Topline
Police in a small Idaho city arrested dozens of purported members of the far-right Patriot Front over the weekend for allegedly plotting to riot at a local LGBTQ Pride event, a startling incident that led police to receive death threats by Monday and brought nationwide attention to a relatively new but already-infamous white supremacist group.
Members of the right-wing Patriot Front stand in Washington, D.C., as they prepare to march with … [+]
Key Facts
Law enforcement in Coeur d’Alene—a city of 56,000 in northern Idaho—announced Saturday they arrested 31 people from across the country who piled into a U-Haul van carrying shields, shin guards, at least one smoke grenade and documents indicating they were headed to disrupt the city’s downtown Pride in the Park event that afternoon.
The alleged rioters appeared to be tied to the Patriot Front, according to Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White, and one of the arrestees who now faces misdemeanor conspiracy charges was reportedly Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau of Texas.
Rousseau founded the Patriot Front in the summer of 2017, splitting off from a separate radical group called Vanguard America, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The group’s core belief is that the United States fundamentally belongs to people with white European ancestry, a message it often promotes by mixing racist and antisemitic claims with patriotic iconography, the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center say.
News Peg
The arrests have drawn focus to both the Patriot Front and Coeur d’Alene. At a Monday press conference, White said local law enforcement have received 149 phone calls since the arrests: Roughly half of those calls were supportive messages from local residents, and the other half were anonymous callers from as far afield as Norway who berated the police—and made death threats against officers in some cases.
Key Background
The Patriot Front split from Vanguard America—and forged its approach to spreading its radical message—after the notoriously violent August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rousseau led a contingent of Vanguard America members to the caustic rally, but he reportedly rebranded his arm of the group after a man later convicted of killing counterprotester Heather Heyer with his car was photographed standing alongside some Vanguard America members in Charlottesville (the group has denied the driver, James Alex Fields, was one of its members). The SPLC says the Patriot Front’s ideology largely didn’t change after this schism, but the group became “image-obsessed” and adopted a slightly more subtle tack. In 2019, ProPublica noted that Rousseau has sought to push his radical beliefs in a disciplined and relatively cautious manner: The group uses patriotic symbols to seem more mainstream, and he is loath to explicitly endorse violence.
Tangent
The alleged plan to riot in Coeur d’Alene came on the same day that members of the Proud Boys—a right-wing group—allegedly yelled anti-LGBTQ slurs at a Drag Queen Story Hour event in a library in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Further Reading
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2022/06/13/idaho-police-receive-death-threats-after-arresting-white-supremacist-patriot-front-members-heres-what-we-know-about-the-group/