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

[Nevilledog]

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

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.

*snip*

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Mikael Thalen
@MikaelThalen
Patriot Front had its data leaked. This video sums them up pretty nicely:

Camera on: We aren’t Nazis!

Camera off: “Seig fucking Heil, let’s fucking go! I can say that now that it’s (the video) over.”


Watch on Twitter
3:42 PM · Jan 21, 2022

[Cha]

1. Fucking Hitler Lost the World War &

Killed his GD self... you Stupid Ass Nazi Shits.

[Kingofalldems]

2. Kick and rec

[crickets]

3. Well, there's no excuse not to go after them now.

The internal communications further reveal an organization that, despite having been publicly accused repeatedly in the commission of crimes across the country—namely, the defacement and destruction of public works of art that confront and illuminate racial and social inequality—has simply continued unabated, routinely planning and executing what are essentially hate crimes, in spirit if not under the law, while facing virtually no personal or legal consequences. [snip]

Despite extensive efforts to shield the identities of members engaged in criminal activities, including the adoption of fake names, the leaked messages provide sufficient evidence in some cases to positively identify the culprits. [snip]

This insistence on documentation combined with sloppy infosec—hosting raw media on unprotected, public folders on file-sharing sites, for example—means the leak includes dozens if not hundreds of videos and photos of members apparently committing crimes.

Again, there's no excuse not to go after them now.

*chirp*