Last month we named the members of the neo-nazi group Patriot Front who vandalized a mural honoring Black tennis champion Arthur Ashe mural in Battery Park, a mostly Black neighborhood in Richmond, VA: unicornriot.ninja/2022/patriot-f…
Yesterday, the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights (@LawyersComm) filed a federal lawsuit against Patriot Front, Nathan Noyce and Thomas Dail (the 2 members seen on leaked video defacing the mural), Patriot Front leaders Thomas Rousseau & Paul Gancarz, and 23 John Doe defendants.
The new civil suit alleges that Noyce, Dail, and Patriot Front as a group committed at least three civil rights violations under the Ku Klux Klan Act and Virginia state laws against “Racial, Religious, or Ethnic Harassment”: lawyerscommittee.org/lawyers-commit…
The suit notes that Thomas Rousseau "require[s] that members get Patriot Front regional and national leadership approval for any high-profile acts of vandalism."
Nathan Noyce and Thomas Dail, the PF members caught on tape defacing the Arthur Ashe mural, use the in-group aliases 'Roger VA' & 'Kenneth VA', respectively.
Police bodycam footage shows 4 Patriot Front members being pulled over in Maryland after a 12/4/21 nazi march in DC.
Along with Noyce and Dail, the other two passengers are also now named as John Does in the @LawyersComm suit - 'Vincent VA' & 'John VA':
Patriot Front member and KKK Act lawsuit John Doe defendant 'Vincent VA' is Aedan Tredinnick, a 21-year-old from the Norfolk, VA area who graduated high school from @TCCva and began attending college at @ODU this fall:
Patriot Front member & KKK Act lawsuit John Doe defendant 'John VA' identified himself during a traffic stop as Jacob Brown, 21, of Newport News.
Leaked videos show he's been involved in posting nazi propaganda on behalf of Patriot Front around Virginia:
Jacob Brown ('John VA') & Aedan Tredinnick ('Vincent VA') are seen in leaked footage of fascist posters being glued to utility boxes on 11/14/21.
Patriot Front's Virginia leader Paul Gancarz, also named in the new lawsuit, addresses Brown as 'John' and Tredinnick as 'Vincent':
On 11/10/21 Nathan Noyce, Aedan Tredinnick, Thomas Dail & ~10 others were at a drilling meet led by Patriot Front Network Director Paul Gancarz ('ND - Samuel VA').
They were training for PF's official 'shield team' that attacks anti-racists at PF rallies:
At least 5 defendants in the Patriot Front lawsuit are seen in leaked footage of the Nov. 20 drilling session led by Paul Gancarz, including unidentified Network 9 member 'Christopher VA', who was involved in defacing the Arthur Ashe mural.
According to the complaint filed yesterday by @LawyersComm, Patriot Front Network 9 Director Paul Gancarz violated the Ku Klux Klan act by planning, overseeing, and failing to stop his PF chapter's racially-motivated vandalism of the Arthur Ashe mural in Richmond.
Leaked notes show Gancarz was at an October meeting of the Patriot Front's Network 9, which he leads, when a plan for "Richmond Stencils" was approved.
Exif data on the leaked .docx file show that the meeting document was created by the username 'Ganz' - Gancarz's nickname.
Patriot Front's founder/leader Thomas Rousseau is also being sued under the federal Ku Klux Klan Act for approving, allowing, and not stopping the racially-targeted destruction of the Ashe mural last year.
Thomas Rousseau often coordinates directly with local Patriot Front chapters to intimidate minorities.
In a call last Oct, 4 days before Gancarz's meeting to plan the Richmond vandalism, Rousseau helped plan the destruction of gay pride art in Olympia: unicornriot.ninja/2022/patriot-f…
With Rousseau's blessing, Patriot Front's PNW chapter planned to destroy the "Respect & Love Olympia" mural, filmed themselves doing it, then discussed the act in a leaked meeting the next day.
This happened at roughly the same time that Richmond's Ashe mural was trashed.
Patriot Front's Rousseau-appointed Network 8 Director Colton Brown ('ND - John WA') and low-ranking member Spencer Simpson ('David WA') were both arrested this year for their role in destroying the Olympia pride mural:
Spencer Simpson once said that the point of Patriot Front's nazi vandalism campaigns was to “show people that you can do something like this, and you can get away with it.“
The Richmond suit & Olympia arrests paint a picture of a future of increasing legal trouble for Patriot Front.
Many identical incidents exist in which Thomas Rousseau and his Directors seem liable for apparent hate crimes committed by their underlings: unicornriot.ninja/2022/patriot-f…
Take one example - in November, St. Louis-area members of Patriot Front (led by Network Director Luke Paule aka 'Carter MO') vandalized a LGBTQ center while clearly intending to intimidate people based on gender and/or sexual identity:
The 5 Patriot Front members who defaced the LGBTQ youth center in Springfield are also implicated in the destruction of a Black history mural on Washington State University campus. 1 of the 5, Mitchell Wagner, currently faces a felony in St. Louis for it: unicornriot.ninja/2022/patriot-f…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
NEW▶️“Who Watches the Watchmen?” Community Resistance in Long Beach, California [Commentary]
Rapid response & patrol teams have become an effective strategy in deterring ICE activity and creating relationships with vulnerable populations affected by ICE.unicornriot.ninja/2026/commentar…
“Rapid response groups are geography based, and the more concentrated and focused and at scale that geography is, the more effective the rapid response group is,” states James Suazo, the Executive Director of Long Beach Forward.
“It usually entails people who are trained or familiar with what to do, how to document, [and] how to potentially intervene if that’s what the group has agreed upon. And really trying to quickly respond in an emergency.” - James Suazo
On January 7, an ICE agent shot and killed an observer near 33rd and Portland Aves., only the most recent in a series of abuses of power that have steadily mounted in recent weeks. The Minneapolis Police Department once again appeared on the scene for “crowd control."
Local police arrived after federal agents sprayed chemicals on residents who responded to the shooting – part of a larger pattern in Minnesota of integrated police actions between federal, county and local law enforcement.
New: Cop City RICO Cases Dismissed Years After 61 Activists Charged as Criminal Conspiracy
Racketeering charges against dozens indicted as co-conspirators in the Stop Cop City movement were dismissed yesterday marking a legal victory for the movement
The dismissal comes after more than two years of attempted prosecution that sought to convict protesters who opposed Atlanta’s sprawling police training facility, known as Cop City, as an organized criminal enterprise.
In September, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Kevin Farmer said from the bench that he planned to dismiss the charges, but the decision was only made official yesterday.
8 years ago today: A coalition of neo-nazi groups held the so-called "#UniteTheRight" rally in Charlottesville, VA - after planning online for months to carry out racially motivated violence.
The even ended early after being outnumbered by militant antifascists.
Police stood down most of the day as fascist groups openly carried out attacks while using slurs. After the rally was shut down, one neo-nazi ran into protesters with his car, killing Heather Heyer.
(The cop keeping the road closed had been allowed to leave her post earlier.)
Virginia State Troopers monitoring protesters discussed wanting to mass arrest anti-racists - who they called "motherfuckers" - shortly before the car attack.
(See our 2019 story: "Neo-Nazi Gets Multiple Life Sentences In Federal Prison for Charlottesville Car Attack")
During the first Trump administration we obtained hundreds of pages of special agent manuals from ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in full - we released w/o redactions. It includes everything from denaturalization, to 'special response teams' to undercover operations:
Icebreaker Pt 1 – Secret Homeland Security ICE/HSI Manual for Stripping US Citizenship unicornriot.ninja/2018/icebreake…
"...denaturalization efforts are in line with the Trump Administration’s policies stripping DACA and Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been contributing to this country for years." — Jennifer Chang Newell, managing attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project
Icebreaker Pt 2 – Confidential Homeland Security Asset Forfeiture and Search and Seizure Handbooks unicornriot.ninja/2018/icebreake…
"the [handbooks] ... exposes the inner workings of an extrajudicial system that has destroyed people’s lives without due process. This shadow system skirts the checks and balances that have traditionally staved off at least some abuses of power and gives the elite who run this country the unfettered ability to manipulate outcomes.” – Michelle Gross, Communities United Against Police Brutality
Current DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has often espoused racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric tied to the neo-nazi-originated “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and embraces adopting anti-LGBTQ policies. Oh and she shot the family dog.
Mike Huckabee is Trump's ambassador to Israel.
He's rubbed elbows with actual white supremacists (Council of Conservative Citizens, pro-segregation), demonized gay people, and claimed "there's no such thing as a Palestinian."