Patriot Front was responsible for 80% of propaganda incidents across the U.S. in 2020.
Over the weekend, 31 members of the white nationalist group “Patriot Front” were arrested near a Pride event in Idaho. Now, the Coeur d’Alene police say they’re getting death threats.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Police Chief Lee White said that half of the roughly 150 calls his department has received since the arrests have been from anonymous aggressors.
The callers “want nothing more than to scream and yell at us and use some really choice words — offer death threats against myself and other members of the police department merely for doing our jobs,” he explained.
Most of the threats seem to originate from outside the immediate Coeur d’Alene community.
Saturday’s arrests were made after a local reported seeing a “little army” of men wearing riot gear. The police swiftly made the connection with the relatively new Patriot Front group. The group’s leader, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, was among those arrested. Per CNN, the apprehended members came from at least 12 states. They’ve been charged with conspiracy to riot, but released on bond.
“It is clear to us based on the gear that the individuals had with them, the stuff they had in their possession, the U-Haul with them along with paperwork that was seized from them, that they came to riot downtown,” Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said.
So, what is Patriot Front?
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Patriot Front “is a white nationalist hate group that broke off from [the neo-Nazi group] Vanguard America in the aftermath of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, of August 12, 2017.”
It “rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism,” and “focuses on theatrical rhetoric and activism” that can easily be spread as propaganda.
Where did the group come from?
Thomas Ryan Rousseau, who founded Patriot Front, was a fervent Donald Trump supporter in 2016. He, along with his loyalists, splintered from Vanguard America following a feud with its leader Dillon Irizarry.
Per the SPLC, among Rousseau’s gripes with Vanguard America was its inability to moderate how members presented themselves at the Unite The Right rally — in particular, the swastikas on prominent display. Rousseau’s approach to Patriot Front has been to channel its explicitly racist, xenophobic agenda via Americana, framing its ideas as a revival of the “original” American identity.
What is Patriot Front’s agenda?
“Patriot Front is a white supremacist group whose members maintain that their ancestors conquered America and bequeathed it to them, and no one else,” explains the ADL.
The group’s manifesto says: “Our people must learn to internalize their natural identities and come to connect that re-emerging identity with their homeland. Americans are descendants of Europeans, but at the same time they are not European. This nation is unique in its newly realized pan-European identity which has allowed it to succeed.”
People of color are explicitly excluded from this imagined ethnostate.
“An African, for example, may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American,” says PF’s manifesto. “The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people as well as to those who do not share the common unconscious that permeates throughout our greater civilization.”
Who are Patriot Front’s members?
Like Rousseau, who is just 24 years old, Patriot Front’s members are mainly young. The image-conscious group focuses much of its activity online, though it also distributes banners, flyers, and posters. Branding is key, with red, white, and blue featuring consistently in PF’s propaganda. Members are extremely prolific — Patriot Front was responsible for 80% of propaganda incidents across the U.S. in 2020.
On-the-ground action is tightly choreographed for maximum publicity and impact. Flash demonstrations, which minimize individual exposure and convert easily into shareable online content, are extremely popular — and often performed on patriotic holidays, or at historic sites.
Might they get violent?
According to FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, who spoke to CNN on Monday, it’s hard to say when PF’s mainly propaganda and protest-focused activity might tip into violence.
“The real question in my mind is their intention for what they were going to do that day,” Strzok said of last weekend’s gathering.
