Who is Patriot Front? Group’s past may hold clues about foiled Coeur d’Alene riot
When police arrested 31 masked members of a white nationalist group in Coeur d’Alene in a U-Haul on suspicion of conspiring to riot at the town’s Pride in the Park event, it had some fearing a return to the days when North Idaho was home to one of the largest white supremacy groups in the country.
It has since been revealed that just two of those arrested were from Idaho. The rest appeared to have come from other states, including Washington, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming. All were members of a group called Patriot Front.
With thousands of Pride events happening across the country, it is still unclear why the group chose Coeur d’Alene as its destination.
For now, clues about Patriot Front’s intentions in Idaho come mostly from its past. The extremist group’s history points to a pattern of controversial activity meant to gain public attention.
Group launched after Unite the Right murder charge
The 2017 Unite the Right rally played an essential role in the launch of Patriot Front. Hundreds of members of far-right groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and armed private militias, protested the removal of a Confederate statue. Chanting Nazi Germany slogans like “Jews will not replace us,” they brought torches, weapons, shields, and Nazi and Confederate flags.
Escalating violence between protesters and counterprotesters left more than 35 people injured in the riots, according to Charlottesville police at the time.
The most publicized moment came when protester James Alex Fields Jr. drove his vehicle into counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and eight counts of malicious wounding.
Fields was later revealed to be part of neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Founder among those arrested
After the murder charge, Vanguard America began receiving increased negative attention. To distance himself, then-18-year-old Vanguard America member Thomas Ryan Rousseau, who was photographed the day of the rally with Fields, quickly launched a new group called Patriot Front, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many Vanguard America members migrated there.
Rousseau has continued to lead Patriot Front from his home in Texas.
The now-23-year-old was among those arrested in Coeur d’Alene on Saturday.
How many members?
Until recently, it was unclear how many people were part of the group.
In January, Unicorn Riot, a left-wing nonprofit media organization, published leaked chat logs indicating it had less than 240 members, according to The Guardian.
“We are absolutely desperate for new people,” Rousseau wrote in one message.
What do they believe?
The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Patriot Front a “white nationalist hate group,” and its members aren’t coy about those beliefs. They believe that, because “their ancestors conquered America,” the country belongs only to people with European ancestry, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
“An African may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American,” Patriot Front’s original manifesto stated. “… The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people, or do not share the common unconscious that permeates throughout our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.”
What do they do?
Patriot Front has mostly focused on increasing its public image. Members will paper an area with flyers, deface statues and murals, drop banners off buildings and occasionally attend small events to create controversial online content, according to the Southern Poverty Center.
The center reports that Patriot Front’s public appearances are “typically tightly choreographed and scripted to maximize propaganda value” with “virtually all its activities” intended to create propaganda.
Why Coeur d’Alene?
Patriot Front often stages events in carefully chosen locations to make the group seem larger than it is, according to Kate Bitz, program manager of the Western States Center, an organization that studies and works to counter extremism.
Instead of attending large national white supremacy gatherings, Patriot Front members prefer to hold or crash smaller events so they can be the center of attention, Bitz said.
“This can create the impression that Patriot Front is local to all of these towns and cities where their propaganda shows up, and that there are a lot of them,” Bitz said in a phone interview.
Considering Coeur d’Alene’s history, Bitz theorized members could have been hopeful of finding like-minded sympathizers to recruit. The Aryan Nations formerly had a compound in Hayden Lake, just outside of Coeur d’Alene.
Bitz said it’s possible that, as in the past, Patriot Front’s plans were focused more on creating propaganda and controversy rather than causing violence.
At the same time, she noted that Patriot Front has been escalating its activities in recent years, often without much pushback from police, and extremist groups across the country have been growing increasingly violent.
“They’re trying to test out what can they do with impunity without getting themselves into major trouble with law enforcement,” Bitz said. “… I do think it’s possible that they planned some kind of further escalation of their activities in Coeur d’Alene, but of course don’t think it’s fruitful to speculate while law enforcement is still investigating. I’m very interested to see what comes out of their investigation.”
This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 12:12 PM.
