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MAGAReport for 4/28/2024
Today: The white supremacist group Patriot Front marches in West Virginia
Yesterday (Saturday April 27), Patriot Front held a march in Charleston, West Virginia.
Patriot Front is the main offshoot of Vanguard America, the group you know from the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. They are a white supremacist, neo-fascist movement. It is the group I am most interested in, not necessarily because they are the most dangerous in terms of physical violence, but because they have a very good understanding of how normalization of white supremacy in the media and online can bring new people into the movement.
Patriot Front members are required to regularly post stickers in public places and stencil graffiti. (Interestingly, they need to buy these stickers and stencils from the organization, which seems to be how the leader, Thomas Rousseau, makes all his money). They have production teams that design graphics, edit videos, and maintain some pretty slick online channels. They also organize demonstrations like the one yesterday, where they dress up in their trademark khaki pants, blue shirts, white face-covering gaiters, and ball caps.
Interestingly, a lot of the far right distrusts Patriot Front. They call them “feds” because of their dress. And when I see non-extremists post videos of them on social media, the comments often also accuse them of being an organization full of police and feds who are secretly white supremacists. While there are definitely neo-fascist groups that recruit from law enforcement and the military, Patriot Front is not one of them. They have pretty aggressive screening in their interviews to filter out people who have ever worked for the government or who are related to people who have.
I think Patriot Front is so dangerous because of how public they are. Their marches and graffitiing is intimidating. It makes people distrust institutions. It normalizes white supremacy and instills a fear of violence. They realize this - they have told me that the normalization of these ideas since Trump began his 2015 run for the Presidency has helped their cause, and they are continuing that process. This “activism” is basically the only thing they do. They get together and play Fight Club, sneak around in the middle of the night and put up stickers, and occasionally dress up and march around. While that is not violent like we see from groups like the Proud Boys, it has impact and is damaging.
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