Infiltrating the far right

Infiltrating the far right


David D. Kirkpatrick writes:

Colton Brown, who lived with his father and stepmother in a single-story house outside Seattle, earned about fifty thousand dollars a year as an assistant electrician—but his real passion was fascism. In recordings of his private conversations, he argued that an “international cabal” of “hook-nosed bankers” was conspiring to replace white Americans like him with people of non-European descent, and he expressed alarm that the U.S. population would soon be less than half “ethnic American.” This so-called “great replacement” may have felt personal: his stepmother was Vietnamese. Brown, who has blue eyes and short, wavy blond hair, wore clothing with Nazi iconography, believed that white people deserved their own ethnostate, and told his dad that other races could “go to hell.”

In 2021, when Brown was twenty-two, he became a regional director of Patriot Front—one of the most active of the white-nationalist, neo-fascist, and anti-government organizations that academic researchers collectively characterize as the modern far right. (Such groups lie beyond even the fringes of the Republican Party.) Patriot Front’s leaders routinely summoned members to travel across the country, on short notice, for demonstrations: hundreds of young white men marched in identical uniforms, with protective helmets disguised as baseball caps, and neck gaiters pulled over their faces. At some rallies, Brown shouldered one of the tall metal shields that Patriot Front members were trained to use in street battles. The members frequently marched through racially diverse neighborhoods, almost baiting residents into fights (while maintaining that marchers would never throw a first punch).

The organization placed Brown in charge of a crew of a dozen men. He led them on nocturnal expeditions around Seattle, to plaster public spaces with Patriot Front propaganda. They stole Black Lives Matter and gay-pride signs, and spray-painted white-nationalist slogans and symbols over public art promoting tolerance or racial justice. His crew posed, masked, for photographs while on long hikes together, and they trained for street brawls by sparring with one another in boxing gloves. Sometimes they were invited to participate in “fight club” competitions with other white nationalists.

Like a pyramid scheme, Patriot Front effectively paid for its operations by amassing new members. Brown required his team to buy all sorts of supplies—badges, banners, posters, stickers, graffiti stencils—exclusively from the organization. An order of stickers was forty-five dollars, a rectangular badge was five, a round one was ten. Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau—a twenty-five-year-old from an affluent suburb of Dallas, whose manifesto for the group maintains that the only true Americans are “descendants of Europeans”—told members that, without their repeated expenditures, “I can’t pay rent anymore. And then I have to get a job.”

Brown’s crew often tried to enlist men from other far-right groups, such as the Proud Boys. But he was always on the lookout for undercover F.B.I. agents. He was aware that Patriot Front’s vandalism (and occasional street fighting) broke the law, and could be met with increased penalties under civil-rights statutes. “Rule No. 1 is don’t get caught,” he often told his crew. “No face, no case. Nobody talks, everybody walks.” Yet he couldn’t be that picky in his vetting process; after all, he was under pressure to increase membership. Nor could the movement expect every new member to be already “fashed out”—fully fascist. One of Patriot Front’s goals was to lure more mainstream MAGA types into the far right. Brown assessed applicants by quizzing them about their political evolution and influences, and about what future they foresaw for white people. As a “pro-white” organization, of course, the group required recruits to be Caucasian themselves. After a teen-age applicant admitted that he was a quarter Filipino, others in the Seattle crew recommended rejecting him. (“His phenotypes are wack as fuck,” one complained.) But the recruit responded that Hitler’s Nuremberg race laws would have allowed him to have sex with an Aryan woman. What could they say? He’d out-Nazi-ed the neo-Nazis. The teen was let in.

Another recruit, whom they code-named Vincent Washington, was a much easier call. He had read Patriot Front’s manifesto and understood the need for a white homeland; at six feet four and about two hundred and twenty pounds, and trained in martial arts, he could also fight well. After Vincent joined Patriot Front, in July, 2021, he threw himself into even mundane chores, such as making banners. (At Halloween, he proposed carving “very fascist” jack-o’-lanterns.) He also turned out to be a skilled photographer, and used a high-end camera to take pictures of the group’s rallies and vandalism. Thanks to his skill and utility, Brown and Rousseau quickly began including Vincent in private online meetings that Patriot Front held for planning and coördination. One member recently told me, in an e-mail, that Vincent’s “nice camera and good experience” had likely sped his ascent in the group, and that Vincent had displayed a remarkable enthusiasm “to take part in any and all activism.”

Early that December, Rousseau summoned every available member to Washington, D.C., where the group planned to march without a permit on the National Mall. The Seattle contingent met at the airport. But Vincent didn’t show up. Although initially surprised, the crew soon learned why: Vincent wasn’t actually their ally. He’d made off with a huge cache of internal information, which documented everything from their bigoted and misogynistic rants to their recruitment methods and vandalistic exploits.

Vincent wasn’t a Fed, though. He was one of a growing number of far-left vigilantes who are infiltrating the far right. Sometimes such impostors adopt false online personas in order to gain entrance to chat groups or private servers. Others, like Vincent, go undercover in the real world, posing as white nationalists to attend meetings and demonstrations. Some even participate in low-level crimes in order to establish their credibility—almost like undercover F.B.I. agents do, though they lack any of the protections, training, or restraints that come with a badge.

Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism for the New York Police Department, told me that “part of the complexity of today’s Internet-driven threat environment is that law enforcement doesn’t have a monopoly on intelligence gathering anymore.” Amateur spies such as Vincent have become common enough that they pose “operational challenges.” She went on, “Government agencies collecting human intelligence have systems to deconflict with each other, but it muddies the waters considerably when you have civilians impersonating bad guys.” Such vigilantes can place themselves in life-threatening danger, Weiner said, and their ruthless exposure of far-right groups “can certainly ruin lives,” by getting members fired from their jobs or shunned by their communities. Still, she acknowledged, the disclosures could be useful. “The spectre of infiltration by Antifa is, in some ways, as inhibiting for far-right extremists as concern about infiltration by law enforcement,” Weiner said. “In fact, sometimes they are even more worried about their adversaries than they are about cops.”

Patriot Front has just a few hundred members, and scholars who study the far right say that only about a hundred thousand Americans actively participate in organized white-nationalist groups. But the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—and the deadly riot in Charlottesville before that—proved that even just a few hundred organized men can spearhead a devastating, history-making mob. Moreover, the far right’s online promotion of the great-replacement theory to countless sympathizers is accumulating an ominous death toll. In the past decade, lone gunmen inspired by far-right propaganda have killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston (2015), eleven Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh (2018), twenty-three Walmart shoppers in El Paso (2019), and ten Black residents of Buffalo (2022). Inside Patriot Front and across the far right, these mass murderers are venerated with the title of “saint”—as in “Saint Dylann Roof,” who carried out the Charleston massacre. (Roof’s name was chanted at the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, in 2017.) Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University who studies extremist violence and sometimes advises the White House and the F.B.I., told me that Patriot Front’s marches and vandalism—even if they appear merely performative—“are intended to normalize these ideas, to help mobilize other people, to make them think that there’s a groundswell, to inspire violent action. And it’s effective.” [Continue reading…]

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