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.