Is the ‘Patriot Front’ a Fed PsyOp?
Posted on | January 25, 2025 | Comments Off on Is the ‘Patriot Front’ a Fed PsyOp?
Certainly I am not the only conservative who has suspected this mysterious “white nationalist” group of being secretly controlled by the FBI, and when the Patriot Front showed up during Friday’s annual March for Life in Washington, everybody with an X account was yelling “Fed.”
With nearly 40 years of experience as a journalist, I certainly do not wish to be counted among the “right-wing influencers and conspiracy theorists . . . peddling false narratives about [Patriot Front being] ‘Antifa’ and undercover federal agents.” It takes nearly zero research skills to discover the basic facts about Patriot Front. The group originated in the aftermath of the August 2017 “Unite the Right” riot in Charlottesville, Virginia (which I had been invited to attend/cover, an invitation I fortuitously declined). A teenager from Texas named Thomas Ryan Rousseau participated in “Unite the Right” as part of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America (VA). Rousseau then split from VA to form the Patriot Front, having gained control of VA’s online channels and using these resources to recruit some 200 members for his new group.

Thomas Ryan Rousseau
So, unless Rousseau was faking his neo-Nazi act as a teenager, he is a sincere white nationalist and his group was at least authentic in its origins. No room for “conspiracy theory” there but . . .
Among other things, Patriot Front has been plagued by what we used to call “piss-poor opsec.” Here I find myself smiling ironically as I cite my source, the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Like other hate and extremist groups, the need to recruit and grow their members makes PF a target for antifascist activists who attempt to infiltrate white nationalist groups to expose and disrupt their activities. Since 2018, antifascist activists have infiltrated PF at least five times, which has led to journalist and activist networks obtaining thousands of documents, including internal chat logs, audio and video recordings, and photographs. The laxed operational security measures of PF that are responsible for these infiltrations led to the identification of more than 130 current and former members since 2019.
Now, if Antifa activists can succeed in infiltrating Patriot Front so often, is it really a “conspiracy theory” to suspect that some members of Rousseau’s group are either (a) undercover FBI agents or (b) FBI informants? How many times have we heard Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray and others swear under oath that “white supremacists” are the Number One terrorist threat in America? The SPLC has called the Patriot Front “arguably the leading white supremacist group in the country.” Doesn’t it make sense that the FBI would be all over them?
Most people have never paid attention to how COINTELPRO-type tactics actually work, especially in the Internet Age, although we get glimpses of these tactics occasionally, such as the bizarre kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, where about a dozen “militia” types got swept up in what most would consider an entrapment that involved two undercover FBI agents and three FBI informants. If the feds can infiltrate an undercover agent who succeeds in gaining trust of a group, it’s possible for such an infiltrator to act as an agent provocateur, encouraging the group to engage in illegal acts for which they can then be prosecuted. Insofar as such agents provocateurs are influencing the group’s activities, then, the other members are unwittingly participating in a federal operation, the objective of which is their own destruction.
Let us not overlook the fact that such tactics have frequently been used against Islamic extremists — Ahmed gets “radicalized” and wants to do something to strike a blow against the Great Satan and, next thing you know, Ahmed gets caught in a sting operation, with FBI undercover agents “helping” his plans for a bombing or whatever. Yea, FBI!
If we’re going to cheer for the FBI when they’re duping jihadi wannabes like that, we would be hypocrites to condemn the FBI for employing similar tactics against Thomas Rousseau and his Patriot Front buddies. But the question is, to what extent is the FBI enabling the Patriot Front? This question arises when you consider what happened in the 2022 Idaho bust of the Patriot Front at a “Pride” counter-protest.
[P]olice in North Idaho had the leader of America’s largest white nationalist group and 30 of his followers unmasked, zip-tied and in custody.
They’d been caught on June 11, 2022, based on a tip that said a “little army” of masked men had been seen filing into the back of a U-Haul truck. Coeur d’Alene police pulled open the back door, found a squadron of men equipped with white masks, metal flag poles, homemade sheet-metal riot shields and a smoke grenade.
And on the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, police found a note laying out a detailed plan to establish a “confrontational dynamic” at that day’s gay pride festival.
If the threat of “white supremacy” is as serious as Merrick Garland and others keep saying it is, wouldn’t you think that the feds would jump into action to make sure that this arrest put an end to the Patriot Front? And yet, that’s not what happened at all:
Kris Goldsmith, head of an anti-fascist research organization, said the Patriot Front case should not have been handled by local prosecutors to begin with.
“Expecting a city prosecutor to take on a national white supremacist organization is disappointing,” Goldsmith said. “The FBI is just sitting on their hands.”
In fact, court documents suggest, the FBI made prosecuting Patriot Front a lot harder.
You can read the whole thing and, if you do, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether mere incompetence is sufficient to explain how the feds dropped the ball when they had a chance to wreck the Patriot Front. Instead, they got away with slap-on-the-wrist treatment, and if one were in the mood to entertain a conspiracy theory — note the hypothetical — you might conclude that the feds very much want the Patriot Front to keep going. In this hypothetical scenario, it serves the political interests of the Democratic Party to have this flamboyant white supremacist group keep showing up to stage public protests, thus helping to further the narrative that the Great Racist Menace is alive and kicking, and that there is no real distance between the Patriot Front and those evil right-wing racist Republicans who elected Donald Trump, i.e., a psyop.
Of course, this is just hypothetical speculation and, as I stipulated previously, I have no desire to be a “conspiracy theorist.” However, my experience as a journalist has taught me to be skeptical of any story that seems too “just so,” conveniently offered as validating someone’s pet political agenda, like the UVA rape hoax. The activities of the Patriot Front seem to fit that category, as they zoomed to prominence during Trump’s first term, then kept popping up at public events during Biden’s term, conveniently representing the Threat to Our Democracy that Biden kept talking about. So now, just four days after Trump got back in the White House, BOOM! The Patriot Front shows up in D.C., and we’re all expected to think this is just a coincidence? A spontaneous event?
Pam Bondi will soon be confirmed as Attorney General, and Kash Patel will be the new FBI director, and my hunch — just a hunch, not a conspiracy theory — is that we will soon see the Patriot Front disappear, like the morning dew evaporating in the noonday sun. We might never learn the whole truth (“sources and methods” must be protected), but if my hunch is correct, Trump’s DOJ won’t continue . . . Well, “sponsoring” is perhaps too strong a term for what the feds have been doing with the Patriot Front, but call it what you will, it’s going to end soon.
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