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With the white nationalist group Patriot Front, what you see is not what you get
Members of the group Patriot Front ride the subway as a commuter looks on, in Washington, D.C., on July 4.
Cheney Orr/Reuters
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Cheney Orr/Reuters
The sight of hundreds of masked men roaming the streets of Washington, D.C., on July Fourth weekend, wearing khakis, blue shirts and uniform patches, was chilling to some of the city’s residents.
For many Americans, it was the first they heard about Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization that was born out of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. A now-viral Reuters photo prompted reflections on the experience of a lone African American woman who was photographed in a Metro subway car, surrounded by white supremacists.
The planned demonstration of force was timed to bring a fringe group of extremists into public view as the nation marked 250 years of its independence. Indeed, the stunt succeeded in earning the group media coverage across mainstream outlets, amplifying its brand and potential to reach new recruits. On this occasion, the members refrained from engaging in violence and property damage, projecting an image of law-abiding, orderly activism.
But those who are closely familiar with Patriot Front’s history and operations warn: Don’t believe what you see.
“That is not who they are in private,” said Len Kamdang, director of the Criminal Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Although they were on their best behavior [last] weekend, this is a dangerous group that commits acts of violence all over the country.”
Patriot Front’s history of violence and property damage
Kamdang’s organization sued members of Patriot Front for vandalizing a public mural dedicated to the tennis legend and Black activist Arthur Ashe in Richmond, Va., in 2021. Ashe, who was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985, was born in Richmond and his legacy is a continuing source of pride to members of that community.
“A couple of Patriot Front members showed up under cover of night and vandalized the mural,” Kamdang said. “They painted white stencils all over. … They literally tried to whitewash him and they put their symbols of hate all over — their stencils, their slogans. And all the while they were caught on video. And that video leaked using some of the most horrible language that you can imagine.”
In many jurisdictions, law enforcement can seek additional hate crime charges or sentencing enhancements in cases where illegal acts appear to have been motivated by racial bias. But in this case, Kamdang said, Patriot Front members faced no criminal charges and their identities were only revealed when online activists later infiltrated the group and leaked internal records.
In another civil case, Patriot Front was ordered to pay almost $2.76 million to an African American musician whom they assaulted in Boston in 2022, at another July flash rally they staged. Despite a police detective concluding that the attack “appeared to be more likely than not motivated in whole or in part by Anti-Black bias,” nobody was criminally prosecuted.
Neo-Nazi ideology in patriotic colors
In 2020, Kristofer Goldsmith said that a fellow veteran invited him to partner up on infiltrating Patriot Front. Goldsmith, who later established the Task Force Butler Institute to recruit Army veterans to counter fascist groups through open source online research, was not closely familiar with the group at the time.
“Frankly, when my friend used the term ‘neo-Nazi,’ I thought he was using hyperbole,” Goldsmith said. “It wasn’t until I saw them doing things like debating the merits of national socialism versus fascism versus monarchy that I truly understood that neo-Nazi was not hyperbole, that these people actually praise Hitler. … These people have dedicated their lives to promoting white nationalist, fascist and genocidal ideology.”
Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, was formerly a leader of a group called Vanguard America, which was prominent in planning and a presence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally. That gathering, the largest public white nationalist event in generations, turned fatal when one extremist drove a car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer. Ultimately, Goldsmith said that rally further smeared public perception of the white nationalist movement as violent and un-American — lessons that Rousseau took to heart.
“Rousseau needed to rebrand Vanguard America,” Goldsmith said. “So he basically stole all of its assets, its digital assets … and made it into Patriot Front and literally painted everything in red, white and blue so that it would be more attractive.”
The group has also shown up at natural disaster sites, namely in Central Texas last summer, ostensibly to assist local residents. Goldsmith said these missions and the group’s outward aesthetic are meant to project an idea of patriotism and service. He said the group maintains a strict code of conduct. Among other things, they do not display swastikas or give Hitler salutes in public.
“The goal of their propaganda, of their public actions like this, is to beat MAGA and conservatives and Republicans into defending them and to saying, ‘I don’t see anything wrong with this group. They clearly love America,’” he said.
Patriot Front described as a “cult” and a “pyramid scheme”
The show of force in D.C. has raised questions about the group’s financing, and whether members’ travel was sponsored by outside individuals or groups. In fact, Goldsmith and Kamdang said that members of Patriot Front appear almost entirely to shoulder the cost of operations and Rousseau’s lifestyle. They said it’s most likely that those who traveled to D.C. had to cover their costs themselves.
“All of them funnel resources to the top,” Kamdang explained about the group’s general financial structure. “In order to be a Patriot Front member, you have to engage in acts of what they call ‘activism.’ And usually what that means is vandalism: putting up banners, spreading the slogans of hate all over the country. And in order to do that, they will have stickers, stencils, branding. All of that has to be approved from the top down, and all of it has to be purchased from the top down. So all the members who do this multiple times a month send cash to Thomas Rousseau for essentially stickers and stencils.”
Goldsmith said that from his time infiltrating the group, the costs could run up to hundreds of dollars a month per member. Kamdang, who said that attorneys are actively seeking to collect judgment in the settlement over the Arthur Ashe mural, noted that Rousseau appears not to hold any additional paying jobs.
“This seems to be what he’s doing full time,” Kamdang said. “So he appears to be being propped up full time by his members.”
Goldsmith likened the financial operation to a pyramid scheme. But he said even more substantial than the financial investment that Patriot Front members are required to make to retain membership is the control they give up over their time and personal choices.
“I describe it as a cult, not to be offensive, but because it is like Rousseau needs to have complete control of all of his members,” Goldsmith said. “[The group] requires its members to give up all of their lives, all of their relationships. All of their priorities in life need to be focused towards growing the organization or continuing the organization [and] enriching its leadership. So, it’s costly.”
NPR reached out to Patriot Front for comment. The group did not respond by deadline.
Goldsmith also noted that Rousseau often gives lengthy speeches that members are expected to listen to, via online platforms.
To Kamdang, the publicity that Patriot Front earned through the group’s D.C. stunt presents a danger: It amplified a presentation of the group that was deliberately crafted to make Patriot Front appear orderly and patriotic.
“I think the reason why it got a lot of attention is because Patriot Front was very careful in their language,” he said. “They try to mask their replacement theory, the white supremacy and in ‘Americana’ terms and patriotism. But that is not who these guys are.”
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This year brings a new challenge for Armaghan Khan and many other teachers in the nation’s second-largest school district: Ban screen time for younger students, and significantly limit it for older kids.
“This is going to be a big impact for me,” says Khan, who’s spent his career in the Los Angeles Unified School District. “I would say about 75% of our work was on some kind of screen-based activity.”
As a science teacher Khan, has embraced technology. Not only because his students at Johnnie L. Cochran Middle School can perform large-scale experiments on their laptops — like a car crash simulator to understand things like Newtonian forces — but also because it’s his best option.
“My hands are kind of tied in terms of just what I can offer,” he says. “We have a lab space, but we do not have a lab budget.”
Many districts and a growing number of states have passed similar limits this year, but the rapid roll out in Los Angeles for teachers and the district’s more than 400,000 students is unique. The school board passed the resolution this spring: Starting this week, 1st grade and under will have no screen time at all, in November, the rest of elementary school classes will have limits, with middle and high school students following later in the year.
The new rules are a departure for LAUSD, which only a few years ago was a national leader in bringing technology into the classroom. Khan said he was surprised by the new policy and subsequent lack of guidance: “I don’t feel like I’m being set up for success.”
A rapid rollout
Pia Sadaqatmal, the district’s new chief academic officer who is overseeing the new screen time rules, says she knows it’s not flawless.
“There is no perfect solution on how to roll out to a school district the size of ours.”
She encourages teachers to see this year as a transition year and not expect overnight improvements.
“We have one of the first school districts in the nation to adopt a policy at this scale,” she says. “We know that we are going to be learning along the way at each phase.”
Students will have software on their personal tablets or computers that will keep track of the amount of screen time used per week. The software will not shut the device off once the limit is reached, instead it collects data for the district to comb through at the end of the year.
The hope is that the data gathered will help the district make tweaks to the rule and better understand what worked this year and what didn’t.
Certain things are exempt, like virtual textbooks, but teachers are still trying to figure out where everything else fits.
Filling the gaps
“I have more questions than I do sort of immediate … concerns around it,” says Kirti Baranwal, a teacher librarian at William Jefferson Clinton Middle School. This is her 28th year with the school district.
“I think generally screen time limits are good,” she says.
Last year the district banned cell phones, a growing standard for many states around the country. So Baranwal did a lesson on screen addiction, and asked her students to report their own screen time. Many came back with 8 or 10 hours a day – even with the ban in place.
“And I was like, when are you sleeping?”
Research shows that for kids who don’t have the resources to play on sports teams or attend arts programs, their time outside of school is occupied, often, by their phone. Baranwal, like Khan in his science classroom, thinks just unplugging or turning screens off ends up leaving holes.
We know that we don’t want students on phones, Baranwal says. But then, “what is it that we want kids doing?”
With the school year just beginning, the Los Angeles school district is trying to figure that out.
Former Olympian David Hearn stands with his attorney Norman Eisen as he speaks to reporters and protestors gathered after his arraignment at Moultrie Courthouse on July 09, 2026 in Washington, DC.
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Finn Gomez/Getty Images
President Trump’s Department of Justice walked away from the case against David “Davey” Hearn.
Prosecutors charged Hearn with vandalism in relation to peeling paint in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The charges have since been dismissed.
But President Trump can’t let the case go .
Trump continues to insist it was so-called vandalism that led to peeling paint and blooming algae on the National Mall reflecting pool – not a botched repair project as prosecutors ultimately concluded.
What’s it like to have the President beat the drum for your arrest?
This episode was produced by Jason Fuller and Linah Mohammad, with audio engineering by Ted Mebane. Our director is Kai McNamee.
Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning who also edited today’s episode along with Patrick Jarenwattanon.
For tickets to a live taping of Sources & Methods, NPR’s national security podcast, visit this link on or after Tuesday, August 11: npr.org/sourcesliveshow
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Dispatchers in Alaska Airlines’ Network Operations Center near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Joe Nicholson/Alaska Airlines
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Joe Nicholson/Alaska Airlines
On a typical day, Alaska Airlines operates roughly 1,500 flights, most of them guided by a team of dispatchers on the sixth floor of an office building near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport known as “The Hub.”
The dispatchers sit in a big open room, surrounded by as many as five flat-screen monitors that display real-time information on air traffic, weather, upper-level wind patterns and more.
It’s a lot to process. But these dispatchers are getting some help from a software tool called Flyways AI.
“It ingests all that information,” said Alek Mead, a manager in Alaska’s Network Operations Center, “and it really kind of puts us all together in a nice little package for the dispatcher to look at, take some options, maybe play around with some different ideas, and then pick the most efficient and the safest route.”
When Alaska wanted to optimize its operations, it turned to a small startup called Air Space Intelligence. Now the Federal Aviation Administration has tapped the same company to carry out a major reboot of the entire U.S. airspace.
The FAA wants to use technology — including artificial intelligence — to make the nation’s airspace more efficient. And Flyways offers a glimpse of how that might look in practice.
Alaska was the first airline to start using the Flyways system back in 2021 to do things that would be challenging, if not impossible, for a human dispatcher working alone.
“It doesn’t decide the route or waypoints that a dispatcher uses to get an airplane from A to B, but it does help provide suggestions that might be more efficient,” explained Capt. Bret Peyton, the managing director of Alaska’s network operations control. “That’s where Flyways is really excelling for us.”
Alaska says it’s saving tens of thousands of hours in the air and roughly a million gallons of fuel per year because of Flyways.
The system works by basically crunching data on air traffic, wind, weather and other factors to anticipate what is going to happen during flight before it does.
Phillip Buckendorf, the CEO and co-founder of Air Space Intelligence, speaking at a conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
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Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
“It’s actually a really fundamental change, a massive behavior change,” said Phillip Buckendorf, the co-founder and CEO of Air Space Intelligence, the company that built Flyways, in an interview on the podcast Crossing the Valley last year.
Buckendorf says his company worked closely with Alaska to build Flyways from the ground up. The company has since expanded to work with Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, as well as the U.S. Army and Air Force.
“One of the hardest things is we’re dealing with users that have basically made decisions against static displays for like 10, 20 years of their career. And so now they basically make a decision against a predictive picture,” Buckendorf said.
Federal regulators are betting that predictive analytics can make the entire U.S. airspace work better, too.
“I think we’ve got a real opportunity to do something transformational with AI,” said Bryan Bedford, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, at an industry conference in May.
Bedford says the U.S. airspace is safe today because air traffic controllers make sure planes are separated from each other at every stage of their journey. But he says the current system is not as efficient as it could be.
“What we’re seeing is a system that is woefully unorganized,” Bedford said. “We don’t have in any of our facilities the ability to see the entire national airspace picture in a unified way.”
Bedford says predictive analytics can help prevent bottlenecks and congestion before they happen, with relatively small adjustments to schedules and routes.
The FAA is so convinced that it recently announced an $875 million contract with Air Space Intelligence to modernize the nation’s airspace. The company is tasked with building what the agency is calling the SMART system, short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories.
It’s part of the Trump administration’s ambitious push to deliver a Brand New Air Traffic Control System. FAA officials say the goal is to help air traffic controllers, not replace them.
But skeptics wonder if the technology can scale up from helping airline dispatchers to optimizing the entire U.S. airspace, which is the busiest and most complex in the world.
Bret Peyton at Alaska Airlines says dispatchers there were skeptical, too.
“It took a while for us to convince the dispatch group that it is what we say it is, which is a decision-making aid, and not a tool that’s going to run rogue and make weird decisions for the dispatcher,” Peyton said. “And it happened relatively quickly once dispatchers saw their true results that were pretty immediate.”
KNKX’s Izzy Ross contributed reporting from Seattle.
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