You would think that a group of people who believe they are members of a preferred race, and the only real Americans, would be happy to say who they are. But this is not the case. In fact, the opposite is true. The sensitive souls at Patriot Front react to individual recognition as vampires do to sunlight. Unhappily.
So when members of the group were outed by a left-wing activist, they did what any red-blooded American would do. They sued. Now a federal court in Western Washington will decide if they have had their civil rights trampled. This is an irony that will no doubt be lost on these rights-denying zealots. As Fox 8 in North Carolina reports:
"A lawsuit filed in the Western District of Washington on July 25, accuses a man purported to be an antifascist activist of using a false identity to infiltrate the neo-Nazi group in 2021 and leaking sensitive information about the group on the internet, causing loss of jobs and forcing some of them to move.
The plaintiffs in the case, described in the document as members of or affiliated with Patriot Front, are listed are Paul Gancarz, Daniel Turetchi, Colton Brown, James Johnson and Amelia Johnson. They are suing David Alan Capito II, aka Vyacheslav Arkangelskiy, alleging that he misrepresented himself to gain access to Patriot Front, revealing members’ identities publicly and negatively impacting their lives. Capito is described in the filing to be a “radical antifa activist” and member of the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, an organization described as an “anti-fascist, anti-racist, pro-worker community defense organization.”
There is something viscerally satisfying about people whose group’s mission is to make life miserable for others, whining that a member of another group is “negatively impacting their lives.” This inability to man up and take a punch is a classic symptom of the insecure bully (see Trump).
In the suit, Patriot Front binds itself to the free speech defense the right wing has adopted as a one size fits all justification for criminality (see Trump — again).
"At a deeper level, this complaint seeks to vindicate the rule of law and basic principles of free expression for persons who espouse unpopular opinions."
The suit claims Capito joined Patriot Front using a false identity and accessed the group's computer databases to access private information, which he then shared with friendly activists and hackers.
"This confidential information was then widely published and used to harass and threaten the Plaintiffs, with the aim, and result, of doxxing them and other Patriot Front members and causing them serious harm."
When it comes to the thin-skinned denizens of the far-right sewer, every accusation is a confession. Patriot Front is not a debating society. Nor is it a think tank churning out intellectual justifications for corporate rapacity. And it is not a fundamentalist church using God as a club to smite LGBTQ Americans.
It is a small collection of disaffected young men who like wearing a uniform — in their case, tan caps, blue shirts, khaki pants, and riot accessories — who band together to “harass and threaten” innocent citizens.
In one instance in June 2022, the police arrested 31 members of Patriot Front as they traveled to disrupt a Pride event in Idaho. After the arrests, the police received over 70 anonymous calls, which Coeur d'Alene Police Chief Lee White described as being anonymously placed by people who “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."
By itself, Patriot Front is not a threat to America — its membership is an estimated 200 — but they are a symptom of the prevailing right-wing war against democracy. These ineffectual buffoons will not achieve anything. But there are larger better-organized nationalist, racist, anti-democratic fascist groups — of which the most dangerous is the Republican Party, with its cult-like devotion to a mango Mussolini.