San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Texas group fans flames of hatred
Patriot Front backs white nationalism
“America is Our Birthright,” declared a banner hanging from a footbridge at the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2017.
“Deport them All,” read another unfurled in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood in Fort Worth last year.
“Keep America American,” said flyers passed out in Round Rock in June.
Since 2017, more than 230 incidents of hateful propaganda have been reported in communities across Texas — a phenomenon that has dramatically escalated this year, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that tracks extremist activity.
One group is responsible for more than two-thirds of the hype: Patriot Front, a Texasbased white nationalist group formed after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally two years ago in Charlottesville, Va.
Members of the group insist their European ancestors conquered America, and that people of color, including Hispanic immigrants, are a threat to the white race.
The same message appeared in an online manifesto allegedly
posted by the gunman who killed 22 people with an assault-style rifle Aug. 3 at a Walmart in El Paso.
The shooter wrote that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” and he criticized “race mixing.” Police said that after being arrested, the suspect said he was targeting Mexicans.
It was another sign of a resurgence in white nationalist ideology in America.
In October 2018, a gunman opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue during Shabbat morning services, killing 11 people. In May 2018, 10 people were gunned down at Santa Fe High School near Houston by a shooter who reportedly posted photos of himself wearing a Nazi symbol on his coat.
Three months before that, 17 people were killed at a Parkland, Fla., high school by a gunman who etched swastikas into some of the ammunition magazines he used in the massacre.
“We have seen an increase of reports of individuals who express a desire to commit violence — definitely,” FBI Special Agent Michelle Lee of San Antonio said, referring to white supremacists.
After the massacres, the FBI saw a noticeable uptick in the number of reported threats, Lee said. It’s unclear whether members of the public simply are more aware of the need to report threats, or if people with extremist ideologies are more active after they become inspired by acts of violence.
In July, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers that in the preceding nine months, the agency recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects — most of whom were associated with white supremacy.
His comments came two months after a senior official in the FBI’s counterterrorism division said the agency was investigating 850 domestic terrorism cases, about 40 percent of them involving racially motivated violent extremists.
But investigating hate groups can pose a challenge to federal officials because the government can’t monitor people — even if they espouse hatred against certain groups — unless there’s probable cause that they might commit an act of violence or other crimes, Lee said. The First Amendment protects free speech, no matter how repulsive, she said.
Instead, the FBI largely relies on the public and private tech companies to report threats, most of which surface online.
Critics argue that tech companies have allowed extremists to strengthen and proliferate online, and that the federal government long has overlooked the threat of white supremacists, instead focusing disproportionately on Islamic extremists.
Groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the AntiDefamation League have tracked the growing presence of white supremacists.
Last year, right-wing extremists — the majority of them white supremacists — were linked to more murders in the United States than in any other year since 1995, when the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building left 168 people dead, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The ADL tracks murders connected to all forms of extremism, including right-wing, left-wing and Islamist extremism.
“All of this is part of the surge (in white supremacist activity) that we’ve seen since 2015,” said Carla Hill, a senior Anti-Defamation League researcher. “It’s also paired with the political rhetoric that has seemed to embolden this movement further to think, ‘Hey, this is our chance. If we don’t get ahead now, we’re losing our last chance to save the white race.’”
Online message boards such as 4chan and 8chan became breeding grounds for hate, Hill said. Racist or sexist memes, masquerading as jokes, were used to indoctrinate often young, white men into hateful ideologies. The bigotry kept escalating.
The online surge coincided with the 2015 launch of President Donald Trump’s election campaign, when he said Mexico was sending “rapists” and “criminals” to the U.S.
Hill said she believes the political climate — and focus on terms such as “invasion”— have contributed to the rise in violence.
“It’s just been the perfect storm,” she said.
Birth of a hate group
White supremacists soon decided to take their movement offline and into the real world.
One of the hate groups that demonstrated in Charlottesville was the neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America. At the rally, James Alex Fields, a white supremacist, plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32.
After Heyer’s death, a Dallasbased member of Vanguard America, Thomas Rosseau, rebranded the organization to escape scrutiny. He called the splinter group Patriot Front.
Today, the group has at least 300 members, and Texas is home to its largest chapter, ac
cording to the Anti-Defamation League. Since 2018, Patriot Front has been linked to more than 870 reports of racist propaganda across the country: more than 40 percent of all such incidents in the country.
Patriot Front is the most visible white supremacist group in Texas, followed by the American Identity Movement, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The social media accounts of both groups are flooded with images of propaganda. They post photos of posters on utility poles and stickers on road signs, each image stamped with the U.S. city in which it was taken.
One day after the El Paso massacre, the American Identity Movement tweeted an image of its logo on a poster outside the municipal building in Allen — the hometown of the El Paso shooting suspect.
Both groups aim to recruit new members with patriotic language. Sometimes, their flyers aren’t overtly racist. Instead, the groups are trying to insert themselves into mainstream conservative politics, said Hill of the Anti-Defamation League.
Many of their flyers are printed in red, white and blue, with phrases such as “Reclaim America” and “NOT STOLEN CONQUERED.”
“I can only assume that it’s part of the optics to present themselves as American patriots, as opposed to white supremacists,” Hill said.
Erik Sailors, a Texas leader of Patriot Front, is a former Marine, according to the Daily Beast. Contacted by a reporter last week at his San Marcos home, Sailors cracked open the front door and looked out, then quickly shut the door.
In February, another member of Patriot Front with military ties, Joffre James Cross III, was arrested in Houston and charged with felony firearm possession.
Cross was an Army paratrooper at Fort Bragg in North Carolina in 2007 when he was accused of stealing body armor and drugs from the military and selling them to an undercover FBI agent, court records show.
At the time, Cross was posting messages about firearms and explosives on white supremacist websites under the screen name “jagervonjuden,” or “hunter of Jews.”
That year, Cross told a confidential FBI informant he would sell him the equipment for “the movement,” court records state.
He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years in prison. After his release, he was arrested again when a search of his home turned up 11 Kevlar ballistic helmets and three sets of carriers for ceramic plates, a form of body armor.
‘Are you a Jew?’
In its current incarnation, Patriot Front seems to relish physical confrontation.
Last year in San Antonio, about a dozen members of Patriot Front — most of them wearing masks — appeared at an encampment run by the group Occupy ICE SATX. A video posted to Patriot Front’s website shows the men chanting, “Strong borders! Strong nation!” before knocking over coolers, chairs, tarps and a tent and setting off smoke bombs.
Patriot Front staged another demonstration last year in Houston at a meeting of Showing Up For Racial Justice, a nonprofit that mobilized in response to unrest in Ferguson, Mo., after a police officer killed an unarmed black man.
The group had gathered at a Houston bar to raise funds for undocumented families, said Kathy McDougall, a chapter coach for the organization.
“It was an outside space, which made us a little vulnerable,” McDougall said. “We noticed a group of people starting to congregate. After a while, they came over and approached us and started saying things like, ‘Are you a Jew?’ to people. And eventually they just interrupted the space and started chanting, ‘(Expletive) no borders,’ and a lot of them had ‘Make America Great Again’ hats.”
“It was definitely superaggressive,” said McDougall, whose 10-year-old son hid behind her older daughter during the confrontation. “There was a lot of shouting. After it happened, they said that any time we met, they would be there.”
Last month in Denton, more than a dozen masked Patriot Front members emerged from the back of a moving van and massed in front of a bar with flags and flares, yelling, “Reclaim America!” The bar was hosting the North Texas Anarchist Book Fair at the time, the Denton Record-Chronicle reported.
Patriot Front also has descended on the Alamo.
In 2017, the group handed out flyers to passersby on the River Walk. In polo shirts and khakis, about a dozen masked men organized in front of the Alamo, yelling the Nazi slogan, “Blood and soil!”
It isn’t the only hate group to center on the Alamo. The Texas Nationalist Party, which lists the same post office box as a Klan group, says on its website, next to a photograph of the Alamo, that the state is losing its history. The site echoes extremist and mainstream rhetoric: “Stop the Invasion!” and “Make Texas Great Again.”
White supremacy also has seeped into local debates as the city has sought to transform the Alamo site in recent years.
Last year, the City Council heard from members of This is Texas Freedom Force, a local pro-Confederacy and gun-rights group that opposed both the removal of a Confederate statue in Travis Park as well as a plan to relocate the concrete-and marble Cenotaph, a memorial to Alamo defenders.
One of the group’s members, Krystal Ross, asserted that the “real point” of moving the Cenotaph is “to water down Anglo-Saxon history,” according to minutes of the meeting.
Ross “pointed at me and said, ‘You’re trying to get rid of white history,’” said Councilman Roberto Treviño, whose district encompasses downtown. “And at that moment, I had several council members turn to look at me and say, ‘Holy (expletive), there it is.’”
During the debate over whether to remove the Confederate statue, someone sent Treviño an angry note that referred to him as “Mex.” The councilman keeps the note on his desk under glass in his downtown office.
“It’s important for me to remember that these things exist, and I can’t be naive,” Treviño said, adding that he has lost count of the death threats made against him, especially as debate drags on over plans for extensive renovations to the Alamo site.
“My executive assistant will tell you, there are people who would just call her and tell her that they want to kill me, and hang up,” he said. “It does feel like it’s escalating. The fact that it happened in El Paso, not only did I get the feeling that it’s something that can happen here, but I’ve had others calling me, telling me the same thing.”