Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Patriot Front, White Nationalist Thugs, Deface Statues Dedicated to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Are These Skirmishes in a Brewing Civil War?
Hate groups see defacing of memorials to Black martyrs as a means of increasing racial tension and recruiting White Nationalists. (Chad Davis)
July 5, 2021
By Bill Berkowitz
Days after a statue of George Floyd was recently unveiled on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, it was covered with black spray paint and marked with a stencil for Patriot Front, a white nationalist group. The group’s name was also spray painted in early June on a mural of Floyd in Philadelphia. A Floyd statue in Newark, New Jersey was similarly defaced. In Louisville, Kentucky, the “Say Their Names” mural, created last July to honor the lives of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others killed by police, was recently vandalized. According to WKYT Kentucky, the name “Patriot Front” was spray painted on the mural in three places.
There are so many far-right anti-government white nationalist neo-Nazi groups out there that it is difficult to keep up. You’ve got Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, 3-Percenters, Boogaloo Bois, and Patriot Front. In November 2019, ProPublica described Patriot Front as “one of the more prominent white supremacist groups in the U.S.”
In David Neiwert’s recent Daily Kos story titled “Spread of fascist vandalism by Patriot Front goons a reminder of the limits of ignoring hate groups,” he calls the group as an “unapologetically fascist organization,” “numerically small but intense,” “rely[ing] on highly public stunts as a way of attracting attention and, they believe, recruits to their cause.”
While spreading propaganda appears to be the day-to-day work of Patriot Front, its chat groups are rife with talk about guns and violence; laced with anti-Semitic and anti-immigration posts. ProPublica reported that “Patriot Front members make clear in their chats that such actions — almost always recorded by one of the masked members — have multiple aims: to frighten, to provide material for their own propaganda efforts on social media, and to recruit. The drive to recruit might help explain why college campuses are Patriot Front’s most common targets.”
Patriot Front has held demonstrations in Washington, D.C., waved banners from freeways, posted stickers around college campuses, and has more recently have dedicated itself to “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.”
According to Neiwert, a longtime reporter of right-wing movements:
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.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of Hate Groups, points out that the white nationalist Patriot Front “broke off from Vanguard America in the aftermath of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, of August 12, 2017.” Evidently SPLC reported, “Rousseau and his loyalists broke away from VA after a months-long feud with VA’s leader Dillon Irizarry”:
Rousseau’s conscious rebranding under the banner of PF was a direct consequence of “Unite the Right” organizers’ inability to control the rally’s presentation. Swastikas and other Nazi-era imagery was prominent among attendees who were also chanting slogans such as “Jews will not replace us.” PF was one of a number of hate groups that sought to recast itself as mainstream, patriotic Americans by dressing up their propaganda and rhetoric in Americana.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, “Patriot Front is a white supremacist group whose members maintain that their ancestors conquered America and bequeathed it to them alone. They define themselves as American fascists or American nationalists who are focused on preserving America’s identity as a European-American identity.”
* “America is our nation, passed down to us by our fathers, and so long as we live, the enemies of our people will not stand unopposed.” Patriot Front, Twitter, November 6, 2017
* “This nation is the property of the founding stock and no one else.” Braxton Bragg, Twitter, October 1, 2017
* “The American Identity is not merely given upon birth, it is seized through the potential of one's blood, and the extent to which they fulfill their natural duty to their people.” Patriot Front, Gab.ai, October 1, 2017
* “The American identity was forged in a struggle between civilizations that ended in victory for our ancestors.” Patriot Front, Twitter, September 17, 2017
Over the past few years, there have been debates within white nationalist neo-Nazi hate groups about optics; how best to portray themselves and present their ideas to the public. While some groups prefer smash mouth politics, most of Patriot Front’s public activities focus on using the American flag and flag gear as a prop for rallies, and posting of flyers on telephone poles and buildings on or near college campuses.
A few years back, flyers appearing on the campus of West Virginia University in Morgantown, attempted to brand the organization as a “fraternity dedicated to survival and fitness.”
At the time, Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told WVPB’s Dave Mistich: “If you look at the Patriot Front and the Patriots of Appalachia, they're very much cloaking their racist ideologies in imagery of patriotism, liberty and freedom-loving Americans. And, so, when you look at that, if you're just a bypasser on the street you don't think, ‘Oh my god that's a hate group.’ You think, ‘What is this?’ -- and all they really want is for someone to be curious enough to go down that perverse rabbit hole and come out the other end having been indoctrinated and radicalized.”
As ProPublica’s Carol Schaeffer and Fritz Zimmermann noted, “The organization is not about its members,” the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, once wrote to its members in the secret chats. “It is about its goals. Each person behind the mask is just another awoken member of the nation, who could be anyone who’s had enough.”
Given the recent spate of statue defacements, it appears that Patriot Front has graduated from theatricality to outright abhorrent vandalism. How this vandalism promotes Patriot Front’s goal of spreading its ideology and increasing its numbers is anybody’s guess.
Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland, California-based freelance writer covering right-wing movements. His work has appeared in BuzzFlash, The Nation, Huffington Post, The Progressive, AlterNet, Street Sheet, In These Times, and many other print and online publications, as well as being cited in several books.
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