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Will Patriot Front Be Coming To Your Town? [1]

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Date: 2024-09-10  

On a recent Saturday morning, members of a Texas-based white supremacist and neo-fascist hate group were parading in Tallahassee, Florida's capital city. According to the Tallahassee Democrat, “The 20-or-so men were dressed in khakis and wearing white balaclavas covering their faces while toting their hate group's flag and the Confederate flag.”

At demonstrations, they’ve usually got matching hoodies, hats, shirts and chinos. Prepared for violence, they don matching shin guards like catchers in baseball, and wield red, white and blue shields. They all wear body cameras so their media team can process and post collected footage. Some are calling them modern-day media masters as they recruit youth to become young warriors and reclaim America. Welcome to the world of the Patriot Front.

InvestigativeWest called it “a secretive racist organization of young men that has been running a guerrilla marketing campaign for white nationalism since the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.” InvestigstiveWest noted that “Patriot Front frequently targets minority communities with racist propaganda vandalism, said Jeff Tischauser, research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate organization. They spray-paint over gay pride murals. They deface George Floyd memorials. And they show up to events like Coeur d’Alene’s Pride in the Park [in June 2022] with masks, shields and smoke bombs in an attempt to intimidate participants into staying home, he said” (https://idahocapitalsun.com/2024/02/12/how-north-idaho-prosecutors-lost-the-case-against-patriot-fronts-white-nationalist-leader/).

This year, Patriot Front has been active across the country, holding demonstrations in West Virginia, New York, and most recently, Nashville, Tennessee.

The Tallahassee Democrat’s Ana Goñi-Lessan reported that, “Patriot Front stems from another group, Vanguard America, and was created after 2017’s Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which one woman was killed after a white supremacist plowed his car into a group of counter-protesters.”

"Patriot Front espouses racism, antisemitism and intolerance under the guise of preserving the ethnic and cultural origins of their European ancestors," Anti-Defamation League Vice President Oren Segal told USA TODAY in 2022. "They essentially believe that this is their country and they need to fight for the perception of what it was."

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