Patriot Front: White Supremacists, Feds, or Both?

Over the weekend, videos of fit white men wearing khaki pants, blue polo shirts, gators, and baseball caps parading through Washington, D.C. began circulating on Twitter. The men carried upside-down American flags as they marched in orderly rows, flanked by an army of police officers on bicycles. The white supremacy group is called Patriot Front and has been active for more than five years. Conservative observers have noted that the group appears to be primarily made up of federal agents and informants. Democrats claim they are simply MAGA Republican Neo-Nazis. I decided to do a little research and find out for myself.

Based on multiple sources, Patriot Front has an estimated membership of 200 to 250 individuals from every state excluding Hawaii and Kansas.1 The majority of their members are concentrated in Texas, Washington, California, Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia. Shockingly, despite its relatively small size, this group is responsible for a staggering 80% of all white supremacy propaganda circulated throughout the United States according to ADL.2

This weekend President Biden told graduates of a historically black college that our nation’s greatest threat came from these 250 white supremacists. The fact that fewer than 250 people represent the vast majority of the white supremacy movement in the United States is shocking.

It is even more shocking when one realizes that almost a year ago, 20% of the group, including its leader Thomas Ryan Rousseau, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to riot.3 With the group's leader and 30 other members out on bail and unable to communicate with the group, it is unclear who organized and participated in the D.C. march this weekend.4 5

Looking through The Southern Poverty Law Center Patriot Front timeline something curious stands out like a sore thumb. The group, active since 2017 to the present was shockingly absent from the January 6th protest at the Capitol—the literal SuperBowl of conservative protests. Patriot Front has always been very active in the D.C. area and yet they didn’t arrive at the Capitol until a month later on February 8th, 2020. Where were the nation’s largest and most active white supremacists on January 6th? No one seems to know.

When Patriot Front finally made its appearance in D.C. a month later dozens of police officers escorted them as they marched from the Washington Monument to the Capitol where they welcomed them onto the grounds and closed the area off to both media and counter-demonstrators.

Journalists like Zach Roberts and Ford Fischer that cover Patriot Front in D.C. have noted that the group is always and somewhat mysteriously protected by a massive police presence.6 Just a quick review of Tweets from counter-protesters and it is clear they believe the fact that the police protect Patriot Front members is evidence of a conspiracy between the group and law enforcement. In their experience, no other group receives similar treatment. For example, just this weekend when Patriot Front ended its march in D.C. the police ensured that neither media nor counter-protesters were able to follow, blocking the entryway to an underground tunnel to everyone but the group.

FOIA requests by a group calling themselves Property of the People show that the FBI has been closely monitoring the group for years.78 If history is any guide, prior to the arrest of 31 members of the group, they likely had a large number of federal agents and/or informants embedded inside of Patriot Front.9 For example, of the 17 members of the Wolverine Watchmen (the group that planned the kidnapping of Michigan Governor Whitmer), at least 12 were federal informants and/or agents.10 During the Proud Boys trial the DOJ admitted that at least 8 and perhaps as many as 50 federal informants and/or agents were with the group of 5 defendants on January 6th - including the group's president and vice president.1112 In what has become a pattern, the federal government often represents the majority of members and leaders of white supremacy groups.

As a result, it is no wonder that many observers assume that Patriot Front is merely a ‘honeypot’ to entrap white supremacists in criminal activity. The group is almost NEVER involved in violence because of its close coordination with the police—instead, the group seems to be focused on spreading white supremacy propaganda. Ironically, while it is the nation’s largest source of racist propaganda it was struggling to find new members before police arrested the group’s leadership—according to hacked files from Patriot Front the arrests all but killed the group.13 If true who is keeping Patriot Front alive? After last year’s arrest of Patriot Front’s leadership, many assume its current leaders to be FBI informants and/or agents.

Ironically, the various groups documenting the members and activities of Patriot Front like Task Force Butler, Unicorn Riot, ADL, and several others seem a lot more dangerous than the group they are investigating.

The leader of one of the groups claimed he attempted suicide to justify missing his deployment flight to Baghdad back in 2007—he was separated from his unit, the Army, and given a less-than-honorable discharge. Covered with the same sort of tattoos you’d expect a white supremacist to have, he joined various online hate groups until he realized he could get paid to ‘dox’ members of groups like Patriot Front. The leader of another group is a white man who grew up in the juvenile justice system spending much of his early years incarcerated. Upon release, he got involved in the protest movement and now works for a BLM-style social justice organization.

From what I can tell Patriot Front and BLM are two sides of the same coin. Both are fixated on advancing social justice based on race. While BLM is primarily funded by well-intentioned corporations like AT&T and Apple I can't help but think Patriot Front is funded by federal government informants just as the Wolverine Watchmen and Proud Boys were.14 Perhaps more importantly the 'brains' behind these organizations were the informants. The FBI seeks out very intelligent people like Enrico Tarrio to become confidential human sources and it is foreseeable that without Tarrio's 'brains,' the Proud Boys wouldn't have existed much less engaged in organized criminal activity.15 Who is running Patriot Front now? How many members of the group are federal informants? Are the fit, sharp-dressed men we see marching in our nation's capital white supremacists, feds, or Best Buy employees?

I have a proposal. Why don’t we stop organizing and funding these racist white supremacists? If our nation’s greatest threat comes from the Proud Boys and Patriot Front (less than 300 people) why don’t we stop enabling them?