One of the nation’s largest white supremacist groups is rapidly expanding, adding hundreds of members across 49 states in the past two years. Internal documents leaked to USA TODAY show a coordinated recruitment push fueled by step-by-step manuals and a network of fight clubs where members meet and sign up new recruits.
The files, provided by a source inside Patriot Front, offer a rare look at the group’s inner workings as it accelerates its growth. Known for its highly choreographed rallies – rows of identically dressed men in blue shirts, chinos and white face coverings carrying American flags – the group has used disciplined optics to amplify its reach and visibility nationwide.
A USA TODAY analysis of the group’s 72-page member roster and other obtained documents revealed:
And Patriot Front has plans to keep growing — fast.
In an internal communication provided in the leak, the Texas-headquartered group’s leader, 27-year-old Thomas Rousseau urges his members to get more involved, stay fit, and continue their incessant campaign of white supremacist propaganda. He calls for 600 members by July 4, 2026:
“This is a picked band of dedicated men that far exceeds any of our domestic contemporaries,” Rousseau writes. “These teams need dedicated members. Men willing to work for the cause and not just fight for it.”
The secretive organization portrays itself as merely patriotic, fighting for “traditional” American values. But the documents obtained by USA TODAY provide fresh evidence of the group’s intentions and future direction “working to secure a future for White children,” as one applicant to the group wrote.
“White Nationalist tired of watching my country be raped and pillaged by foreign invaders,” wrote another Patriot Front hopeful as he applied for membership.
USA TODAY is not identifying the source of the documents out of concerns for their personal safety. Patriot Front did not respond to a request for comment. To be sure, the group publicly eschews violence, and the documents provided to USA TODAY include instructions to members to specifically avoid violent or aggressive confrontations.
“Suggestion or conduct which may infer, encourage, or advocate for members to become aggressively violent themselves or encourage it in others is prohibited,” one document reads.
Dozens of members of Patriot Front were charged with conspiracy to riot in 2022 after being arrested en route to protest a Pride parade in Coeur D’Alene Idaho. Five were eventually convicted. Other members have been charged with vandalism for defacing a Pride mural in Olympia Washington and a Richmond, Virginia memorial commemorating Arthur Ashe, the first Black man to win singles tennis titles at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open.
“Patriot Front is the most active white nationalist group we track,” said Jeff Tischauser, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who has been researching the organization since its inception. “What you have are internal documents to a very secretive white nationalist group, and any time we get some documentation on what’s going on inside the group, the better we can inform our communities about what’s going on inside this hate group.”
One of the documents provided to USA TODAY is a list of “active clubs” across the country affiliated with Patriot Front. There are at least 23 in total, spread across 32 states, since some clubs are listed for more than one state.
The clubs are essentially small groups of young men who organize online to come together in real-life meet-ups, either at gyms or at outside locations where they train and spar, practice mixed martial arts and engage in other outdoor activities.
The document suggests that Patriot Front is increasingly seeking to appeal to these groups and forge alliances with them. It lists Patriot Front members who are friendly with active club leaders, and contacts within the clubs who should be approached.
The extremist group got its start in the days after the deadly 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, by former members of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America.
Members of the group participate in several demonstrations a year, usually attracting at least 100 participants. Recent rallies have gained headlines in Washington DC, Kansas City, Des Moines and other cities including a Memorial Day weekend protest in Virginia Beach. At these protests, Patriot Front members wear matching chino pants, blue button-down shirts and white face gaiters. They carry American flags as well as banners and flags bearing the group’s logo.
“No-one has rebranded themselves as successfully as Patriot Front,” said Carla Hill, vice president of research and investigations at the Anti-Defamation league’s Center on Extremism, which monitors the group. “They’re very good at optics. They plan everything ahead, they dress alike, they’re color-coordinated – it’s all planned.”
The documents provided to USA TODAY reveal just how organized and controlling Patriot Front’s leaders are about those “optics.”
Multi-page PDFs distributed internally tell Patriot Front members exactly how they should behave in public, what sort of shirts they should wear at protests (work shirts with two breast pockets, rather than dress shirts with just one), how to scrub their identities online, and exactly how to share posts about their activities.
The documents often read more like corporate compliance manuals than the invective-laden platforms of more “traditional” white supremacist hate groups.
“Activists are representatives of the organization at all times,” reads a General Conduct Guide, “and in all circumstances, and no exemptions exist for ‘personal’ or ‘unofficial’ circumstances.”
Tischauser, who authored a report linking Patriot Front to the active club network last year, explained that Patriot Front has gained a reputation among white supremacists as a hotbed for “feds” – informants for federal law enforcement. That has, in turn, led the group to open a new front in its recruitment efforts, he said: active clubs.
“Patriot Front needs to use active clubs to recruit in the movement,” he said. “It offers them plausible deniability and it also offers them a way into the American conservative movement that isn’t Patriot Front-facing.”
You may well have seen one of Patriot Front’s stickers, fliers or banners in your neighborhood without even realizing it.
The propaganda isn’t far off what you might see from brands that emphasize American patriotism. Using a set palate of reds, whites and blues and incorporating Patriot Front’s logos, fliers often appeal using patriotic rhetoric like “America First,” alongside images of strong-jawed, broad-shouldered white men.
Other examples veer closer to Patriot Front’s true white supremacist ideology, using slogans like “Reclaim America” and “Not Stolen. Conquered.” The group is also overtly antisemitic, with members bearing banners at events that read “No Zionists in government.”
Patriot Front has been responsible for distributing thousands of pieces of propaganda in recent years, and the documents provided to USA TODAY illustrate just how organized and controlled this effort has become.
The documents include a guide on how to create stencils for graffiti and another on how and where to place large posters advertising the group, including instructions on how to mix flour and water to create wheat paste to stick the posters up.
Another document details exactly how to create a Patriot Front banner – down to how to tie the knots affixing the canvas.
Crucially, the documents insist that Patriot Front members only use propaganda, including slogans, logos and imagery, created by the group’s innermost leadership and approved by Rousseau himself.
“They’re trying to attract the widest possible audience so they put out some messaging that is patriotic in its orientation,” said J.M. Berger, a researcher, author and academic who co-authored a seminal 2020 study on Patriot Front’s propaganda efforts. “They’re trying to capture people who if you just said ‘Hey, do you want to join the Nazi Party?’ would say ‘No.’”
“Our mission is a hard reset on the nation we see today – a return to the traditions and virtues of our forefathers,” reads Patriot Front’s website.
While the word “white” doesn’t appear in the manifesto, the leaked messages, along with years of research on Rousseau and several other members of the group have led experts across the board to establish Patriot Front’s true goals
Despite all the controls over propaganda, conduct and publicity, researchers have known for years what Patriot Front’s leaders and members really think and want. A 2022 leak of thousands of internal messages and audio and video recordings between Patriot Front members published by the media collective Unicorn Riot offered an unvarnished look inside the group.
And the leak to USA TODAY provides further evidence of the group’s careful masquerade, Tischauser, the SPLC researcher said.
“I have no doubt in my mind that Patriot Front is a white nationalist group that is trying to build a white ethnostate,” he said. “Based on leaked messages, we know that members of Patriot Front idolize Hitler, they joke about the Holocaust, they use racial slurs and they very much want to psychologically traumatize nonwhite groups – they are very comfortable being white supremacists in private.”
Will Carless covers extremism and emerging issues for USA Today and is the host of Extremely Normal.
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