September 7, 2022

By William Berkowitz

At demonstrations, they’ve got matching hoodies, hats, shirts and chinos. Prepared for violence, they don matching shin guards like catchers in baseball, and wield red, white and blue shields. They all wear body cameras so their media team can process and post collected footage. Some are calling them modern-day media masters as they recruit youth to become young warriors and reclaim America. Welcome to the world of the Patriot Front: A well-oiled white nationalist enterprise resembling a pyramid scheme,

Thirty-one Patriot Front members were arrested in June, packed into the back of a U-Haul near a Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Pride event. According to authorities, the group was preparing to launch an assault on the celebrants.

According to The Guardian’s MacKenzie Ryan (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/02/patriot-front-recruits-members-young-pyramid-scheme), “The mass arrest not only revealed the names of members of an extremist group that had long worked to keep those hidden, it provided extremist experts with new insight into how the group is meticulously planning, financing, organizing and publicizing armed demonstrations at public events that celebrate diversity. Patriot Front’s fundraising and mobilizing efforts, those experts say, reveal a corporate-style organization that more resembles a media production company with satellite offices than a classic neo-Nazi group.”

“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,” Morgan Moon, investigative researcher with the ADL Center on Extremism, told The Guardian’s MacKenzie Ryan. “That’s what makes them a particular concern.”

Founded after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, by Thomas Rousseau, the 24-year-old Texas man who was a former member of the small, neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, Patriot Front has been able to recruit young white men through a sophisticated media campaign.

After Patriot Front events, “the social media team monitors the group’s mentions, shares news coverage on private servers, and tells members which social media accounts to harass,” Ryan reported.  “The video packages are specifically designed toward attracting a younger audience, says Stephen Piggott, program analyst with Western States Center, a Portland-based non-profit that promotes inclusive democracy. And while other far-right and white nationalist groups are engaging in meme culture and recruiting people online, the group has been effective at attracting young radicals and getting them off their laptops and into the streets, he adds.”

Being a Patriot Front recruit isn’t easy. The top-down organization requires members “to attend monthly roundups, hit a weekly activism quota, and show up to demonstrations, according to the ADL’s Moon. If they don’t, Rousseau expels them from Patriot Front.”

Patriot Front uses the tactics of a Pyramid scheme including the recruitment of investors, or in this case, recruits. Initial members recruit others, who are required to recruit more members, and so on. While Rousseau’s operation may not be as skilled at recruiting as Amway or as shrewd as BernieMadoff– until he wasn’t, he still is making money.

According to The Guardian’s Ryan, Rousseau charges members for propaganda materials during mural defacing, banner drops and nighttime raids on college campuses. “In this sense, Patriot Front is close to a white nationalist pyramid scheme,” Jeff Tischauser, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Ryan.

Being highlighted in the news cycle is one of Rousseau’s goals. Ryan reported that, “The tightly organized structure enables Patriot Front to be responsible for up to 14 hate incidents a day, according to the ADL. Under the direction of network directors, Patriot Front members defaced 29 murals honoring Black history, LGBTQ+ pride, migrant history and police shooting victims,” said the SPLC’s Tischauser.

According to a recent report by the Daily Dot’s Tina-Desiree Berg, Patriot Front joined together with another white supremacist group, the Rise Against Movement (RAM) to stage a Mixed Martial Arts event in Southern California which was first called “Rebirth of a New Frontier,” and then changed to “Birth of a New Frontier” (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/patriot-front-rise-against-white-nationalist-mma-event/).  Berg reported that, “It was, in the words of an account from the blog Hyphen Report, a showcase of the strength of ‘the fabric of nationalism in America that will terrify Jewish power for decades to come.’”

“A post about the event on Telegram from one of the hosts declared that ‘Not only are we awakening the warrior spirit, but we are demonstrating that we can organize on our own, outside of the mainstream structure,” Berg noted. “’We are creating a counterculture of resistance’ and that ‘for the first time, a roster of fighters from across the spectrum stepped inside a ring to do battle for brotherhood and our shared goals.’”

In January, Unicorn Riot, a left-wing nonprofit media organization that reports on social movements, uncovered a trove of chat logs that, according to The Guardian’s Sergio Olmos, “reveal a group of men struggling to expand membership and being harangued by their leadership to maintain physical fitness, show up to events and contribute financially to the cause of white supremacy – all with limited success. It also shows how the group uses social media to make itself seem larger than it is” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/28/leaked-online-chats-white-nationalist-patriot-front).

How successful is Patriot Front’s member focused funding scheme? Can it be sustained? Will its new co-sponsored MMA events generate new enthusiasm, recruits and funding?