Or rather, I should say, doing work that the FBI
should be doing.
(Far-right infiltrator) told me he couldn’t believe that the organizers “were this stupid”: they’d laid out explicit plans, in writing, for instigating violence. Anarchist computer programmers eventually helped replicate the entire cache, which Unicorn Riot published online, in searchable form.
The leaks became the basis of a landmark lawsuit, Sines v. Kessler, which concluded this past July, when the court in Richmond approved a verdict awarding a group of Charlottesville residents more than nine million dollars in punitive damages and legal fees, from a roster of far-right groups and their leaders. Prosecutors used the leaks to help convict Fields of the killing—he was given a life sentence—and to win plea agreements from four members of Rundo’s Rise Above Movement, who had been charged as “serial rioters.” The suit also led to the implosion of several white-supremacist groups, including Vanguard America. (Afterward, Rousseau led hundreds of the group’s members to form Patriot Front.)
They have also demonstrated how much the military and police are infested with white supremacists:
In addition, the leaks caused the dishonorable discharge of two U.S. marines who had participated. One of them, Lance Corporal Vasillios G. Pistolis, a member of the Atomwaffen Division, had boasted on Discord that during the rally he had “cracked 3 skulls together.” Sergeant Michael Joseph Chesny had asked in a Discord chat, “Is it legal to run over protesters blocking roadways?”
And it's clear that
Patriot Front is an exceptionally evil organization:
By May, 2022, Unicorn Riot had released audio files documenting at least seventeen hours’ worth of internal Patriot Front meetings and calls, in addition to nearly a hundred thousand lines from internal chats. (Feidt and Schiano refused to talk about their source.) The chats revealed that Rousseau and other members had privately described the U.S. as a “Zionist Occupied Government.” Recordings captured members discussing the need to ban homosexuality and to make women subservient, and fantasizing about how “rape gangs” could exert control over women in their future ethnostate. In one recording, a Florida network director of Patriot Front advised members to enlist their girlfriends in racist vandalism; then the members could blackmail their girlfriends, insuring their loyalty. The director mused in another recording that Patriot Front was, in some ways, “a criminal organization.” Patriot Front officially disavowed violence. It also prohibited members from bringing firearms to events. But the leaks revealed that some members had a keen interest in guns. Photographs showed 3-D-printed “ghost guns” inside the home of a Seattle-area member. A video captured someone in Brown’s crew firing a rifle at a stolen Black Lives Matter sign, and chats indicated that another member brought two loaded handguns to the Washington march. (At least two people linked to Patriot Front in other areas have been arrested for illegal gun possession.)
The end of the article has this fascinating account of the antifascist Appalachia Research Club versus the far-right Appalachian Archives.
At the time, (journalist Jordan) Green was reporting on the 2119 Crew, a neo-Nazi gang linked to brick-through-the-window attacks against a synagogue and a Jewish center, in addition to vandalism targeting Muslim and Black people. (“2119” is alphanumeric code for “Blood and Soil.”) Appalachian Archives posted a head shot of Green and wrote, “The bastard above had been found out to be harassing our boys.”
One afternoon this past January, Green’s doorbell rang: a pizza that he hadn’t ordered was being delivered. The next day, Appalachian Archives posted a photograph of Green answering the door. A few weeks later, half a dozen men—many wearing skull masks, a neo-Nazi hallmark—gathered outside his house. Some gave straight-armed Roman salutes, and one carried a sign warning of a “consequence” for Green’s reporting. Appalachian Archives posted a picture of the stunt, as well as a photograph of the same contingent standing next to a marker commemorating the Greensboro massacre, where, in 1979, white supremacists shot and killed five labor organizers.
But an antifascist collective called Appalachia Research Club, which was working with Green, had obtained a photograph of the vehicle driven by the stealth photographer at the pizza delivery. Armed with the license-plate number, they were able to identify the car’s owner: Kai Liam Nix, a twenty-year-old from North Carolina. Having scoured social media and Unicorn Riot’s database of leaks, they were able to match his face and birthday with a Patriot Front member operating under the pseudonym Patrick North Carolina. It seemed likely that Nix either ran the Appalachian Archives account or was closely linked to it. With the help of Jeff Tischauser, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the researchers discovered that Nix is also an active-duty soldier in the Army, serving in the 82nd Airborne Division and stationed at Fort Liberty, in North Carolina. Tischauser told me, “These antifascist researchers may not be up to the ethical standards of professional journalists, but some of them get quality information.”
I reached Nix by phone, and he denied any involvement in the Appalachian Archives account or with Patriot Front. He told me, “That is a hate group, and you can’t be in the military and a hate group at the same time.” Nix pleaded with me not to publish the allegations, which, he said, would hinder an application he’d made to become a police detective after leaving the military, “to stop criminals.” We agreed to discuss the matter the next day, at a Starbucks near Fort Liberty. Before we hung up, I asked him for his license-plate number—the key detail linking him to Appalachian Archives—and he claimed not to remember it. The next morning, he backed out of our meeting and stopped responding to my messages. On August 16th, a few days after I called the Army, a government official told me that the previous day federal agents had arrested Nix for illicit sales of firearms and lying on a background check. (Spokespeople for the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina declined to comment.)
The online war between the far right and the far left continues. After recent marches in Nashville by Patriot Front and a neo-Nazi group, some antifascist researchers launched a campaign called Name the Bozo, which aims to publicly identify as many neo-Nazis as possible. About twenty “bozos” have been exposed so far. One member of the Appalachia Research Club told me that members of far-right groups “have a First Amendment right to be assholes and voice their opinions—but I have a First Amendment right to call them out on that, and if that results in repercussions where they lose their jobs or go to jail, that’s on them, not me.” He continued, “It doesn’t seem like the authorities are interested. I don’t know if they are just turning a blind eye, or if there is something else. But I think this is important work, and I am going to keep doing it, because I think some of these guys are legitimately dangerous.”
The article also links Patriot Front to the Buffalo mass-murderer:
Moreover, the far right’s online promotion of the great-replacement theory to countless sympathizers is accumulating an ominous death toll. In the past decade, lone gunmen inspired by far-right propaganda have killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston (2015), eleven Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh (2018), twenty-three Walmart shoppers in El Paso (2019), and ten Black residents of Buffalo (2022). Inside Patriot Front and across the far right, these mass murderers are venerated with the title of “saint”—as in “Saint Dylann Roof,” who carried out the Charleston massacre. (Roof’s name was chanted at the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, in 2017.) Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University who studies extremist violence and sometimes advises the White House and the F.B.I., told me that Patriot Front’s marches and vandalism—even if they appear merely performative—“are intended to normalize these ideas, to help mobilize other people, to make them think that there’s a groundswell, to inspire violent action. And it’s effective.”
The Buffalo mass-murderer wrote a manifesto that cites several people who have participated in conferences of the International Society for Intelligence Research.
