Leaked Chats Reveal Evidence of Hate Crimes by U.S. Fascists

[tenderfoot]

Patriot Front members confessed to destroying numerous works of art in private messages.

For the second time in as many years, American fascist organization Patriot Front is facing a humiliating leak of internal communications, messages revealing a trove of evidence pointing to coordinated criminal activities in multiple states, including New York, Washington, Indiana, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Oregon.

Experts consulted by Gizmodo say the material is likely to seriously damage Patriot Front, which the Anti-Defamation League has identified as one of the biggest sources of white supremacist propaganda in the U.S. and mostly recently was in the public eye for a march of an estimated 100 cadres on the National Mall in Washington, DC, last month.

A hostile offshoot of the defunct neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, Patriot Front formed in late August 2017 less than three weeks after the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. (James Alex Fields Jr., who was convicted in December 2018 of killing 32-year-old anti-racist protester Heather Heyer at the rally, was seen there holding a shield emblazoned with the VA logo. VA later denied he was a member.) The split from VA followed months of infighting between Thomas Rousseau, the Front’s founder, and VA leader Dillon Irizarry, who was seen accusing Rousseau in leaked chat logs of staging a “literal coup” in June 2017, according to the ADL.

According to Rousseau at the time, the betrayal was necessary to rebrand the movement and eschew the explicitly racist and anti-Semitic imagery blatantly advertised in Charlottesville. Preferring his hate group with a more sanitized, pro-American visage, Rousseau’s plan was to “inspire sympathy” among those “inclined to fence-sitting” —young, impressionable bigots across the country who, conscious of it or not, were already believers in his cause: erasing a century’s worth of racial progress and reverting the U.S. back into its former condition as strictly a white ethnostate.

https://gizmodo.com/patriot-front-leak-data-breach-hate-crimes-1848401943