Trumpism—the ugly right-wing politics of hatefulness and division that coalesced under the current occupant of the Oval Office—and its effects will linger in the United States long after Donald Trump has vacated the presidency. This is acutely the case when it comes to the spread of white nationalist hate that he has enabled and empowered.
The openly fascist hate group Patriot Front—known best to the public for the fliers its members plaster around towns and college campuses with such slogans as “We Have a Right to Exist,” “Fascism: The Next Step for America,” “Will Your Speech Be Hate Speech?”—is the living embodiment of this new reality. A deep dive into the group by Buzzfeed’s Jane Lytvynenko reveals how its danger and viciousness extends well beyond those fliers, and how it plans to keep it going long after Trump.
Unlike such far-right pro-Trump groups as the Proud Boys, Patriot Front does not keep a high public profile, preferring to operate primarily in the relative secrecy of online platforms, where it can optimize its program of radicalizing young white men into its violent belief system. Until the fliers begin showing up, or the group organizes a march intended to show its strength such as the one it organized earlier this year in Washington, D.C., most of its activities remain hidden from view.
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!!!!”
Though they share similar goals, the “Boogaloo” civil-war movement is viewed similarly. “The whole ‘Boogaloo’ thing is a reminder that if you joke about anything long enough, you’ll stop joking,” founder Thomas Rousseau, a young man from Texas, told another member online. “A offhand forum slapstick joke could become something that someone shoots someone over if its left to fester and rot like the mold-like idea it is.”
However, it is extraordinarily prolific in spreading fascist propaganda, which has surged overall during Trump’s tenure. “In the United States, they lead white supremacist propaganda distributions,” Carla Hill, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, told Buzzfeed.
Patriot Front, as I reported in 2017 for the Southern Poverty Law Center, is unapologetically fascist in its politics and openly racist, anti-Semitic, and hateful toward the LGBTQ community. And as Lytvynenko’s report explains, it is not only growing, it’s doing so independently of Donald Trump’s career arc.
It grew out of the now-defunct 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 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,” and includes this passage:
An African may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American. He is, as he likely prefers to be labelled, an African in America. The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people, or do not share the common unconscious that permeates throughout our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.
Rousseau’s group has also shown a propensity for violence, ranging from its threatening protest of a book fair in Houston, Texas, to its attempt to attack an “Occupy ICE” protest encampment in San Antonio, Texas, in 2018. It was spotted earlier this year recruiting new followers at the rally for Donald Trump in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Yet Trump himself is often viewed with a kind of derisive contempt by many Patriot Front members, much as they see rival far-right groups as simply not radical enough.
“In many ways, a lot of people in the white power movement are not fans of Trump, but they do see him as useful to their movement, introducing some of their ideas and carrying out some of the policies that they favor,” Cassie Miller, an analyst at the SPLC, told Lytvynenko. “But in some ways, they see him as buying them time.”
As Lytvynenko observes:
To them, Trump is an old man holding up crumbling institutions, enacting policies that incrementally forward the cause without remaking the institutions themselves. When he’s gone, the rubble will remain, and to many he’ll be nothing but a tool they used to build the white power movement up.