The young man who founded one of the most prolific neo-Nazi propaganda organizations in the U.S. was arrested over the weekend by sheriff’s deputies in Parker County, Texas, for plastering stickers promoting his group on county property.
Thomas Ryan Rousseau, the 21-year-old founder of the openly fascist hate group Patriot Front, was arrested along with two other men in Weatherford for criminal mischief—a minor misdemeanor—after they allegedly placed stickers on several signs on the county courthouse lawn.
Deputies also arrested Cameron Rathan Pruitt, 21, of Midway, Utah, and Graham Jones Whitson, 29, of Grapevine, Texas. All three were held overnight on $500 bond and released the next day, according to the arrest report.
Thomas Rousseau, left, marches with James Fields, right, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
Rousseau became a prominent figure in white-nationalist circles following the Aug. 11-12 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which he marched with a fellow member of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America named James Fields, who later that day rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters and killed a woman named Heather Heyer. Rousseau formed Patriot Front in late August 2017 as a spinoff group dedicated to bringing white nationalists together under an activist banner.
Rousseau announced online that “we are rebranding and reorganizing as a new entity,” and henceforth be known as “Patriots Front” (the “s” was dropped in short order). “The new name was carefully chosen, as it serves several purposes. It can help inspire sympathy among those more inclined to fence-sitting, and can easily be used to justify our worldview,” he wrote.
Rousseau also made it clear that the plan was to translate online discussion into real-world action, concrete activism: “You will be expected to work, and work hard to meet the bar rising,” he wrote. “Inactivity will get you expelled, unwillingness to work and contribute in any capacity will as well.”
The “work,” as Patriot Front’s organizing has played out, has primarily comprised of making their presence felt at rallies and protests, spreading the word with freeway banners, and plastering flyers in public locations, where they are often summarily removed.
Their stark black-and-white posters—featuring a variety of slogans, including “We Have a Right to Exist,” “Fascism: The Next Step for America,” “Will Your Speech Be Hate Speech?,” as well as screeds urging “Patriots” to “reconquer your birthright,” while others urge “all white Americans” to “report any and all illegal aliens”—have been either taped or glued to lampposts, telephone poles, windows, doors, bulletin boards, and anywhere else they can be seen by the public. They have especially targeted college campuses.
Patriot Front is notable for its utterly undisguised and unrepentant fascism. It’s also utterly lacking in the often juvenile transgressive humor, and use of pop culture and irony, that are core to much of the appeal of the alt-right online. Instead, its dead-serious advocacy of white-supremacist ideology is intended to appeal to a more militant mindset, an important byproduct of its origins in the online neo-Nazi community.
Rousseau’s group marched in Washington, D.C., in February.
To date, Patriot Front appears mainly to be comprised of small clusters of dedicated neo-Nazis intent on spreading their fascist gospel to other right-wing extremists, especially “fence-sitting” alt-righters potentially attracted to violent street action. It is noteworthy mainly because of the ease and rapidity with which it has spread to nearly every corner of the country, and the open appeals to young white males who are the focus of their recruitment.
On several occasions, Rousseau has attempted to translate the largely online recruitment efforts into more concrete expressions of the group’s ideology. Patriot Front first made its physical presence felt in Houston in late September 2017, when about a dozen members appeared outside a book fair and demanded a fight with antifascist organizers who reportedly were inside giving a talk. (Rousseau later led a similar protest outside an Austin bookstore.) In late July 2018, a group of Patriot Front marchers invaded an “Occupy ICE” protest encampment and vandalized it.
The most publicized instance of the group’s efforts to manifest themselves as a real-world white-nationalist entity occurred in February, when Rousseau led a group of about 100 members on a march down the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C., that was largely unannounced. The march had come and gone before local antifascists could organize a counter-protest.
Afterward, a police spokesperson told WUSA9 reporter Mike Valerio that no permit had been issued: the 150 or so marchers had simply shown up at the Lincoln Memorial and begun marching down the National Mall toward the Capitol. Metro Police scrambled to create a de facto security detail, the majority of them bicycle patrol members, “so officers could keep the peace,” a not-uncommon procedure in a city that sees protest marches frequently.
