Inside the culty white supremacists the feds are ignoring
B A PARKER, HOST:
Hey, everyone. You're listening to CODE SWITCH, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm B.A. Parker.
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
And I'm Gene Demby. All right, Parker. So you know we've talked before on this podcast, obviously, about young dudes getting red-pilled online, right?
PARKER: Yes. They start looking at fitness influencers or podcasters or gaming streamers, and they get introduced and pulled toward more extreme ideas, like, you know, conspiracy theories, misogyny, racism, antisemitism. It's all a bad time, man.
DEMBY: Bad time (laughter).
PARKER: So, you know, thanks, internet.
DEMBY: Ah, you're crazy for that one, internet. Yeah, there's a lot of lonely people out there online. But on another part of the interwebs, there are a lot of folks out there hawking their wares, trying to get you to join their MLMs.
PARKER: So we should explain for the people. MLMs are multilevel marketing companies.
DEMBY: Right, right, right.
PARKER: Like, pyramid schemes.
DEMBY: Right. And those companies deny that they're pyramid schemes. They don't - they say that's not what they are.
PARKER: Think Amway, or Cutco knives or Herbalife.
DEMBY: Or, you know, that lady in your neighborhood pushing a hot pink SUV that she got as a reward for selling a whole lot of Mary Kay. But, Parker, what if I told you that I recently learned one of the most visible white nationalist groups in the country right now might be kind of doing this red pill thing and this MLM thing at the same time?
PARKER: I don't think I would like that, Gene.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: This morning, as hundreds of members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched through D.C.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Marched through Washington, D.C., carrying Confederate flags and shouting slogans like, quote, "reclaim America."
DEMBY: That group is called Patriot Front, and I learned a lot about them from the reporting of Odette Yousef, who's one of our colleagues here at NPR.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: I am NPR's domestic extremism correspondent, and I cover domestic extremism.
DEMBY: And Odette walked me through what she knows about these dudes.
YOUSEF: So this is a neo-Nazi organization. This is a group of men that are trying to foment for a white ethnostate for ethnic cleansing of the United States. This is a group that admires Hitler. The founder of Patriot Front is a man named Thomas Rousseau.
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THOMAS ROUSSEAU: Mass immigration must be halted and reversed with equally massive repatriation efforts.
DEMBY: Rousseau is based in Texas. He's 27, so he's, like, a Gen Z cusper. And he founded the Patriot Front after he went to the Unite the Right rally in 2017, back in Charlottesville. You remember that, Parker, right?
PARKER: Yeah.
DEMBY: Yeah. That was back when he was a teenager.
PARKER: When he was just a little fledgling fascist.
DEMBY: Odette talked to this guy named Kris Goldsmith, who went undercover in Patriot Front because Goldsmith wanted to get a sense of what things looked like from the inside, like, what their books look like, how they sustain themselves financially.
YOUSEF: The way he describes Patriot Front is as a cult and a pyramid scheme. And that's because Thomas Rousseau really keeps a tight leash on members of Patriot Front.
DEMBY: And Odette said that members of Patriot Front have to buy, Parker, what's basically branded merch from Rousseau. In this case, stickers and stencils.
PARKER: Wait, so he's, like, neo-Nazi Lisa Frank?
DEMBY: Far fewer rainbows because, you know, they hate queer folks, but, yes, yes.
YOUSEF: This is sort of the financial scheme is that members basically have to purchase propaganda material every month, you know, from Thomas Rousseau, and they mail him cash. He expects them to go out weekly and post propaganda for the organization, whether that's putting stickers up or doing banner drops or, you know, stencils or whatever.
DEMBY: And so you've got these hundreds of young white dudes looking for community online with other young, disaffected races. And so they're joining the street team for the white ethnostate. They're like hype beasts for Hitler. And, Parker, I should say that groups like Patriot Front are trying to raise their profile because if you're a young guy on the far right right now, you kind of got a lot of options, including through official government channels.
PARKER: Right. So, like, if you're anti-immigrant, why pay into this club when you could just get a job with ICE?
DEMBY: Exactly. So that's what we're getting into on this episode, Parker, because these guys are openly recruiting in public in ways that white supremacists haven't felt safe to do in a real long time, in part because the Trump administration is looking past open displays of rising political extremism on the right, all the while ramping up investigations and prosecutions into its political opponents, opponents that the administration has labeled extreme and on the left.
PARKER: Oh, boy. OK, take it away, Gene.
DEMBY: A lot of us learned about Patriot Front for the first time because of this haunting viral photo from around the Fourth of July. It shows all these Patriot Front members on the D.C. metro, and they're wearing these white balaclavas. They got shades on. They got baseball caps, you know, just to cover their faces. And in the middle of this photo is this woman, a Black D.C. resident named Bernita Bolding, and she's kind of staring into the middle distance. And people all over the internet were worried about Bolding. But Odette Yousef says Patriot Front was trying to present itself as friendly and accessible. So, in D.C., they made a point to be really visible but not violent or disruptive.
YOUSEF: They look like the guy at Best Buy. Like, they've got the khakis and the polo shirt, and they look very approachable. And that is part of that optic that they are trying to cultivate, you know, not scary, but still a show of force.
DEMBY: Yeah. They're not building a tree house in the backyard. They're building a white ethnostate.
YOUSEF: I think what they are hoping to portray or to project is that they are a group of organized men who share these beliefs, and they're out putting on what they are terming a patriotic display, right? Like, dressed in the red, white and blue patches, organized, orderly is what we saw in D.C., but, you know, standing firm on their values. And it absolutely is intended to signal to men who are on the right, but not as far right, that this is a group that they should think about.
DEMBY: So if we were to do kind of, like, a taxonomy of white nationalism - right? - if you could sort of, like, sketch out this, like, sort of giant universe of white nationalism, how does Patriot Front position itself in relation to the other groups out there? Like, why would somebody join Patriot Front and not the Klan or some other neo-Nazi group?
YOUSEF: So first of all, I think the Klan is just passe.
DEMBY: OK.
YOUSEF: Like, you know, I don't think that people, like, young Gen Z dudes are like, oh, the Klan, like, that's where the cool kids are at. You know, even though the ideology really is the same, it's the presentation that differs. And this has been true throughout history. You know, I've said in my reporting, like, Patriot Front is basically neo-Nazi skinheads with a different presentation - right? - different optics. And so in some ways, it really isn't very different from the other threads of the white nationalist far right. There's a common ideology. It's just sort of the choice of aesthetic that differs.
One thing I will note, though, is that Patriot Front, like many of these neo-Nazi organizations, is not political. You know, it's - like, I've gotten this question from people before, like, oh, are they pro-Trump? No, they're not pro-Trump.
DEMBY: When you say not political, you mean, like, not partisan?
YOUSEF: Yeah. They're not for, like, a political party. Like, they're not for working within the political system to achieve their goal. OK. You know, Patriot Front falls into a category of what would be called accelerationist groups. Accelerationism is an idea that the only way to build the fascist future, the far-right fascist future, is by accelerating the collapse of society and government and order that currently exists so that from the ashes, something new can be built, and that new thing would be a white ethnostate. And so these guys are basically advocates for race war, for anything that sort of accelerates just disorder.
The difference between Patriot Front, though, and some other groups that fall within the accelerationist spectrum is that you don't really hear about, like, members of Patriot Front plotting attacks on the energy grid or things like that. You hear about that from some groups that would be considered even further right, like, within the accelerationist spectrum.
And what Kris Goldsmith told me is that Patriot Front is a bit of like an entryway to those other groups. Like, the churn in Patriot Front is high. Guys join. They fall out because of just, you know, they get sick of Thomas Rousseau, or they get sick of each other, whatever. But they still believe all those things. And so they might go and join other groups that are even more extreme in what they would do or what they would encourage in terms of achieving that end state. The end goal is the same.
DEMBY: It's like the gateway organization into the larger White supremacist universe.
YOUSEF: That's right.
DEMBY: Yeah.
YOUSEF: And so they may go on to those other organizations or groups or networks where there is more, you know, sort of criminal behavior, actually, that is encouraged and that they believe might be necessary to accelerate social collapse.
DEMBY: So, obviously, these guys, they're white nationalists. But you say they have a bunch of other grievances that kind of feel straight out of our culture wars - right? - trans issues, queerphobia, those kind of things. How intentional is that sort of positioning as, like, we care about the sort of things that white, normie conservative men care about?
YOUSEF: Very intentional. I think what they are hoping to portray or to project is that, you know, they are a group of organized men who, you know, share these beliefs, and they're out putting on what they are terming a patriotic display, right? Like, dressed in the red, white and blue patches, organized, orderly is what we saw in D.C., but, you know, standing firm on their values. And it absolutely is intended to signal to men who are on the right, but not as far right, that this is a group that they should think about.
DEMBY: So - OK, I was reading one article about Patriot Front that called them unserious but threatening. So, like, how worried should we be about groups like Patriot Front?
YOUSEF: Yeah. I mean, Patriot Front has long been regarded as a group of LARPers, you know, live action role-play guys who like to put on costumes and, like, do these marches around town or whatever. And to some extent, that is correct. They are not - as I said, they're not out there trying to bomb energy facilities, but they are not harmless. You know, one of the remarkable civil lawsuits that targeted Patriot Front concerned an attack that Patriot Front members made on an African American musician in Boston. This was also around July Fourth festivities. And they have changed that man's life forever. It was an attack in broad daylight.
I think that shows a lot about who these people are, you know? They are advocating for social strife. They're advocating for the harm of people that are not Christian, white, cisgender men. And whether they are reaching a larger audience through these displays and seeming benign, you know, and recruiting greater numbers through that. Like, that's something that we should worry about, as we also should be worrying about the fact that they have been involved in violent assaults.
DEMBY: Does Patriot Front feel more empowered in this moment right now where Trump is in office? You mentioned that Rousseau, this organization or the sort of precursor to this organization came out of Unite the Right, which was emboldened by the first Trump administration. So how do they feel about this moment now?
YOUSEF: So I think there's a few ways to answer that question. You know, one thing that I think is striking about the Patriot Front that showed up in D.C. and more recent records that have leaked from within that organization is that the membership count now may be as high as 500 people, which...
DEMBY: Oh, wow.
YOUSEF: ...Is probably more than double what it was back in June of 2022, when I actually was in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, when they were trying to disrupt a Pride event there and actually were disrupted by local police. So...
DEMBY: So Patriot Front seems to be growing.
YOUSEF: So the - yes. So numbers appear to have grown...
DEMBY: Right.
YOUSEF: ...Over the last few years.
DEMBY: OK.
YOUSEF: But on the other hand, when I heard about them marching in D.C., part of me was like, why? You know? Like...
DEMBY: Say more about that.
YOUSEF: ...The amount of activity from far-right militias or extremist groups has really gone down since January when Trump took office again. And the thinking around that has been that many of these groups have seen things that they have been agitating for, you know, removal of immigrants, that kind of thing, enacted. And so the need for them to show up outdoors in public demonstrations, that kind of thing, has just been lower. So that's why I was surprised that Patriot Front would have gone through the trouble of staging this.
But I think it's also interesting because it shows that even with everything that the Trump administration has put into effect with the removal of immigrants, it's not enough for Patriot Front. You know, their agenda is even more extreme than what the administration is doing. So, you know, some of me has wondered, like, these guys, like, why are they mailing money to Thomas Rousseau every month for stickers and spending time, like, putting it out on - you know?
DEMBY: Maybe they're just crafty dudes, you know...
YOUSEF: Yeah (laughter).
DEMBY: ...On top of everything. You know what I mean?
YOUSEF: You know, it's an investment of time and money when, you know, arguably, if they want to see a white ethnostate, they could join ICE and assist in the removal of immigrants and get paid to do it. I mean, that is - I don't have an answer to that question. Like, that's still a little bit confusing to me. I asked Kristofer Goldsmith that question, and he said that really it is about that community aspect of it for them. These are not just MAGA guys. You know, they might not be MAGA at all. These are neo-Nazis. You know, maybe the community that they're trying to join up with are neo-Nazis.
DEMBY: Coming up, while data shows that far-right extremism is on the rise, the Trump administration is turning its attention and its powers to prosecute towards people it says are extremists on the left.
YOUSEF: There's a real concern about what this is going to mean also domestically for freedom of speech or anybody that's involved really in any leftist organizing.
DEMBY: That's coming up, y'all. Keep it locked. Stay with us.
And in case you missed it, CODE SWITCH is coming to you every week now on Tuesdays and Fridays. That's right, we switched it up a little. So if you have feelings about it, please let us know. Get at us by email at codeswitch@npr.org
Gene. Just Gene for this part. CODE SWITCH. So we've been talking to our colleague, Odette Yousef. She covers domestic extremism here at NPR. And Odette says, yes, we should be aware of white nationalist extremists like Patriot Front, you know, the group that descended on Washington, D.C., earlier this summer. But anybody concerned about the creeping threat of white nationalism should probably be paying much more attention to what the Trump administration is doing.
So, Odette, we've been talking about Patriot Front, the white nationalist group that made headlines after they descended on D.C. on July Fourth. And obviously, since the beginning of the Trump era, we've seen a lot of very public gatherings of, like, mask-off white supremacy, perhaps most infamously at the Unite the Right Rally back in 2017. But the Trump administration is not particularly concerned with that kind of far-right extremism. In fact, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened this big gathering of leaders from almost, like, five dozen other countries because the Trump administration wanted to call attention to what it called the urgent threat of far-left extremism. So what happened at this event and what came out of it, policy-wise?
YOUSEF: So this event, the State Department says there were 60 nations in attendance, and the framing around this was really coming from the U.S. State Department. And what they are trying to do is bring together countries that came together after the 9/11 attacks in a coalition to fight Islamist terrorism, but this time, with a focus on what they are terming far-left terrorism. And I think the framing about this has been a little bit interesting for me to see, just because the data have not shown far-left terrorism to be as deadly as far-right terrorism has been...
DEMBY: OK.
YOUSEF: ... Across the years. You know, just the literal body count pales in comparison. And I think we can think very easily of attacks, mass shootings, that kind of thing that were motivated just here in the United States, but also in other countries by people who've adopted far right beliefs. And so this is an effort to convene sort of an international coalition that is focusing on people because of what their politics are, what their beliefs are, rather than focusing on criminal behavior that's born out of an ideology.
And so there's a real concern about what this is going to mean also domestically for freedom of speech or anybody that's involved really in any leftist organizing. You asked what's come out of it. You know, that very day that they had the meeting, the State Department issued restrictions on people that would travel to the U.S. - foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. that may be associated with what they call far-left terrorist groups.
DEMBY: So Marco Rubio said that people talk about far-left terrorism as a kind of right-wing fever dream, but he says it actually needs to be taken very seriously. Like, do the people who research political extremism agree with his diagnosis of the situation?
YOUSEF: No. I'll say in my reporting - I mean, that's a total mischaracterization, actually, of what the counterterrorism field view on this is. You know, everyone that I've talked to in the course of my years of reporting on domestic extremism is aware that the primary source of domestic terrorism was the left 50 years ago. In the 1970s, you had groups like the Weather Underground and some other groups, Black Liberation Army, that actually were responsible for quite serious bomb plots, murdering police, that kind of thing.
So it's not, like, a political bias that has identified the right as the source of the most lethal attacks that we've seen in recent years. It's just that that's what the facts are. And so, you know, I think the administration has been trying to sort of portray that focus as, like, a political bias, but the data are really quite clear on it.
DEMBY: I mean, the Trump administration has also gone after the Southern Poverty Law Center, investigating them for allegedly funding white supremacist groups. And if you don't know, the SPLC maintains this widely respected, widely cited database of extremist groups in the United States. It was founded to build legal cases against groups like the KKK. So it seems kind of like the Trump administration is going after this independent organization that also keeps the receipts on a lot of right-wing extremists. How does the Justice Department's case against the SPLC fit into this - the initiatives that the Trump administration has taken up to go after what it sees as, like, liberal and left-wing groups?
YOUSEF: Yeah. So I guess just to sort of set the table a bit, I feel like the Trump administration is using a number of tools to sort of position on this, right? We've just talked about the State Department using its tool of designating foreign terrorist organizations and the Treasury Department using its tools of, like, sanctioning those who provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations. So that's, like, one category.
DEMBY: Right.
YOUSEF: Another thing that President Trump has done is he has issued a number of executive orders. One of them that has caused a great deal of concern within civil society is - it's called NSPM-7, National Security Presidential Memorandum No. 7.
DEMBY: OK.
YOUSEF: Which essentially puts out a warning sign to any entity or individual that may have provided funding or other support to what the Trump administration considers to be the radical left. And so the case against the SPLC is perceived among the people that I've spoken to about it as sort of like a test case of NSPM-7. The administration going after a civil society organization. And so we will see how that case will hold up in court.
What I think is very interesting about the SPLC case is I was not surprised that the administration would go after the SPLC. Like, the SPLC has been largely maligned by the GOP for years. What I expected was the administration to go after the SPLC from a tax perspective, maybe audit them or something like that.
But instead, what the administration has done is it's leveled criminal charges against the SPLC, which was quite surprising, saying that basically they engaged in wire fraud with the banks, having all these accounts that they were using to pay their secret informants to white nationalist groups and that the banks weren't aware of what those accounts really were for. And also of defrauding SPLC donors by using donor money that they were saying would help fight extremism. But actually, they were saying it was funding white nationalism because some of the informants were highly placed sources within white nationalist groups.
It was interesting to read the charges because there is a history, actually, of the Department of Justice itself paying white nationalist and far-right informers. And we know that, in fact, in some cases, that has created danger for Americans or the public. And so, you know, it was interesting to see that they were leveling those charges against the SPLC, which itself has been credited with essentially putting Klan groups, skinhead groups out of business. And I think everyone I've spoken to has said that it's almost laughable to accuse the SPLC of trying to keep extremist organizations in business just so they can continue.
DEMBY: There were reports under the Biden administration that it was white supremacist groups that were responsible for a disproportionate amount of political violence, which you said is borne out in the data. So these two administrations have seen the threat of rising political violence in the United States and political extremism in the United States through completely different lenses and as having completely different sources. Like, what do you make of that?
YOUSEF: Well, I would correct that a bit because...
DEMBY: OK.
YOUSEF: ...You know, former FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, himself testified multiple times before Congress that the most lethal and persistent threat when it comes to homeland security is white supremacists. This was a Trump appointee. It was just not, like, debated among people who do serious data analysis. And I think that's why this campaign feels just purely political, rather than based in any real evidence.
DEMBY: So Patriot Front is clearly a right-wing organization. The Trump administration is convening all these countries and groups to do something about left-wing extremism. But one of the sort of discomfiting facts about the news in this moment we live in is that we have these incidents of really high-profile political violence in which the actors actually have kind of incoherent ideological motives, right?
Like, I'm thinking of the guy who shot Charlie Kirk, the other guy who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump back in 2024. Like, they're nihilists, and their politics is sort of idiosyncratic. So, like, what do we do with all these violent political actors whose politics don't really fit neatly on a left-right spectrum?
YOUSEF: Yeah. So this has been a trend that's growing domestically and internationally as sort of these, like, nonideological terrorism. And it's been responsible for everything from school shootings to, as you mentioned, like, the attempted assassination of President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
DEMBY: And I know a lot of people would hear that - are characterizing that assassination type as, like, how could that not be ideological? But, like, his own writings were sort of hard to pin down, right? I mean, it's - people say, like, oh, that's obviously ideological behavior. He's going after the head of state.
YOUSEF: Yeah. I mean, it's political violence because it was an attack on, you know, a political candidate at that time. Like, that is what qualifies this as political violence. But it didn't seem like they were trying to make a political statement or advocate for some political cause through that attack, right? Again, citing that former FBI director, Christopher Wray. He called this salad bar extremism, where you had this sort of take a little bit of this, a little bit of that and, like, somehow, the big picture is just that they're sort of maladjusted people who want to achieve some sort of fame within a subculture online, typically that extols those kind of attacks.
And so this is a growing issue, and it also concerns, in some cases, the grooming of young children online into behaviors of self-harm and harm against other people. It's actually quite a high priority, is my understanding, for law enforcement at every level. They're seeing more and more kids getting ensnared in networks that are nonideological, misanthropic and just sort of extolling violence for the sake of violence. And that's the sort of thing that one would expect to see a global convening of law enforcement around because those are truly transnational networks, and they can only be confronted across borders.
DEMBY: So the Trump administration is obviously framing the political left as a growing threat to America. How much does it matter who is in power when the government is deciding which basket of beliefs and ideologies are seen as especially dangerous?
YOUSEF: So if the work is done properly, there should be no discussion of beliefs, right? There should be a focus on identifying criminal activity and prosecuting criminal activity. That is something that would always preface the FBI director's comments before Congress is that we don't go after people because of what they believe. We go after people because they're engaged in criminal activity.
And that really is what I think is so concerning about this administration is that they have really sort of pivoted away even from the pretense of going primarily after criminal activity, and they are talking upfront about ideology as sort of the reason that people might engage in criminal activity. And it's just, you know, very troubling when you consider that in America, you can believe anything you want to believe. It's just a question of whether you're going to act on it in a way that is criminal, right?
DEMBY: Odette Yousef is a national correspondent for NPR who covers extremism. Thank you, Odette.
YOUSEF: Thank you.
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DEMBY: And that's our show.
PARKER: You can subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein. Our engineer was Annlie Huang.
DEMBY: And we'd be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Christina Cala. That's Xavier Lopez. That's Leah Donnella. That's Dalia Mortada. That's Barton Girdwood. That's Yolanda Sangweni, and that's Maya Dangerfield. As for me, I'm Gene Demby.
PARKER: I'm B.A. Parker.
DEMBY: Be easy, y'all.
PARKER: Hydrate.
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