NOV 08, 2019 NEWS
Carol Schaeffer and Fritz
Zimmerman / ProPublica
ProPublica is a nonprofit
newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter
to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.
In the hours after the
slaughter in El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3, a final toll emerged: 22 dead, most of
them Latinos, some Mexican nationals. A portrait of the gunman accused of
killing them soon took shape: a 21-year-old from a suburb of Dallas who had been
radicalized as a white supremacist online and who saw immigrants as a threat to
the future of white America.
While much of the country
reacted with a weary sense of sorrow and outrage, word of the mass killing was
processed differently by members of Patriot Front, one of the more prominent
white supremacist groups in the U.S.
In secret chat forums, some
Patriot Front members embraced the spirit of the anti-immigrant manifesto left
behind by the accused gunman. Others floated false conspiracy theories: the CIA
was behind the murders; the accused killer was actually Jewish. Still other
members cautioned that the group had its own “loose cannons” to worry about. It
would be a bad look if the next mass murderer was one of their own.
But there was little, if any,
regret over the loss of life.
“It shouldn’t be hard to
believe that the group facing the harshest oppression from our ruling elite are
producing shooters,” one Patriot Front member wrote. “White men are being
slowly destroyed in a way calculated to produce resentment and a sense of
helplessness. Of course, some of them decide to lash out.”
Several Patriot Front members
alerted others to the need to be careful, for the killings in El Paso would
likely make the group a target of the FBI.
“Watch your backs out there,”
one wrote.
Patriot Front was formed in
the aftermath of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville,
Virginia, in 2017. While many on America’s far-right cheered the rally, its
violence struck others as a public-relations debacle for the white nationalist
brand that was sure to attract greater oversight by law enforcement.
Patriot Front aspired to help
chart a new way forward: spread propaganda espousing its version of a nascent
American fascism; quietly recruit new members worried about a nation overrun by
immigrants and a world controlled by Jews; avoid talking about guns or violence
online, but engage in a mix of vandalism and intimidation to foster anxiety;
wear masks in public and communicate secretly.
“The organization is not about
its members,” the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, once wrote to its members in
the secret chats. “It is about its goals. Each person behind the mask is just
another awoken member of the nation, who could be anyone who’s had enough.”
ProPublica spent several
months examining the makeup and operations of Patriot Front, which records
suggest numbers about 300 members.
While the group is careful not
to talk about guns online, two members in the last year have been arrested with
arsenals of illegally owned high-powered rifles and other weapons. While many
of the group’s propaganda “actions” are legal exercises of free speech, its
members have been arrested in Boston and Denver in recent months for acts of
vandalism. In Boston, three members engaged in a nighttime propaganda effort
last winter were arrested on suspicion of weapons possession and assaulting a
police officer. What the group touts as political protests have felt to those
targeted like acts of menace, as was the case in San Antonio, Texas, last year when
Patriot Front members filmed themselves trashing
an encampment of immigration activists.
One person whose establishment
was targeted by Patriot Front in recent months spoke on the condition of
anonymity, fearing the group’s return.
“Ordinarily would you call the
police if somebody put a big sticker on your door? No,” the person said.
“However, once you find out what this is all about, and who is involved, and
what they are promoting? Then, yeah, now we are in hate speech space.”
To the Southern Poverty Law
Center, Patriot Front is a white hate group and a genuine criminal threat. To
some of the more avowedly violent neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., Patriot Front is
a laughable collection of clowns and cowards, content to chat online and put up
stickers while a race war awaits.
But for law enforcement,
gauging how serious a threat Patriot Front might pose is difficult. Patriot
Front shares qualities both with groups engaged in real domestic terrorism and
with fringe political groups.
Asked about the group, the FBI
issued a statement that reflected these complexities and the limitations they
place on police agencies.
“When it comes to domestic
terrorism, our investigations focus solely on the criminal activity of
individuals — regardless of group membership — that appears to be intended to
intimidate or coerce the civilian population or influence the policy of the
government by intimidation or coercion. We would encourage you to keep in mind
that membership in groups which espouse domestic extremist ideology is not
illegal in and of itself — no matter how offensive their views might be to the
majority of society.”
Rousseau, a Boy Scout and high
school journalist before he founded Patriot Front, has much the same profile as
the accused gunman in El Paso, Patrick Crusius: both grew up in middle-class
suburbs of Dallas — Crusius in Allen, Rousseau 35 miles away in Grapevine; both
were seen as unremarkable teenagers before being inculcated in their racist
ideology online; both talk of a desire to reclaim America for “true” or “pure”
patriots; both regard immigrants as a poisonous and present danger.
In the days after the rampage
in El Paso, Rousseau told his members in the secret chats that such acts of
wholesale violence were not for him. While fascist causes like Patriot Front’s
could survive the blowback from such killings, he said, real success for the
group would come from spreading its ideology and increasing its numbers. Of the
alleged El Paso shooter, Rousseau wrote in a chat, “He’d have made more
progress toward his goals by swallowing the first round in his magazine
instead.”
In the months of chats
obtained by ProPublica, Rousseau is by turns amateur philosopher and historian,
as well as the group’s sole spokesman and its online policeman. He warns
members that they will be kicked out if they don’t stay busy — pasting up
flyers and conducting banner drops, joining street actions and posting
regularly in the chat forums. He has put together a security guide to help
Patriot Front members stay anonymous. He waxes admiringly about certain
far-right groups in Europe, and he sees them as a model for how to become more serious
political players in the years ahead. He has the secret chats routinely
deleted, and he tells members to avoid ever writing or saying anything that
might later be of interest to a prosecutor.
“It should be known,” he wrote
to members recently, “that political dissidents are subject to unjust
scrutiny.”
Pete Simi, a professor at
Chapman University in California and an expert on white supremacists in the
U.S., said Rousseau’s stewardship of Patriot Front is deeply familiar.
“It is very common for the leadership
of these groups to disqualify violence, while doing things that are encouraging
violence,” Simi said. “It is part of their strategy to avoid liability, while
simultaneously promoting hate. When they say they are not violent, this is a
lie. They are promoting violence by their goals.”
“Thomas’ Biggest Fear Is
Someone Doing Something Crazy”
To gain an understanding of
Patriot Front — its origins and ambitions, both the careful talk and the
criminal behavior of its members — ProPublica examined hundreds of online
postings, interviewed a person who infiltrated the group, obtained police
records, reviewed its leader’s public statements online and in a variety of
far-right podcasts, collected video material recorded both by the group and
members of the public, and traveled to the homes of its founder and two of the
members who had recently been arrested.
The person who infiltrated
Patriot Front in recent years — posting in the group’s chats and accompanying
it in its propaganda actions — sketched out a portrait of its members, which
appear to be exclusively male:
They come from seven or eight
regional “networks,” and the vast majority of them are recruited online; the
typical member is around 25 years old and can be from blue-collar backgrounds
or be working as “white-collar tech geeks”; many of them are gamers; few have
wives or girlfriends; they can look like “the nerdy boys that sit next to you
in high school,” but they clearly sympathize with “right-wing terrorism.”
The person who infiltrated
Patriot Front said he applied for membership on the group’s website — the one
with the mission statement written by Rousseau. American democracy was dead.
The government had been taken over by Jews and other “elites.” Land claimed by
descendants of the country’s original white settlers had been surrendered to
immigrants of color. The dream was of a white ethnostate, in which all that was
good and true and pioneering about the America of long ago could be restored.
The person who gained entrance
to the group said Rousseau was one of three Patriot Front members who
interviewed him on the telephone when he applied. He was asked to explain his
political evolution, to say which political figures he hated and admired most,
to state the circumstances in which the use of violence would be OK and to
articulate the greatest threat to America. He was told Mussolini’s “The
Doctrine of Fascism” would be required reading.
The chats reviewed by
ProPublica show Rousseau spends lots of time online pressing members to take
part in targeting streets, parks and colleges with the group’s propaganda. He
and others delight in seeing their actions reflected in the SPLC’s nationwide
map recording acts of hate and in the media. Last spring, the group tried to
stage protests in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s
offices in multiple cities, including New York.
“One minute of action is
better than 10,000 books on ideology,” Rousseau told his members.
Rousseau, still a teen when he
founded Patriot Front, makes clear in the secret chats reviewed by ProPublica
that he is in charge, though he’s happy to go without a formal title.
“The title commander gives me
bad flashbacks,” he wrote in a chat once. “If I absolutely had to have a title,
it would probably be general director. But my name works just fine for now.”
The chats show some members
regard Rousseau as a disciplined and effective spokesman for the group, and
they appear to heed his repeated scoldings about preserving their anonymity.
“The enemy cannot attack you
if they do not know who you are,” Rousseau wrote.
Using the pseudonym Samuel, a
member from New York expanded on the idea in response.
“I would say the biggest
accomplishment of masking up is obfuscating our total numbers,” he wrote. “We
can make them feel as if there are thousands of us when it’s only a few
hundred, and we could be anyone and no one. Next time they are at the CVS and
see a white kid with a neat haircut, it could be us. Fear of the unknown is the
greatest fear of all.”
Rousseau, when he isn’t
criticizing members who violate the ban on talking about guns or violence, can
often be found policing the group’s ideological thinking. Nazism, however
popular among members, can’t now be the goal, Rousseau said.
“This is not Germany, this is
not the 1930s,” he chastised. “Get a grip on the fact that we’re activists, not
re-enactors trying to scratch some self-indulgent itch for a political
fantasy.”
Rousseau conducts his online
leadership from the home he shares with his divorced father in Grapevine, a
largely white, solidly middle-class city between Dallas and Fort Worth.
ProPublica went to see Rousseau there this summer, and we found the shades
drawn in every window and a rusting boat filled with fallen leaves on the
property.
Rousseau came to the door, but
he closed it quickly and would not talk. The following day, the red sports car
in the driveway had been reparked, making it hard to see the lone license plate
on its rear end.
Interviews with people in and
around Grapevine — those who went to school with Rousseau, those who
participated in the Boy Scouts with him, a man who dated his mother — produced
a unanimous sense of surprise that he’d started an organization committed to an
all-white America.
He’d mixed easily with the
diverse array of students at his high school, and while he was against gay
marriage, he was regarded more as a nice, conservative boy than a threat. He
wore his hair long, in braids or a bun, and was obsessed with working out and
the state of his physique.
At the student newspaper, he
wasn’t regarded as an impressive writer, but he won a national award for
editorial cartooning. Classmates saw him as a lazy student and a bit of a
loner, but he had a knack for argument and a stubborn streak about never being
wrong. The school had its share of racial incidents, but he was never involved
and wasn’t seen as condoning them.
When Donald Trump was elected
president, some senior boys at the school made a show of chanting, “Build a
wall.” Rousseau, for his part, was certainly an ardent Trump supporter — he
wore a Make America Great Again hat and carried a Trump lunchbox. But his enthusiasm
wasn’t seen as menacing.
“He seemed Republican, but he
didn’t seem crazy, said one fellow student.
To someone who was with him in
Boy Scouts, Rousseau seemed serious about the organization, and he was elected
patrol leader. At the same time, Rousseau could be difficult with adults,
developing what the person called an “authoritarian defiance.”
“I’m saddened,” the person
said of Rousseau’s embrace of white supremacy.
Simi, the professor at Chapman
University, said enough research exists on modern-day white supremacists to
develop a profile: young men, isolated and angry in some way despite their
relatively privileged upbringing in middle class or affluent circumstances, and
vulnerable to invitations to join up with others with similar grievances.
In years past, Simi said,
groups like Patriot Front used to recruit potential new members by waiting
outside schools for the last children to leave, the loners wandering off long
after the final bell. Now such groups don’t have to work so hard to find targets.
They have the internet, Simi said.
“It is a central aspect of
these groups to take the frustration and anger and combine it with the special
feeling and insights of being part of a group,” he said.
Rousseau, then just 18, was in
Charlottesville in 2017, marching in the “Unite the Right” rally as a member of
Vanguard America. The Anti-Defamation
League calls Vanguard America a neo-Nazi group formed in 2016 that,
like Patriot Front after it, was chiefly engaged in spreading propaganda. James
Fields, the white supremacist convicted of murdering a young protester at the
Charlottesville event, was photographed there carrying a Vanguard America
shield, though he was not a member of the group.
Vanguard America splintered
after the debacle in Virginia. Some wanted to abandon efforts to disguise their
Nazi leanings and simply be brazen in their public look and violent aims.
Rousseau took a different tack, and he started Patriot Front as an ostensibly
more strategic, savvy, careful alternative. It would embrace more homegrown
symbols — the flag, the bald eagle and patriotic language. Such shifts might
attract a wider membership.
“I did go to Charlottesville.
Some bad activism there,” Rousseau wrote in one of the secret chats. “I’ve done
my part to learn from my mistakes.”
While Rousseau publicly and in
the chats reviewed by ProPublica disavows violence, some Patriot Front members
have shown support for a white supremacist group that embraces it: the Rise
Above Movement. Eight RAM members have been arrested on
charges related to violence in Charlottesville and
in California.
“Gotta love RAM,” a Tennessee
member said in the chats. “I hope they see us as 100 percent allies.”
In the chat logs, a Patriot
Front member from Texas provides a list of addresses for 11 people in prison or
under house arrest, referring to them as “POWs.” The list includes four members
of RAM, numerous men arrested for violence
in Charlottesville including Fields,
and an imprisoned white supremacist in California. The Texan urged Patriot
Front members to write to the prisoners and provided links to send some
prisoners money directly. He also listed a donation link for a fund tied to
Augustus Sol Invictus, a lawyer known for defending white supremacists.
Later in the chats, a member
from New York shared a link to a white supremacist online fundraiser, saying
proceeds would be given to a legal fund for RAM. He then chimed in that nearly
$2,000 had been donated. “When they crack down we double down and become
stronger,” he said. “Hail Victory!”
Observers of white hate groups
credit Rousseau as a talented in-fighter, and they portray his breakaway from
Vanguard America as a shrewd coup.
According to the person who
infiltrated Patriot Front, Rousseau worries greatly about his members making
the worst strategic mistake: carrying out an act of terrible violence. It would
end his group, he has said.
“Thomas’ biggest fear is
someone doing something crazy,” said the person who infiltrated Patriot Front.
“We Are Regular People”
Jakub Zak was in bed in the
Chicago suburb of Vernon Hills when police, accompanied by his father, shook
him awake. The police had been told that Zak, 19, was a member of Patriot
Front, and that he might have a stash of illegal guns.
“He appeared nervous and tried
to cover a few items on his bed as he put on his blue jeans,” police records
say.
The police, though, had a
clear view of what couldn’t be hidden: a gun safe meant for rifles, as well as
magazines of ammunition on the bedroom floor.
Zak asked his father to make
the police leave. His father would not.
“I advised Jakub that we would
like for him to be cooperative, and explained to him cooperation goes a long
way,” one detective wrote in a formal report, dated April 2018. “I explained to
him the decision is for him to make, and he should think what is best for him.”
Zak spoke with his father and
then offered the code for the safe. If there were guns in the house, the police
wrote, Zak’s father wanted them out.
The police found a loaded 9 mm
pistol and then, in a second safe, four more guns, including three high-powered
semiautomatic rifles. The police records show Zak’s only concern was whether he
could get his case for carrying the guns back after their confiscation.
It is unclear when or how Zak
joined Patriot Front. The initial tip sent to law enforcement identified him as
a member, one who often posted in the secret chats under the pseudonym
“Hussar.” Postings under that name — portions of which were first published
by Unicorn
Riot, the activist group — suggest Zak was a frequent participant in
the group’s propaganda efforts in the streets.
Online, Zak posted a mix of
Patriot Front slogans and images — “America: Revolution is tradition”; “Deport
them all.” But there was also much more explicitly violent material: a young
black man lying prone on the street and about to be stomped; a Glock pistol.
Zak, who had no prior criminal
record, ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor gun possession charge and
was sentenced to probation. Whether local police referred his case, and his
affiliation with Patriot Front, to any other law enforcement agency is unclear.
But the basic facts of Zak’s
case amount to one of the hard-to-identify, hard-to-quantify, hard-to-assess
threats in the U.S. today: an enthusiastically racist young man exposed to a
steady diet of like-minded white supremacists, who doesn’t find it terribly
hard to get his hands on dangerous weapons. Crusius, the accused El Paso
killer, had no prior record; he lived with his grandparents; his mother is
reported to have anonymously called law enforcement, worried once her son had
bought a gun, even if it was legal; the parents of a classmate of Crusius’ told
a local news organization in Dallas that their son had been encouraged by
Crusius to join him in a white supremacist group.
In a brief interview at their
home in Vernon Hills, Zak’s parents would not let him be interviewed.
“There is nothing to talk
about,” his mother said, claiming he was not a member of any white hate group.
“He is going through rough times, and he is in a better place now. I don’t want
to start anything. He is getting his life together and planning [for] the
future.”
“We are regular people,” his
father added.
Concerns about how effectively
federal authorities have been in thwarting the threat of white supremacists
extends back years, covering both Democratic and Republican administrations. In
recent months, though, there has been a series of arrests suggesting that
federal and local authorities are being more aggressive.
In a recent
report, the Department of Homeland Security took care to restate the
balance law enforcement has to strike.
“The Department must take
care, while addressing the scourge of violence, to avoid stigmatizing populations,
infringing on constitutional rights, or attempting to police what Americans
should think,” the report said.
Last February, a Patriot Front
member, Joffre Cross, was arrested on gun charges in Houston. At a probable
cause hearing, authorities said they got on to Cross through phone records
belonging to a white supremacist in Texas who was convicted on assault charges
this year.
Cross, 33, fits what experts
see as another familiar profile for potentially violent white supremacists: a
former Army soldier whose association with white supremacists dates back to his
active-duty days. Disaffected former soldiers are a prime recruiting target for
white hate groups, prized for their gun and bomb training and their possible
access to weapons. Cross, while on active duty, was
convicted on drug charges and imprisoned for five years. As part of
the investigation, the authorities developed information that he was eager to
secure weapons for white supremacist groups.
Cross, who has pleaded not
guilty, was charged with felony weapons possession after police found guns and
body armor in his home.
“If you don’t know me,” Cross
once posted on Instagram, “consider this your trigger warning.” Cross and his
attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Cross is a regular participant
on the Russian social media platform VK, whose terms of service about extremist
content are not strictly enforced. His posts are rife with Nazi videos,
Holocaust denial material and white supremacists beating protesters.
One post reads: “Help more
bees; plant more trees; save the seas; shoot refugees.”
In the Patriot Front chats,
Cross continued to post even after his arrest.
“We have to build a foundation
that can weather any storm, anything they throw at us,” he wrote last April.
“We just have to keep pushing.”
“In the Aggregate They Are
Disturbing”
It was the Sunday of Memorial
Day weekend 2019 when 20 or so masked members of Patriot Front made their way
onto a corner of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. They set off
flares and smoke devices, delivered a short speech using a megaphone and fled.
The police report said it lasted all of three minutes.
Blakely Lord, a high school
English teacher, managed to capture the incident on video. In brief, she called
the episode “profoundly disturbing.”
“I chose to film because you
feel helpless,” Lord said. “I’m a dumpy middle-aged English teacher. I’m not
going to get out my sword and face them down.”
She added, “I do think it’s a
narrative people need to be thinking about: these little incidents may seem
unimportant, but in the aggregate they are disturbing.”
Such disturbances — masked
flash mobs, defacing property, distributing propaganda — are the day-to-day
work of Patriot Front. Screaming outside an anarchist book fair in Texas.
Plastering stickers across multiple
store fronts on a busy block in Denver. Parading with flares at night
in a public
park in Boston. Posting an “America First” sticker at a gay
pride center in Vermont. All in the last year.
Members give one another tips
about where to place posters and stickers legally, and they urge one another to
wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. But in practice, Patriot Front
members frequently target storefronts or places of worship, which is vandalism.
Additionally, many colleges and universities, another favorite target for
postering, prohibit flyers from nonstudent groups. White supremacists see
campuses as a strategic location for flyering: a place to recruit potential
members while
attracting press coverage to amplify their propaganda.
In Columbus, Georgia, three
months ago, two Patriot Front members posted flyers on and around a local
synagogue, Temple Israel. “Reclaim America,” read one. “Life, liberty and the
pursuit of victory,” read another. And the address of Patriot Front’s website
was printed at the bottom of the flyers. The temple’s leadership became aware
of Patriot Front’s history and said it was clear the synagogue and its members
were targeted because of their faith.
“To me, the sinister aspect is
this particular group disguises themselves as patriots, Tiffany Broda, the
temple’s president, told the Ledger-Enquirer last
July. “Yet they are a hate group, a nationally recognized hate group. And
though we don’t want to give them publicity, we think that it’s important to
bring this out of the shadows.”
“Jews have been a part of
Columbus almost since the founding of our city, which is almost 200 years ago,”
Rabbi Beth Schwartz added. “We will remain vigilant as a congregation, vigilant
as a Jewish community. We don’t hide our heads in fear.”
Patriot Front members make
clear in their chats that such actions — almost always recorded by one of the
masked members — have multiple aims: to frighten, to provide material for their
own propaganda efforts on social media, and to recruit. The drive to recruit
might help explain why college campuses are Patriot Front’s most common
targets.
Late last month, Patriot Front
launched what it claimed were coordinated actions to distribute flyers and
stickers and posters at more than 100 campuses across the country. The group
posted on Twitter what it said was evidence of success at 90 schools.
Michael Loadenthal, a visiting
professor of sociology at Miami University in Ohio, said Patriot Front had
recently been targeting
the school.
“Fascists having a public
presence is organizing; this is recruitment,” Loadenthal said, adding that the
simple idea that “white supremacists are individually radicalized people in
their basement at home is wrong.”
“They are a network,” he said.
“No particular node is dangerous until they are.”
Simi, the professor in
California, said Patriot Front had hit the campus of Chapman University three
times in a single month recently. The school, he said, had set up a permanent
conference dealing with the nation’s southern border, and Patriot Front
had singled
out posted materials related to the conference to be defaced or
covered up.
“People on the campus get
intimidated,” Simi said.
He said the school had to add
security cameras and police protection.
“This is part of their
strategy,” Simi said of Patriot Front. “These are things they want to happen.”
Thalia Beaty and Lucas Waldron
contributed to this report.
No comments:
Post a Comment