Patriot Front

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Patriot Front

Postby liminalOyster » Fri Jul 15, 2022 7:13 pm

Most hits about them on RI lead back to AD's old data dumps but with their rise in MSM visibility, I'm curious to start a new compendium.

What's the deal beyond what WP/MSM has to offer?

Consensus among my more conservative friends is that it's an egregious honeypot. Left friends see them as Richard Spencer redux.

IMO, the Unicorn Riot leaked files (January of this year, easy to find online) give more credence to the possibility they really are a legit (if surely also well infiltrated) bunch of wannabe nazi ninnies.

Would post an article for starters but really can't find anything very good on them.
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Re: Patriot Front

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 15, 2022 8:06 pm

They are all egregious honeypots. This is how the militia movement was ended in the 90's, this is how Islamic terrorist networks got dismantled in the Bush Era. These operations are of dubious morality and come with steep consequences and blowback, but they also work: once you have to assume any group of more than three people has more than two informants, your capacity -- for anything, recruitment, planning, operations, sleeping on a weeknight -- is permanently broken.

It's not all the benevolence of good men doing hard jobs, of course: all of these groups are still great scarecrows for fundraising, and hell, if some of your assets do something wild like blow up an abortion clinic or launch the worlds dumbest plan to kidnap a sitting governor, all that's going to do is increase your budget for next year. That's if you don't get promoted straight to DC as a reward.

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Re: Patriot Front

Postby liminalOyster » Fri Jul 15, 2022 9:32 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 15, 2022 8:06 pm wrote:They are all egregious honeypots. This is how the militia movement was ended in the 90's, this is how Islamic terrorist networks got dismantled in the Bush Era. These operations are of dubious morality and come with steep consequences and blowback, but they also work: once you have to assume any group of more than three people has more than two informants, your capacity -- for anything, recruitment, planning, operations, sleeping on a weeknight -- is permanently broken.

It's not all the benevolence of good men doing hard jobs, of course: all of these groups are still great scarecrows for fundraising, and hell, if some of your assets do something wild like blow up an abortion clinic or launch the worlds dumbest plan to kidnap a sitting governor, all that's going to do is increase your budget for next year. That's if you don't get promoted straight to DC as a reward.

There is no authentic counterculture, there is no authentic threat.


Sorry, I should have written a stronger qualifier knowing/hoping for your input, Wombat Yes, definitely and indeed to this historical narrative. But there's nothing to stop small groups of kids, etc from starting wannabe movements. I've seen it happen among Black activists. I'm sure everything of any substantiality is very quickly identified/owned/operated, etc but there's also gotta be those groups which maintain some independent core or side-branch more than just total control, no?

Does "Thomas Rousseau," for instance, have parents or other connections to the state formerly known as the deep state or MIC?
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Re: Patriot Front

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jul 16, 2022 12:17 pm

liminalOyster » Fri Jul 15, 2022 8:32 pm wrote:Does "Thomas Rousseau," for instance, have parents or other connections to the state formerly known as the deep state or MIC?


I am more familiar with the org than the man, but let's assume that he is an earnest convert making an earnest bid to start a successful WN org, because that's more instructive than another Jim Morrison Theory.

I often refer to fields like UFOlogy, or the JFK assassination, or "White Nationalism" as sandboxes, a term of trade from one of my many day jobs, a contained testing environment, managed and controlled. Thanks to the FOIA nerds, we know that Thomas Ryan Rousseau has been under FBI observation since he was in high school. Well-designed flyers, persistent social media presence, and published writings in the school paper were enough to land him on the radars -- and whiteboards -- of the Quantico Mafia before that motherfucker could even get a diploma.

From there he gets onboarded into Vanguard America, the product of an ex-Marine who started it straight out of active duty. Per the brits:

Hopper was promoted to staff sergeant by the marines in October last year, according to a local news report, and had been due to “train, teach and mentor” potential marine officers. The article said Hopper had joined the military shortly after graduating from high school in Roswell, New Mexico, in 2005.

In a speech to fellow Nazis in Pikeville, Kentucky, earlier this year, Hopper said that since taking over the leadership of American Vanguard he had tried to strengthen the group with lessons learned from his time in the military.

“I’ve kind of tooken [sic] that experience and scrubbed the Vanguard pretty good with it,” Hopper said, “and I’m getting a pretty good product.”

...

“We also uphold standards of dress and grooming and physical fitness because our ideology is one of strength and purity and self-improvement,” he said.

Thomas would not provide any details about the group’s process for vetting members, other than to say that it included an interview. A questionnaire once used by the group for screening, which was obtained by the Guardian, asked for details of applicants’ professions, beliefs and criminal histories. It asked how often they consumed tobacco or alcohol and “how long you’ve been ‘red pilled’,” a phrase used on the far-right to mean aware of supposed difficult truths.


Oddly, a collective that recruits on the basis of blackmail evidence (cf. the insufferably homoerotic "Proud Boys") had difficulties with trust and group cohesion, and by all accounts, Rousseau and Irizarry/Hooper were at odds over core strategy from the start, culminating in an acrimonious split in '17.

All of this happened against the background of Charlottesville, full of strange details I will simply ignore this morning, a seismic event that was successful in splintering a nascent movement that was emboldened by the election of ol' DJT45. Everyone involved was trying to avoid culpability and a plethora of law enforcement operations were able to swoop in and set up some bespoke informant networks -- thought not without some infighting and turf wars of their own. Men are men.

And what else could a young white nationalist do? All of his potential mentors were suspects and failures, if not felons and inmates. He has to carve out his own turf and then, immediately, come to grips with the steep costs and high demands of defending it from the same forces that destroyed everything else so far. So immediately, despite the alarming headlines of a bold new hate group on America's bloody soil, Rousseau is locked down by the burden of policing his own org, reduced to his original talent: making up pithy little 8.5 x 11 inch flyers and demanding .jpg proof that his loyal flock are putting them up in the real world. Truly, a terror set loose upon the world!

This is exactly the outcome outlined in the Subversion of Social Movements by Adversarial Actors paper. Rousseau is attempting to observe, orient, decide and act in an environment of total distrust and paranoia. He exerts most of his energy vetting his recruits, monitoring their actions, and trying to control the internal flow of information (and failing spectacularly when entire server logs get leaked).

(This state of affairs is also great for narrative control, because given all the proliferating inter-related orgs and actors and accusations, anything that stinks can be debunked by lumping them all together: ie, "Patriot Front isn't a Fed honeypot because Ray Epps didn't organize the January 6th protest for the FBI." It's a target rich environment for lazy, stupid writers and most corporate product journalists fit that bill.)

All of this is fundraising fodder for orgs like SPLC, training material for "OSINT" research team cutouts like Bellingcat, and, perhaps most important, the boogeyman for bills to restrict and monitor online speech.

Fucked, and fucked from the start, and it's all by design. The United States of America has been an active combat zone for centuries now, and our entire culture war was, and is, a military intelligence sandbox. Not as a primary cause, but as an inevitable outcome. It does not matter if participants are agents or targets, witting or useful, paid or volunteer, the system will abide until the money dries up and the lights flick out.
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Re: Patriot Front

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Jul 16, 2022 12:25 pm

.
Nothing of substance to add, but:

This is good shit. Thanks for starting this thread LiminalO and for WRex in formulating words more coherently than the random musings that sputter in my brain.
Funny: I also work in an industry where "sandbox environments" and "OSINT" are part of jargon/M.O. for certain engagements (as recently as an email received this AM, in fact), and coincidentally, earlier this week was conjuring [half-baked] parallels of industry concepts applied towards machinations out there in the wild, along similar lines (well, conceptually at least) as conveyed above.
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Re: Patriot Front

Postby liminalOyster » Sat Jul 16, 2022 5:15 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jul 16, 2022 12:17 pm wrote:
liminalOyster » Fri Jul 15, 2022 8:32 pm wrote:Does "Thomas Rousseau," for instance, have parents or other connections to the state formerly known as the deep state or MIC?


I am more familiar with the org than the man, but let's assume that he is an earnest convert making an earnest bid to start a successful WN org, because that's more instructive than another Jim Morrison Theory.

I often refer to fields like UFOlogy, or the JFK assassination, or "White Nationalism" as sandboxes, a term of trade from one of my many day jobs, a contained testing environment, managed and controlled. Thanks to the FOIA nerds, we know that Thomas Ryan Rousseau has been under FBI observation since he was in high school. Well-designed flyers, persistent social media presence, and published writings in the school paper were enough to land him on the radars -- and whiteboards -- of the Quantico Mafia before that motherfucker could even get a diploma.

From there he gets onboarded into Vanguard America, the product of an ex-Marine who started it straight out of active duty. Per the brits:

Hopper was promoted to staff sergeant by the marines in October last year, according to a local news report, and had been due to “train, teach and mentor” potential marine officers. The article said Hopper had joined the military shortly after graduating from high school in Roswell, New Mexico, in 2005.

In a speech to fellow Nazis in Pikeville, Kentucky, earlier this year, Hopper said that since taking over the leadership of American Vanguard he had tried to strengthen the group with lessons learned from his time in the military.

“I’ve kind of tooken [sic] that experience and scrubbed the Vanguard pretty good with it,” Hopper said, “and I’m getting a pretty good product.”

...

“We also uphold standards of dress and grooming and physical fitness because our ideology is one of strength and purity and self-improvement,” he said.

Thomas would not provide any details about the group’s process for vetting members, other than to say that it included an interview. A questionnaire once used by the group for screening, which was obtained by the Guardian, asked for details of applicants’ professions, beliefs and criminal histories. It asked how often they consumed tobacco or alcohol and “how long you’ve been ‘red pilled’,” a phrase used on the far-right to mean aware of supposed difficult truths.


Oddly, a collective that recruits on the basis of blackmail evidence (cf. the insufferably homoerotic "Proud Boys") had difficulties with trust and group cohesion, and by all accounts, Rousseau and Irizarry/Hooper were at odds over core strategy from the start, culminating in an acrimonious split in '17.

All of this happened against the background of Charlottesville, full of strange details I will simply ignore this morning, a seismic event that was successful in splintering a nascent movement that was emboldened by the election of ol' DJT45. Everyone involved was trying to avoid culpability and a plethora of law enforcement operations were able to swoop in and set up some bespoke informant networks -- thought not without some infighting and turf wars of their own. Men are men.

And what else could a young white nationalist do? All of his potential mentors were suspects and failures, if not felons and inmates. He has to carve out his own turf and then, immediately, come to grips with the steep costs and high demands of defending it from the same forces that destroyed everything else so far. So immediately, despite the alarming headlines of a bold new hate group on America's bloody soil, Rousseau is locked down by the burden of policing his own org, reduced to his original talent: making up pithy little 8.5 x 11 inch flyers and demanding .jpg proof that his loyal flock are putting them up in the real world. Truly, a terror set loose upon the world!

This is exactly the outcome outlined in the Subversion of Social Movements by Adversarial Actors paper. Rousseau is attempting to observe, orient, decide and act in an environment of total distrust and paranoia. He exerts most of his energy vetting his recruits, monitoring their actions, and trying to control the internal flow of information (and failing spectacularly when entire server logs get leaked).

(This state of affairs is also great for narrative control, because given all the proliferating inter-related orgs and actors and accusations, anything that stinks can be debunked by lumping them all together: ie, "Patriot Front isn't a Fed honeypot because Ray Epps didn't organize the January 6th protest for the FBI." It's a target rich environment for lazy, stupid writers and most corporate product journalists fit that bill.)

All of this is fundraising fodder for orgs like SPLC, training material for "OSINT" research team cutouts like Bellingcat, and, perhaps most important, the boogeyman for bills to restrict and monitor online speech.

Fucked, and fucked from the start, and it's all by design. The United States of America has been an active combat zone for centuries now, and our entire culture war was, and is, a military intelligence sandbox. Not as a primary cause, but as an inevitable outcome. It does not matter if participants are agents or targets, witting or useful, paid or volunteer, the system will abide until the money dries up and the lights flick out.
\

Neither sarcastic or overly-adulatory when I say I still think you have one of the strongest and most unique grasps on this mise-en-scene than anyone I know or know of. I never fail to rethink my assumptions about the radical group / abc enmeshment wholly, after reading your takes. Thanks, man.
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Re: Patriot Front

Postby Elvis » Wed Jul 20, 2022 10:06 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:There is no authentic counterculture, there is no authentic threat.


:phew:

A local established poetry group was joined by an FBI informer who asked a ton of questions over the course of a few meetings/readings, then stopped showing up. He was just trying to stay out of prison; I wonder what other groups he joined? Seems like poetry is not the threat they're looking for.
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