Inside Patriot Front: The Masked White Supremacists On A Nationwide Hate Crime Spree

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Christopher Mathias
@letsgomathias
New: A @HuffPost investigation into the inner-workings of Patriot Front, the secretive white supremacist group on a nationwide hate crime spree.

From me & @awinston:

huffpost.com
Inside Patriot Front: The Masked White Supremacists On A Nationwide Hate Crime Spree
A new HuffPost investigation exposes the inner workings of the secretive American fascist group destroying Black Lives Matter symbols across the country.
5:07 AM · Feb 10, 2022

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/patriot-front-white-supremacist-group-hate-crime-vandalism_n_620293abe4b0725faad01783?a1n

In the early hours of June 24, 2021, four masked men in a black Jeep SUV arrived in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and parked one block away from an intersection where five days earlier, on Juneteenth, artists and politicians had unveiled a statue of George Floyd. Surveillance cameras captured the men walking toward the bust, one of them shaking what appears to be a can of spray paint with one hand and carrying a stencil in the other. A red light, possibly from a GoPro camera, glowed on the chest of another masked man.

The New York Police Department said that these men then vandalized the statue, dumping paint over the bust of Floyd and stenciling its base with the address of a website belonging to a notorious extremist organization: Patriot Front.

Minutes later, the men returned to the Jeep and drove off into the night. Locals discovered the vandalism as the sun rose over Brooklyn. By that afternoon, news headlines broadcast the cruelty of the act — the defacement of a statue of a Black man by a white supremacist group in a predominantly Black neighborhood — across the country.

“A racist, loathsome, despicable act of hate,” tweeted then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “We will bring these cowards to justice.”

More than six months later, the perpetrators are still at large, even as another George Floyd mural on Bowery and Houston streets in Manhattan was vandalized with a Patriot Front stencil.

*snip*