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Notes -
Patriot Front's Conspiracy to Riot in Coeur d'Alene Idaho
This is another post in what has become a series covering widespread lawfare against dissident-right activists, previously I have covered:
The arrest of the Patriot Front men on their way to protest in Idaho (seen here from their perspective) became a big news story, with the dox and mugshots widely published and applauded, even as anti-hate NGOs admitted that rioting was not the M.O of the group. At the time, even I didn't think the charges stood a chance of going anywhere, even if police wanted to argue for probable cause there was no way a prosecutor would dig a little into the group, see quite clearly they intended to protest in the exact way that have been documented to protest over a dozen times, and then claim that these men came to riot. But I was wrong, and charges were pursued on a single count of "conspiracy to riot."
30 out of 31 members pled Not Guilty and opted for jury trials, 1 member pled guilty to a lesser charge of disturbing the peace and was sentenced to 180 days in jail with 179 days suspended. The first jury trial of 5 members who pled not-guilty to conspiracy charges was concluded last week, where a jury of 6 unanimously found them guilty of conspiracy to riot. They were sentenced to 5 days in jail with 2 days served and banned from downtown for a year.
Having followed the trial in various news stories, the evidence provided by the prosecution seemed to solely entail potentiality, as in "these shields could be used to bash people, and the flagpoles could have been used to hit people from behind the shields." It was noted that the shields the men were carrying had scratches on them and the flagpoles were longer than normal as suspicious, even while the testifying officers admitted that other protestors were open carrying, and it is not illegal to have a shield.
It's notable here that the members were arrested on their way to protest, they did not even have the opportunity to leave the vehicle. All indications are that they planned to march in the exact manner they have done many times before. My confusion, even after following the coverage, is whether or not the prosecution is alleging that this behavior would have constituted a riot, or if they solely relied on speculation for how the shield and flag poles and such could have been used to riot. If the Patriot Front had made it to the park and marched, would they have been arrested for rioting? I don't think so, somehow stopping them before they even had the opportunity gave the prosecution more leeway to plant in the minds of the jury all the things they could have done when they got to the park. It's not clear how this conviction will impact the other trials.
Needless to say, civil rights organizations are not lining up to defend these men (in contrast, the "civil rights conspiracy" Charlottesville lawsuit was concocted in a Manhattan office with a multimillion, NGO-funded war chest, with a lead attorney who compared the lawsuit to the Warsaw ghetto resistance). The PF men have relied on public defenders and faith in the jury process.
FBI Whistleblower Reveals Malfeasance In Patriot Front Trial (?)
The one form of institutional opposition to this prosecution has come from an article published last week by the Idaho Tribune. This trial is only the tip of the iceberg. Not only were PF men arrested, doxed, and charged with conspiracy to riot, but their phones were handed over to the FBI by the State for data extraction. The prosecution claims it cannot present the phones to the defendants in their conspiracy cases, as the State no longer as possession of the evidence. It turns out, nobody from the State ever saw a warrant for those phones before, or since, handing them over to the FBI. Not only that, but according to a whistleblower an FBI SSRA in Idaho was removed from his position because he refused to a sign a warrant for the phones due to lack of probable cause:
IANAL, so I cannot tell how serious this issue is, but reading through this brief it seems Rousseau's attorney is claiming the phones contain potentially-exculpatory evidence and that the State has "parked" the evidence with an FBI based on a warrant that nobody has ever seen and has not been provided to the defense.
In these cases, from what I can tell the public defenders have done a good job and they are receiving a good defense, though maybe not the best money could buy. But I'm not sure what exculpatory evidence could be on the phone: it seems the prosecution wasn't even denying that they planned to march in the way they've done every other time, they were just arguing that their actual plans constituted a plan to riot.
Lessons Learned
So you're right wing, but anonymously shit-posting online isn't enough for you, you want to organize IRL. Maybe you want to march with your friends against a Pride event. Well you better be prepared to be arrested, doxed with your face plastered in national news, charged with a conspiracy, and have your phone be handed to the FBI. Some people on the DR argue that it's an "overly online" movement, but this case shows that IRL activism is at the moment not worth the risk.
Patriot Front has some cringe optics, Rousseau's speeches are really cringe, but if their activism is accomplishing anything, it's exploring the boundaries of legal right-wing expression, which is not where you would expect it to be based on 1A protections.
I think a major part of PF's issue is that they don't seem organic at all, so they get no support from the right wing.
Every time they come up in my circles, everyone starts screaming "FED! FED!" and until they deal with those optics they are going to be left out to hang.
Funnily enough, this FED-screeching happens in both relatively normal freedom-loving libertarian and neo-nazi groups.
I don't think there are any particular reasons to believe PF are "feds" (presumably meaning: led by federal informants?) beyond them being a group that does IRL protests. Which is a decent reason to believe they have informants, but not a decent reason to believe that they, as a group, are primarily lead by feds.
The issue is that their uniform looks like the stereotype for "off duty cop" or "soldier in civilian clothes" and they would show up with riot shields out of a police catalog when they first started.
I mean that and they seem almost universally in the kind of shape that you’d expect from cops or feds — the median American is overweight and not fit, the median member of PF is fit, and looks like they spend significant time in the gym lifting. They’re also remarkably clean cut and clean shaven for civilians. In short, not only is their equipment very cop like, but their demeanor and appearance is very similar to military feds and police.
A much simpler explanation is they explicitly ask their members to look good and work out because they want to seem optical or w/e
That used to be a tactic of the OG natsoc's where they specifically tailored their clothes, put the fitter, taller more attractive men in the front of their parade/protest groups and when producing video of events like rallies used some camera tricks and staging to keep putting the hero prop level attendees in view with the more typical extras in the back out of focus.
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Exactly. The demographics of a real right wing fringe group are going to look a lot more like this than this.
That's Australia though. Boomercons and the fringe far right are different groups in the US. There were a bunch of articles in Salon and the like about how going to the gym makes you a fascist.
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They're clearly selecting members to go out and protest based on fitness, though? All of the 'PF are feds' arguments just seem like a cross between conspiracy and cope (not parent specifically though)
I just never see anything approaching that level of organisation in other groups. There's someone with the job of going and reviewing members to make sure they're in the right physical shape to protest. There's someone ensuring they have matching outfits. There's someone procuring matching riot shields. When the protest is done they all leave together at the same time at the same subway station, with a police escort the whole way.
This is just completely foreign to any experience of politics I've had. Even mainstream parties attract a ton of crazies. Niche groups are overflowing with them. Things are haphazardly thrown together, individual members go and get arrested for absurd nonsense acts. But these guys have money and structure.
I just don't buy that it's genuine. It's a law enforcement trap to suck in the nazi-curious and catch them before they do anything violent.
If you take a dozen or so samples from most distributions, you'll find a few outliers. The modern far-right has a strong emphasis on physical appearance and masculinity and aesthetics. It makes sense that some of them would come together to form a group. That, notably, is not true about mainstream democrats or republicans. If you have a hundred thousand people in the US who watch webms of nazi rallies approvingly (which there are! Hitler is becoming very popular online), you can probably scrap together a few thousand of them who'll want to imitate it, a few hundred of which will be fit.
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See also the Ambercrombie and Snitch meme from 2021.
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This reminds me. I need to go visit my local police surplus store. I’m told it’s one of the best places to get a well-used Remington.
Why do you want a well-used remington?
Because the ones produced throughout the 2000s and 2010s (they haven't produced any in 2020 because they went bankrupt, of course) have shit quality control and the earlier ones don't?
Not that I'd ever recommend a Remington shotgun even with the best QC in the world because their design is sub-par compared to Mossberg's (safety location is better, consumable small parts can more easily be replaced if you need to, no stupid loading door) unless you want a detachable magazine (where it's the 870 that's the better design) or want a pistol grip (Mossberg's tang safety is in the wrong place for that), but y'know.
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They're priced accordingly, and I don't yet own a shotgun.
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The only evidence I’ve seen has been
Some journalist sifting their comments. I can’t really tell what he’s linking because Twitter is a trash website.
None of them are morbidly obese.
It’s, uh. Not exactly a knockdown argument.
The arguments that I've seen for Patriot Front being federal agents have nothing to do with them not being morbidly obese - the general neonazi position on matters of physical fitness are that if you are representing the movement at all you need to be physically capable and impressive. The real reason as to why people think they're feds is that they're directly advocating for a form of protest that leads to people who join them getting doxxed and prosecuted, while at the same time doing absolutely nothing to achieve meaningful political change. Organisations like PF are worse than useless at achieving political goals in the current climate, and carry an incredibly high risk of permanently ejecting the people involved from mainstream society. For the record I think that argument is actually somewhat convincing given just how many cases we've seen of the FBI manufacturing and creating terror plots so they can arrest some isolated losers.
I’m not going to get into what Nazis actually think about fitness. But as I pointed out above, these guys, if you met them on the streets outside of the actual protest, would absolutely look and act like official muscle. Super-fit, 25-30 tops, dressed in polos and khakis and carrying riot shields. Nobody can go from the typical incel physique to military levels of fitness in the timeframe in question. If they’re joining and within 6 months look ready for deployment, there’s definitely something off here.
The other thing is that in the arrests, it’s very obvious that the feds had very clear ideas of exactly where they’re going to be such that the government can immediately stop them on the way to their protest. As has been pointed out above they never reached the event, and never actually rioted. And given that they’re driving to a protest in a U-haul that’s not immediately obvious, it seems somewhat weird to me. There’s no reason that the government should be able to find a single U-Haul out of however many are rented in a day, going to a specific site and know which route they’re taking. Unless someone on the inside told them about the u-haul and the specific route, it’s simply not possible.
IF they're not morbidly obese and they're fairly dedicated, plus or minus some "help" of questionable legality, they probably can. A sedentary untrained young dude who works out hard can get to benching 185 and running a 7 minute mile in six months. He'll need to work his ass off, but if he spends a bunch of time doing pushups and running with other guys in his Neo-Nazi group? Plausible. Hard, but plausible. And there are probably a few guys who work manual labor or go to the gym or something joining, too.
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I was under the impression that Patriot Front didn't even let you join if you weren't in good shape so I wasn't really surprised by their fitness levels - but I freely admit that I might be wrong here. Also I totally agree on the importance of the fact that they never actually reached the event, and knowing what I do about FBI conduct I have to assume that was on purpose too.
Also I don't think there's anything weird about the government finding them at all. Someone else has already mentioned Snowden's leaks, but you don't even need those. The leader of the Proud Boys was a federal informant, and even if I assume that PF didn't start out as a fed honeypot there's no way that an organisation like that wouldn't be crawling with agents from the get-go. Given just how much hyperventilating there's been in the press about the dangers of far right terrorists, there's no way that the FBI weren't on that group like flies on shit. I'd bet a decent chunk of change on there being at least one informant in the van, and I think they would have been live-tracking every single phone in there as well.
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Not to detract from any of your points, but as a 20-year US military veteran, I believe you have a gross overestimation of "military levels of fitness" and "ready for deployment". Add caveats of "specops" or "infantry" or "Marine" and I'd agree, but holy shit you would not believe the fatbodies I've had to work with in a warzone.
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You might want to ask Edward Snowden about that one.
I mean there are parts of that story that absent someone texting them and handling them information don’t track for me.
First of all, this is a rental vehicle and thus unless you know which vehicle they’re renting from which rental place, you are not really able to put out the information or put trackers in the vehicle. You also need to figure out where they’re coming from and specific routes if you’re going to have assets in place to stop them en route. Even having the information of renting uhauls doesn’t help with tracking as there’s no way to pick out PF from dozens of people moving stuff around by uhaul. Even having the lísiense isn’t enough unless you get super lucky and happen to have your persons of interest drive past a cop car. Technology can’t help you find something you don’t know anything about.
Did they rent the vehicle with cash? If not, they could easily be tracked. Even if they did, rental companies have internal databases, which could well be penetrated.
It's most likely there were informants. But they don't actually need them.
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Point 2 is in fact a knockdown argument (though I'd emphasise age over weight). Young, fit men are a tiny fraction of the politically active population. Politics is an old people thing!
Both my extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing friends mostly are fit, and many of them actively go to the gym and lift weights! This is just not true. That's probably representative of the kinds of people I'm friends with ... but then there's no reason PF can't pick its members from similar kinds of people.
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Even if they started as sincere neo-Nazis, they would have ended up teeming with feds in no time.
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