You didn’t think they were going to be anonymous for long, did you?

Torch Network

9-17-2020 – Today, Torch Antifascist Network leaked over a year of internal communications from Patriot Front, a major US white supremacist organization. Patriot Front splintered and rebranded from another fascist group, Vanguard America, in the aftermath of the 2017’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The organization currently has almost 300 members nationally, divided into regional networks under the micro-management of its young leader Thomas Rousseau in Texas.

Patriot Front is best known for plastering cities and campuses with its coded propaganda. Last year members targeted synagogues in Georgia and Vermont. The group held a masked demonstration involving over 100 participants in Washington, DC this February, and a smaller nighttime flash demonstration in Chicago in early July.

The Torch Network has released hundreds of pages of internal Patriot Front messages, which were originally posted to a members-only RocketChat server. The leaked conversations date from March 2019 through June 2020, providing a window into the workings of the white power group. The release of these documents shows the unrestrained racism, antisemitism and misogyny behind Patriot Front’s patriotic facade and slippery rhetoric. The conversations also provide clues to the identities of individual members, which the organization has attempted to carefully guard.

The leaked discussions, which will be of use to antifascist researchers, investigative journalists, and community watchdog groups, are available at Inside Patriot Front.

As Torch Network noted in its overview accompanying the data release, the danger from Patriot Front is not just the organization’s official activities, but from splinter groups and radicalized individual members.

Already one former Patriot Front network director has launched his own, more blatantly neo-Nazi formation, the National Socialist Club. With far-Right violence and militancy increasing, Torch Network has decided that now is the perfect time to expose Patriot Front.

Founded in October 2013, the Torch Network unites militant antifascist groups around shared political points of unity. We currently involve nine projects across the US. For more information on our history and efforts, visit: torchantifa.org