Each person behind the mask is just another awoken member of the nation, who could be anyone who’s had enough.” “The organization is not about its members,” the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, once wrote to its members in the secret chats. Patriot Front aspired to help chart a new way forward: spread propaganda espousing its version of a nascent American fascism quietly recruit new members worried about a nation overrun by immigrants and a world controlled by Jews avoid talking about guns or violence online, but engage in a mix of vandalism and intimidation to foster anxiety wear masks in public and communicate secretly. Get Our Top InvestigationsĮmail address This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. While many on America’s far-right cheered the rally, its violence struck others as a public-relations debacle for the white nationalist brand that was sure to attract greater oversight by law enforcement. Patriot Front was formed in the aftermath of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Several Patriot Front members alerted others to the need to be careful, for the killings in El Paso would likely make the group a target of the FBI. Of course, some of them decide to lash out.” “White men are being slowly destroyed in a way calculated to produce resentment and a sense of helplessness. “It shouldn’t be hard to believe that the group facing the harshest oppression from our ruling elite are producing shooters,” one Patriot Front member wrote. It would be a bad look if the next mass murderer was one of their own.īut there was little, if any, regret over the loss of life. Still other members cautioned that the group had its own “loose cannons” to worry about. Others floated false conspiracy theories: the CIA was behind the murders the accused killer was actually Jewish. In secret chat forums, some Patriot Front members embraced the spirit of the anti-immigrant manifesto left behind by the accused gunman. While much of the country reacted with a weary sense of sorrow and outrage, word of the mass killing was processed differently by members of Patriot Front, one of the more prominent white supremacist groups in the U.S. A portrait of the gunman accused of killing them soon took shape: a 21-year-old from a suburb of Dallas who had been radicalized as a white supremacist online and who saw immigrants as a threat to the future of white America. 3, a final toll emerged: 22 dead, most of them Latinos, some Mexican nationals.
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In the hours after the slaughter in El Paso, Texas, on Aug. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.