Editor's note: New Hanover County Board of Elections Director Rae Hunter-Havens told WHQR, "Per the State Board, there does not appear to be a basis for the elections board to remove the Patriot Front signs from a polling place."
C.L. Murray is the data and research lead for Revontulet Intelligence, a company that specializes in studying (and preventing threats from) extremist hate groups.
BNS: All right, C.L. Murray, you are the data and research lead for Revontulet Intelligence – before we get into the Patriot front and all that, tell us a little bit about the organization that you work for.
CLM: All right. So Revontule Intelligence is an intelligence organization where we do threat monitoring, we look at the threat landscape, we do data-driven sort of decision making for organizations, governments, people, events, things where people need to be aware of what sorts of threats exist out there. We work with governments, social media companies, all kinds of things.
BNS: You study this stuff professionally. Give us a 30,000-foot view of what Patriot Front is.
CLM: All right. So Patriot Front is an organization started by a guy named Thomas Rousseau. He was part of Vanguard America. He was kind of a leader in that, he did a lot of their graphic design and stuff like that –
BNS: As a very young man –
CLM: – as a very young man, yeah, in his late teens, early 20s, and he was there at Charlottesville. And if you're familiar with Charlottesville, then you know that James Alex Fields Jr., who was marching with [neo-Nazi organization] Vanguard America, decided to run over several protesters and killed Heather Heyer.
BNS: So Patriot Front is kind of a reboot, a rebrand of Vanguard.
CLM: That's exactly what it is. And specifically from Rousseau's point of view, he actually said that this is an aesthetic rebrand, not an ideological one.
BNS: So let's get into the ideology. What is behind the Patriot Front, what do they believe in?
CLM: They are essentially a neo-Nazi fascist organization in the same vein as a lot of these other groups that emerged just before and right after [President Donald] Trump's first term. But the really smart thing that Rousseau did with this organization is he's sort of couched the idea of hating all of these other groups, having these conspiracy theories about the eradication of the white race and of the European heritage, and all that kind of stuff, everything that you would normally see with a swastika, but he rebranded it with what feels like very Americana kind of stuff.
BNS: So even though they're antisemitic, anti-queer, anti-immigrant, their signs have slogans like “strong families, strong nation,” or “no more foreign wars,” or “protect American labor,” which seem far less vitriolic than what's actually going on behind the scenes.
CLM: It's very much the case, and that's very intentional on his part. By doing this, he can still espouse this white nationalistic points of view, but it's a lot less scary when you see a whole bunch — it's still kind of scary — but when you see a whole bunch of clean-cut fit young men who are wearing matching uniforms parade marching essentially with flags, but those flags really evoke Americana, the founding fathers, and all that, they're doing the same thing that these other groups may do with swastikas, but it's a lot less scary than the skinheads walking around with swastikas or people walking with hoods, right — although that's a slightly different ideology — that rebrand gives you all of the fascism with none of the, you know, the negative side effects,
BNS: None of the problematic history of, say, the swastika, right? Or the, you know, the lightning bolts or stuff like that.
CLM: And they do have, I mean, they use fascist symbols, but they're not as easily recognized. [Rousseau] wanted to do this because he wanted to bring over the fence-sitters. So both the people who weren't too sure about it, people who may have been frightened, may have been scared away by swastikas and things like that and really, you know, people who are not all that concerned about the ideological underpinning, like the historical ideological underpinnings, but can focus on the America-first kind of flavor of things.
BNS: But if you see the bundle of sticks, and you study this stuff like you do, you can kind of recognize what's going on.
CLM: Yeah, and that's a that's a dog whistle for people who he also wanted to bring in who are more ideologically sort of motivated. And given his background as a graphic designer, that was really smart decision by him, you know, it allowed him to go under the radar for a lot of things. It allows him to put these images around town where you know it's very difficult to see an overt connection unless you go to the website and read through the manifesto. And it's also his main income stream, because everybody that is part of the organization has to buy the flags and the uniforms and the stickers that they put everywhere from him
BNS: At conspicuous markup prices…
CLM: I'm sure, yeah, I haven't looked at the prices recently, but I'm sure I'd be surprised if not.
BNS: So you wouldn't be a hate group worth your salt in the 21st century. If you didn't have an online presence. You've tracked some of that, but I'm curious about their activities here in southeastern North Carolina.
CLM: Yeah, right. Okay, so Patriot Front is – they're one of these organizations, not all organizations are like this by any stretch, but they are very disciplined. You know, unlike some organizations, like the Proud Boys that kind of use this veneer of humor to sort of hide behind things, they're hiding behind, you know, Americana instead, and unlike a lot of these other organizations that have gained prominence, Patriot Fronts doesn't have a whole bunch of just regional people going online and saying hateful stuff. What they do have is an online presence that reposts things like these, vandalism stickering, postering, throwing out banners, things like that they do really to try and show how big they are, how important they are. And right at the bottom of that, they're gonna say, sign up today.
BNS: So real quick, do we have a sense of how large the organization actually is, or is that an unknown?
CLM: That's mostly an unknown. Unfortunately, they don't just hand us their rosters. Now, what we do know is that they are very closely affiliated with what's called the Active Club network, and there are certain kinds of rules that these sorts of organizations share, where you can sticker, you can put stickers up, vandalism, mild acts of vandalism, throwing up stickers things that if you do get caught, it's mildly illegal, but it won't get you in too much trouble. So the stickering campaigns are really effective in a lot of ways, because you can do that as a single person. In some of the earliest incarnations of their putting up propaganda around town five, six years ago, it really could have been carried out easily by one person. Past couple of years, they've started to talk more explicitly about a specific network. In order for there to be a network, you have to have a little bit more folks than just one person. I would say that what we're seeing now could be anywhere from five to seven people could be more. It is a growing group from what it used to be.
BNS: And over the last I'd say four or five years, you've seen some activity around the greater Wilmington area, some in Leland, some here in Wilmington. Have you seen that progress or escalate?
CLM: Really, the escalation is happening right now. This that's just happening right now, is much bigger than it's been in the past few years. But in the past year, I would say that they have put a lot more effort into here locally.
BNS: So let me ask, what is the motive or the purpose of putting up these posters around the election site?
CLM: Well, it has a bunch of different possible sort of motivations. You know, for people who may be a little bit more likely to recognize what these are, it spreads fear. You know, it says ‘we're here.’ Most people, though, aren't going to recognize these signs, or maybe won't know until they go to the website and go, ‘Oh, wow.’ It also serves a really important recruitment purpose, because there's laws around destroying political signs – although I'm not a lawyer, but I do believe that this falls outside of that category – but a lot of people are going to leave them alone just because they're going to err on the side of caution. This allows them to keep a lot of these signs up to have them seen by more people. One of the things with the group as well is you will lose your membership status if you don't regularly engage in this type of stickering, postering, banner raising activism. And so it helps sort of connect the people who are part of the group. It helps them potentially, sort of recruit new people. It helps them potentially, sort of intimidate some of their foes that are in the know that might be aware of it, and maybe trick some people into it because they didn't realize what it was, because it’s very vague. We're really just scratching the surface with this group. It's not the biggest, not the one that necessarily always gets the most attention, but it is the most disciplined. When talking about propaganda, they are really good. Everything they do is with a propaganda focus. How does this look? How can this spread the message? How can this make people feel like we're bigger, we're more important, we're better than everyone else.
BNS: All right, C.L. Murray, I really appreciate your time. Thanks for being here.
CLM: Thank you so much.