attracting attention and, they believe, recruits to their cause. In some regards, it makes sense to ignore them as much as possible and deny them the oxygen they crave.

But at times, the stunts they pull demand a response, such as when they brazenly marched in Washington, D.C., with police escorts in both February 2020 and January 2021. That's been especially the case the past month, as Patriot Front extremists have been busily defacing monuments to African Americans, particularly memorials to George Floyd in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, as well as a bust of a Black explorer with the Lewis and Clark expedition in Portland, Oregon.

Patriot Front, the brainchild of a young Texas neo-Nazi named Thomas Rousseau, explicitly embraces fascism in its writings and recruitment material ("Fascism: The Next Step for America" reads one of its fliers). Its primary strategy is to perform attention-grabbing stunts—plastering their hateful stickers around communities and campuses, waving white-nationalist banners from freeways, harassing leftist protest groups, and occasionally organizing marches intended to create the impression that their numbers are larger than they are in reality—that force the media to cover them, which they believe will eventually draw more recruits their way.

Many of these tactics have grown ineffective over time, including the freeway banners and fliers, which increasingly draw little media attention. As a result, Patriot Front increasingly appears to be engaging in more brazen attacks on leftists, particularly by vandalizing monuments.

The first such attack occurred earlier this month in Philadelphia, when vandals sprayed white paint covering a mural dedicated to George Floyd in the Olney section of the city. They then spray-painted stencils featuring Patriot Front logos and slogans over the white paint.

The mural had been commissioned by the North 5th Street Revitalization Project in summer 2020 in the wake of Floyd's murder by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25.

Local residents were furious, Channel 6 ABC reported. "It's disrespectful. It's disrespectful," said one passerby.

"You don't touch his face. After what we've been through in the whole country and around the world? You don't touch his face," said Scott Hilton of Mt. Airy.

The Philadelphia Police Department said the vandalism was under investigation.

The Brooklyn defacement was even more brazen. Early last Thursday morning someone threw black paint onto the bust of Floyd -- dedicated on Juneteenth at Flatbush Junction near Brooklyn College -- and then stenciled graffiti featuring Patriot Front's online URL onto its base.

Security cameras caught images of four men with bandanas covering their faces walking toward the memorial early Thursday morning. One of the men appeared to be shaking a can of spray paint. Another image caught the license plate number of the vehicle that appeared to have brought the men to that location. New York police said they were investigating the incident as a hate crime.

"It's the epitome of not only anti-Blackness and racism, but it is also about the lack of even basic human decency about the life of George Floyd," Imani Henry, an organizer with Equality for Flatbush, told the New York Times."For someone to desecrate an innocent person's tribute is just beyond the pale," Henry said.

"Patriot Front is explicit in its exclusion of people of color from its conception of pan-European identity as the authentic America," Susan Corke, the head of SPLC's Intelligence Project, told HuffPost's Christopher Mathias in a statement. "And their method of operation is to stage offensive racist propaganda stunts. Thus this abhorrent, hateful defacement of the George Floyd statue is more of the same garbage."

The incident in Portland involved a rogue memorial to York, the African American explorer who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition west to Oregon in 1803 as Clark's slave and is believed to have been the first Black man to have reached the Pacific Ocean. In February, a bust of York—composed of wood and liquid urethane but simulating the appearance of a bronze—was placed atop a pedestal in Portland's Mount Taber park that formerly had featured a statue of onetime Oregonian editor Harvey Scott, which had been pulled down during an anti-police protest in October 2020.

The bust's artist is unknown, and city officials have discussed replacing it, perhaps with a more durable version of the same memorial. It was attacked and vandalized earlier this month by a woman who was recorded spraying paint on its base; 43-year-old Jeanette Grode was subsequently charged with criminal mischief for the act.

But Sunday morning's vandalism—white paint once again sprayed over parts of the bust and the pedestal, with a stenciled logo painted in red over the plaque marking the bust's commemoration—was clearly the work, once again, of someone affiliated with Patriot Front.

These acts serve as ongoing reminders of the limitations of the strategy of denying attention to hate groups seeking it: Almost inevitably, their hateful rhetoric generates real-world criminality and violence directed at vulnerable minority communities that cannot be ignored. And their small numbers, in the end, are often inconsequential: It only takes one or two of these violent extremists to wreak a great deal of havoc on the public.

Patriot Front in particular has been gearing up for the post-Trump era, counting on a strategy of "red-pilling" people already radicalized online by militias and the "Boogaloo" movement into extreme neo-Nazi beliefs. Yet they mostly view rival far-right groups with contempt.

"Proud Boys are a bunch of cucks," wrote one Patriot Front member from Texas. "They call themselves 'Western Chauvinists' which means they are a bunch of liberals who don't like PC culture and 'snowflakes' yet they are too scared to actually stand up to these things in a meaningful way lest they be called RACISTS!!!!"

One Patriot Front member, Bryan Betancur of Silver Spring, Maryland, currently faces charges for participating in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Betancur, who voiced support for the man who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in August 2017, actually wore an ankle bracelet as part of his probation for a burglary conviction, and the evidence against him includes data from that bracelet. A hearing on Betancur's status today in federal court noted that discovery was still under way in the case.