It Could Happen Here - Patriot Front's Idaho UHaul Adventure

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

America's dumbest Nazis steal the spotlight at an armed protest of a pride rally.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, boy. It could happen here.

The podcast about it and happening and could. Chris, take take us away i'm taking it away oh boy i i think i promised to um so uh this is this has been a fun week so far we're all kind of sitting through that in that awkward period where we know the supreme court is about to do some shit with roe v. Wade, and that that's gonna light a whole bunch of stuff on fire. And so we're all waiting for that. And we're all waiting for the big Pride Month demonstrations in the wake of a shitload of threats from the right. And kind of in that awkward interstitial period, we got this little burst this weekend of happiness, of just pure joy.

So obviously we had covered a little earlier the Gundaline rally in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which was a right-wing kind of counter rally to Coeur d'Alene's regular local pride um rally uh and you know it was a an event that the the the the the pr for ahead of time was deeply unsettling there were a lot of like threats and talk about you know let the fight start here and all that stuff a lot of people were worried about a massacre including us because when you have a bunch of right-wingers saying that anyone queer is grooming kids and it's time to shoot them, it's reasonable to be worried about a massacre. Now, what we did see on the day, and this is something you'll note a lot of times when you get the events where there's a lot of threats around them. That's what kind of provokes enough attention and enough of a state response that that it's not where people try to shit. You know, it's often kind of at the edges of events or the events that people don't

take seriously enough ahead of time that like things go to shit. You know, Charlottesville would be a great example because prior to Charlottesville, there was a lot of like discussion about how big it was going to be in the city you know did not really take it seriously there were a number of i and this is one of the things that's frustrating the fucking mayor of charlottesville is after um what happened in courteline and stuff has been like on the news talking to people about how to how to avoid demonstrations going badly and shit which like the you know he received a lot of warnings from anti-fascists about how many people with, you know, pending violent charges were going to be at unite the right in Charlottesville

and how many threats were going on. It was kind of ignored. And as a result, it got really fucking ugly. Um, because, you know, you had, uh, smaller numbers on the, on the first night, you know, when people got surrounded by that torch lit mob, you had smaller numbers of anti-fascists outnumbered by fascists and no real counter to them until, you know, the next day. And obviously that's the day that James Alex Fields drove a car into a crowd. The thing that was the bright ray of sunlight in the midst of what has been a pretty rough couple of weeks news-wise was 31 members of the hate group Patriot Front getting arrested in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, jammed into the back of a U-Haul. The story of Patriot Front and the story of how that beautiful moment happened starts inlottesville in 2017 actually it starts significantly before that in texas but uh the group that becomes patriot front starts as a group called vanguard america and vanguard america is one of the groups that is responsible for kind of carrying out the the unite the right rally in charlottesville this is this is a different group than american vanguard right uh wait let me double check here uh because sorry they all use such similar names yeah

um i if i'm not mistaken there is an american vanguard um there's also the american vanguard corporation uh no no no i think it's American Guard. American Guard is the group that is kind of more coming out of the KKK's sphere of orbit because some of them are former Klansmen. That's another story for another day. bringing a lot of people, a lot of fascists, shouldn't call them people, to Charlottesville in 2017. James Alex Field is marching with them and carrying one of their shields earlier in the day before he carries out his car attack. And as a result of the bad press that him murdering a woman and maiming a bunch of people with his car

in a terrorist attack brings down, the leader of Vanguard America, Thomas Rousseau, splits off, like kind of ends Vanguard America and spins it off into Patriot Front, which is less explicitly, just as fascist, but less branded as fascist, more kind of branded in Americana. All of their PR and all of their like images look like

rejected stills from a bioshock game yeah it's it's pretty amazing i i'm pretty sure yeah these are the guys are like there's a video of them like talking like like on like they're literally they go like on camera it's like oh yeah we're doing america stuff we're not hitler people and then like the moment the camera turns off they're like oh good the camera's off we can say sick hail now yeah yeah it's it's great i mean vanguard america's logo was literally like an eagle carrying a bundle of fascists yeah they're not not subtle um and i should say vanguard america i think was actually founded by another guy in California. But Thomas Rousseau was pretty quickly prominent in there, and he splinters off into Patriot Front.

I need to be specific because there's people listening who will yell at me for getting that wrong. So for the purpose of what we're talking about today, we should chat about Thomas Rousseau before we get into some of the funnier stuff, because he's got a really interesting background for a fascist. and they'll march around in their fucking gators and their little fascist uniforms that are like, I don't know, they look like country club Nazis is like the way they prefer to dress. And they'll carry their shields and they'll, you know, film propaganda videos. Most of what they do is hand out, like put out stickers, put out other kinds of propaganda to the extent that like they are probably the primary national purveyors of of nazi propaganda um in like the real world like in terms of stuff that actually gets put out where people can see it um they're i've like i've found like stickers from them it's just like random places in Chicago. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen a couple of them.

Like 2019 Patriot Front was, and this is the ADL's estimate, so they're not the most accurate they could be, but also no one else is really keeping track of this. So I'll say they're probably broadly correct. In 2019, the ADL listed Patriot Front as responsible for 80% of all propaganda incidents nationally of like Nazi type groups. And then in 2020, that number doubled and they were responsible for like 90 plus, I think sometimes you'll hear 92% of like the Nazi propaganda distributed nationwide. Their propaganda efforts are most active in Texas, Washington, California, Massachusetts, efforts are most active in Texas, Washington, California, Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia. And it's one of those things, this is not, the goal with the propaganda is for them to be seen as very large and influential. The way that they manage to do it is that Patriot Front is

effectively like a key parasocial relationship for most of the people in it, right? It's a series of chats and discords and whatnot, and these people come to feel like it's their community. And one of the things Rousseau did that was very smart is if you want to stay a member of Patriot Front, you will get banned and purged from the organization if you are not regularly posting proof that you're active in the real world. And the easiest way to do that is by putting up stickers, right? So that's not only how they fund some of their operations, because, you know, their guys are buying stickers. But that's how you keep people engaged. If you want to like stay in the clubhouse with your friends, you have to go put up stickers every couple of weeks or every so often. And, you know, when you have a couple of hundred people doing that, stickers are not that expensive, you can get a lot of propaganda out that way.

And so Rousseau has been very successful in that end of things. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's chat about him a little bit. He is born in 1998, so he's 24 ish right now. He grew up where I did. He comes from the suburbs of Dallas, the Metroplex, specifically Coppell.

And if you're not, if you don't know much about the DFW suburbs, so Dallas, sizable city, about 4 million people. Last I checked. And then you've got these suburbs that are millions more. And it's effectively, DFW is kind of this megalopolis, like it's this massive sprawling city, larger than several states in its geographical area. At some point in the future, assuming growth continues, you're going to see like all of the big cities in Texas merge when their metroplexes start to mingle. But these Texas suburbs are all laid out very orderly in grids. They're all like planned communities.

And in the area around like this particular chunk around Dallas, they're all pretty wealthy. And of these wealthy suburbs, Coppell is like where the, the money money is like the, like coming up in Plano, which is, it was a fairly well off suburb. We would like the Coppell kids were like the rich kids, right? Like when we would compete against them in football and speech and debate,

like you'd feel like, yeah, we're like fucking with the rich kids. Let's get them. So this is, this is, this is, this is like,

this is like, this is like a Dallas Fortort Worth's Evanston. I assume so, yes. And when we would like, obviously, yeah, they were the rich kids. They were also the kids I would often get drugs from when I was 19 because they had good drugs. So the other thing you should know about, and Coppell is where our boy Thomas Rousseau grows up in the early 2000s. And in fact, his senior year is the year of the 2016 election. And another thing you should know about Coppell is that like all the Dallas Metroplex, it's incredibly diverse. And it's also, I should note, incredibly diverse in a specific way. It's not hugely economically diverse, but it is has a massive population of people from Southeast Asia, from India, from Vietnam, from China and from Japan. You can kind of see that if you look at, so Thomas Rousseau, as a kid, works for the Coppell High School newspaper, The Sidekick. And if you go to The Sidekick's website today, and if you look at its writers and its editorial staff, it is a bunch of kids from Southeast Asia. Now, Thomas Rousseau is extremely white.

And he has, you know, his big thing is like replacement theory. He's been yelling about this for a very long time. And so one kind of assumes this is probably where he started feeling that. Although it's interesting, if you look up like one of the earliest articles, the SPLC has a pretty good profile on him. And back kind of at the start of 2016, in February. He writes this article about the school's diversity club, which is just a pretty normal, you would not, there's no signs in there, not that I saw,

that like he's going to be a Nazi in about a year. Like it's just, it's how like basically anybody who is writing a straight piece of reporting on a diversity club would write it, you know? It's not like, there's no signs in that article. in that article yeah which is because like the next article he writes is like completely off the rails yeah like it's trump is at that point because you know february 2016 trump is still like i don't know he's definitely becoming the front runner but it's not clear what's going to happen yet and by the time he writes his next article a couple in like october it's a full-on trumpy yeah he's like i mean he

he's like by that point like he started his great replacement stuff he started like i mean he's doing that kind of like uh the the white working class has been like oppressed for too long and yeah people keep calling them racist and so they're voting for trump now because they're simultaneously poor but also like but but you know i think it's interesting it's like you know it's it's an interesting sign of that kind of like what actually generates that kind of right-wing populism because it's like so you have you have someone who's like going fascist really quickly writing this and it's like oh where is he from oh wait he's like just from like the incredible rich kid place it's like it's it's it's it's it's fun he's doing yeah he's he's doing this sort of fascist version

of the like working class whispering that you get out of like rich pundits doing. And it's one of the things, the kind of black box mysteries with Rousseau that I haven't seen a great is like when when does the actual switch flip in his head? Like when he writes that article about the school diversity club, is he already a fascist or is he one of these people who like is kind of conservative and gets super radicalized by Trump because he had you see throughout kind of 2016 because I get the feeling from him that he was always kind of like the conservative kid in his school paper and school media and like you get you see like he's writing like the month after that Diversity Club article, he writes an article about campus carry and is like supporting concealed carry on college campuses and is pretty like – but it's also – these are also like – it's also kind of a milquetoast conservative take. Like it's not – he's not like making an explicitly fascist argument. He's making the kind of arguments that like I would have made in speech and debate class as a conservative kid in North Texas when I was a senior. You see like in May,

he's writing an article about like bathroom bills and stuff that's getting closer to kind of modern American fascist rhetoric. And then of course, by like October, he's fully on the Trump train. And he actually has a removed opinion column after the election about like the silent majority where he says, quote, the truth is white voters, especially the working class, have had more than enough of being called racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and the rest of the usual trite buzzwords. The forgotten majority of the American electorate has shown that much to the dismay of the globalist agenda that they have not yet been replaced by tens of millions of blue voting immigrants from abroad. And it's again, you can kind of, there's a debate as to whether you can, I guess, argue as to whether or not he had always been sort of a fascist and just felt like more comfortable as the year went on being open about it, or if he's getting radicalized. I feel like he's kind of getting radical. I can see, I can see in him, like shades of everyone that I knew back then at that point in time in my life, including me.

Well, and this reminds me. So I'm like a year older than he is, right? So I was out of high school by 2016, but I just graduated, right? I graduated in like 2015. Yeah. in like 2015 yeah and i remember this with like people with people that i knew who were like because i mean like okay like what there were always people who were like really really like like we had a lot of like fox news pilled like kill all the muslims kids but there are also people who like weren't like that who were just like conservatives and over the course of 2016 like they went really really like they radicalized really quickly so it it wouldn't surprise me if he's doing the same

thing because i think that was a lot of like like i i i watched a lot of sort of like moral majority people get like who were kind of like on who weren't on the like absolute like right wing like i don't know like who weren't on like the absolute like hard right of that thing who were kind of like conservative but you know like weren't actively invested in murdering every gay person yeah those people just like a switch flipped and they like they just kind of went sicko mode yeah and that and that's where he goes. He goes like full on. And I don't know, you can, it's interesting

because like his primary job for the sidekick, the Coppell High School student newspaper is as like their political cartoonist. And he's mostly doing like really basic like clip art shit, which is what you see him doing for like Patriot Front. It's kind of the thing that distinguishes them is his like art style and the propaganda he makes. So, you know, he's there at Unite the Right in 2017.

One of the guys he's there with commits a terrorist attack. They spin off Patriot Front. And for the next few years, most of what they'll do is these events where they'll like show up and they'll march. It's worth noting that while they bring different kinds of weapons to these events, mainly like, you know, bludgeoning weapons, the kind of things you'd have for like a street fight and shields. These are not primarily violent events in that like their goal is not to get into a fight. I think mainly not because they're not violent people, because they're scared of getting into a fight.

And Rousseau's probably scared of getting in trouble for having a bunch of people show up to riot. So most of what they do is they'll do these flash mobs. Well, they'll get like a bunch of people together in the middle of the night or like on a day when nobody expects it. And they'll march around D.C. or something. And then they'll get footage of themselves doing this march where you know they can kind of uh take care to make sure the angles make them look as impressive as possible and then they'll put that up to try and

get more members um so they can put up more propaganda right uh they've had a couple of well-publicized failures they showed up in philadelphia so i think this was last year right yeah and they again there's like 30 to 50 of them they all like pile out of a u-haul they're marching is like in their fascist uniforms and like three dudes confront them and wreck fit like three philly guys just wreck their shit i remember seeing a video funny i remember seeing a video i think it was from that we're just like there's like there's a video it's it's just them running away and there's like there's like objects flying through the air yeah no like the their their fascist little army confronts like three

random philly yeah we're just like oh this isn't any good i don't know who these guys are but there's no way this is good let's's fuck them up. That's great. It's a perfect Philly moment. So, yeah, and, like, that is their M.O. In part because one thing you'll have to, and I, people can misinterpret what I'm saying here. They're probably the most disciplined of the fascist groups that do regular in-person events. of the fascist groups that do regular in-person events. Because there's a lot of discipline required in getting several dozen people together, getting them all to the area

in the exact same mode of transport together. That's why they all pile into U-Hauls, right? Rousseau doesn't want to coordinate a big caravan. That would be messy. People would be arriving at different times. People would get lost or get stuck in traffic. He wants everyone together. Because again, he's a fascist. So they're really – and they are pretty consistent and pretty good at getting everyone together and marching at the same time.

So, like, on a logistic end, there's some things they do that are competent, you know, generally speaking. are are competent you know um generally speaking now the downside of this plan i've just talked about like why getting everyone in a u-haul can work and how it has worked for them in the past the downside of this is that everyone is in a u-haul together yeah well i mean i i think i think for them there's there i think there's some upside like for them doing this which is that like i i think on a sort of like on like a discipline level on a level of like building this like like building this sort of like culture of like like community and like solidarity but like the fascist version of it it's like yeah you have everyone suffering together in the back of a u-haul which is hot as shit and like has to smell like like like like death like you cannot imagine like yeah it's like like

imagine the worst locker room you've ever been in but then it's it's everyone has been trapped in there for a week it's like yeah it's a it's a hot air balloon powered by nazi farts like that's that's what's going on there and they're all just like and it's it's very funny because like when they had done their last event or two and like, this is like in the dead of winter in the East Coast that they do a couple of events. And they have people like nearly passing out from heat stroke in the back of the van. Yeah. Or in the back of the U-Haul because like, it's not great to be crammed to the back of the U-Haul with 30 something people. to be crammed to the back of the U-Haul with 30-something people?

It's like, it sucks, but also, like, that suffering sort of, like, brings them together and makes them sort of, like, more, like, yeah, in a lot of ways, which sucks. But also, yeah, the second logistical problem with this that I think you're about to get to. Yeah. So they

try to, Rousseau actually puts out specific, like, information about, like, hey, here's how we need to prep for being crammed into a U-Haul together and advises that his dudes start spending time in saunas and shit in order to toughen themselves up to avoid getting heat syncope. Anyway, there's a couple other things that are happening. One of the things that we we know because one of the funny things about patriot front so they claim to have a an intense vetting process you know you're supposed to like message them with an application and then they'll they'll vet you before they let you into the chat rooms they have been compromised since the day

there started being a patriot yeah i i don't think there is a moment of the time that they have existed that I haven't known multiple people who had logs of every conversation. Like they're so infiltrated. It is extreme. Like, it's like, it's like the training wheels of anti-fascist research. Just like get into Patriot fronts,

chat rooms. There's always multiple people in there documenting their shit it's extremely funny um and so because of that we know a number of their tactics one of the things that rousseau has admitted to doing in the past is that like well when we start like heading towards wherever we're gonna you know pile out of the thing in march we'll call the cops and we'll inform them we've seen a group of people with shields getting ready to march and that they don't seem to have weapons, but they're about to be in X area. And they do this so that there will be cops on scene who will provide like an escort for them,

right? So that they won't get beaten up. Like they want the cops to be there to protect them, you know? So Rousseau is like specifically bragged about doing this in the past. Um, so Rousseau is like specifically bragged about doing this in the past. There's also like, as I stated, like the, or as an organization, their events are not geared towards like killing people, right? Like they're not, they're doing these marches to get videos. They're not like, they're not even like the proud boys where they're specifically showing up to get into a brawl. Right.

And every time they do get into brawls, they look very uncomfortable and frightened in them, which is why he, like, calls for police escorts and shit. That said, there are, like, again, they're a Nazi organization. They specifically preach replacement theory and yell that their ancestors conquered America, and so they deserve to own it, all this shit. So a bunch of them have been arrested for like gun stuff. There's been a number of like people of Patriot Front members arrested for like illegal machine guns and shit like that. That absolutely happens. People post about their illegal guns and stuff. But as an organization, they're mainly geared towards providing like propaganda that Thomas Rousseau likes. So they all gather together and are heading into Coeur d'Alene, Idaho

to confront this. And I suspect their goal, I suspect Rousseau's hope for how this was going to go was they were going to pile out of their U-Haul, going to get their 30-ish guys all in lines together in their uniforms with their shields

and with their fucking fascist sticks or whatever. And they were going to march through the middle of the pride gathering and get video of people like scattering or backing away from in front of them, not wanting to confront them because, you know, there was a big group of them. I think that was the hope. I'm sure Rousseau was like, hey, and maybe some Antifa will try to fight and we'll get some videos of us like fighting them with shields and that'll be good for recruitment. But I think the main goal was to get a video of them scaring gay kids and looking like a big scary Nazi phalanx

that they could use as propaganda. Now, this goes to shit before they even get out of the U-Haul because somebody calls the police and reports what looks like a little army of guys with weapons and shields piling into a U-Haul. And again, the police are saying that this was a concerned citizen. And based on the kind of most recent reporting, it may just be a random citizen of Coeur d'Alene who actually like was for understandable reasons, right? If you like see this happening, you're like, yeah, maybe I i should i might need to call somebody about this

yeah um i wouldn't call the cops necessarily but you know in this case it seems to have worked out that said knowing their background you have to acknowledge the possibility that it they that it was one of them who called the police like that is not impossible. Now, there's initially reports that it was the feds reports, I should say, from the cops on the scene. And again, it's reasonable that journalists overhearing that recording it would report on it. That said, cops on the scene are no more accurate about what actually has happened than like random passers by. So and they're more likely to just openly lie. Yeah. random passersby so and they're more likely to just openly lie yeah and and you know i i would not i'm certain there's a fed or or or four inside patriot front that said it doesn't seem like this

was a fed bust although i you know it's not impossible that it was because if you were the feds and you had a guy in here and you decided you want to arrest these people to avoid a potential charlottesville kind of situation happening again um maybe you would want to just say it was like a random person who called i don't know this does not i there's no reason that this needed to be a fed bust they were not like this did not require the fbi's infiltration capability to deal with like it was a bunch of of Nazis piling into a U-Haul. I don't have trouble believing that some dude was just like, hey, cops. And it's, there's been a lot of like surprise online that like the cops did their job, but they went after these people.

I think the surprise there is kind of based on some misconceptions. And these are misconceptions kind of pushed in part by the fact that over the last few years, when we have seen fascist groups rally in places like Portland, or like Charlottesville, for the Unite the Right rally, the cops tend to be on their side and tend to protect them. But what you're looking at are two different things in a lot of ways, because the cops in a place like Portland, and I assume in a place like Charlottesville, I'm not as familiar with their police demographics, but I know this is the case in Portland, don't live in Portland. They live in places like Battleground, Washington. They live in these surrounding more rural and suburban communities, and they don't like the city that they police, and they kind of see them as an enemy. And they don't like the city that they police. And they kind of see them as an enemy.

So when other people, generally from similar suburbs and rural communities as the cops, show up to fight the kids that Portland cops don't like, the Portland cops are going to be on the side of that. And this is, again, you see versions of this occur around the country. In Coeur d'Alene, this was not, like, Coeur d'Alene cops live in Coeur d'Alene, you know? Yeah, I was like, there's nowhere else to live. Yeah, they're from that community. And even if I'm sure a number of them, if not many or most of them have, like, attitudes towards, you know, have said some negative things about gay people, these are also, like, they're probably, some of them are probably related to people with that Pride rally. This is, and in general, these are in general, they are probably seeing this as like, well, whatever I think about Pride, these are people who live in Coeur d'Alene and a bunch of folks from outside of the state are driving in to fuck with them. They're not generally going to be on board with that.

And as a general rule, also, cops don't like people coming in to their town, like home to cause trouble. And these are people from like 11 different states entering Idaho to like fuck with people who live in Idaho. I'm not surprised that the police actually did something here. It doesn't like mean that these are the good cops that we're mythically all looking for. It just means that like nobody wants this happening in their hometown. that we're mythically all looking for. It just means that like nobody wants this happening in their hometown. Like nobody wants these assholes running into town

dressed as like little Hitler youth guys and marching around. Like that's like, of course they don't want that. Who would? So the cops pull over this fucking U-Haul. There's the footage of it is some of the funniest shit on the face of the earth. It's so good.

Because they just roll up the back of this thing there's like some fucking courtesan cop with an ar like pointed in there and there's just all these fucking goober nazis and their their fucking polos and khakis and their fascist gators um god it's good all right look up this footage if you can find it you owe it to yourself to do this it's good look up this footage if you can find it you owe it to yourself to do this it's amazing welcome I'm Danny Thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. We should state we're not really we'll be getting more coverage to what happens and what happened elsewhere on this day, you had a lot of ugly shit happen this day in Coeur d'Alene because there are a lot of heavily armed fascists rallying who are, in many cases, locals or from nearby places like Spokane. Matt Shea, who is a former state legislator from Washington

who lives nearby, who is an accused domestic terrorist, leads a march through Coeur d'Alene. These guys are not stopped by the cops, right? In part because they're not a bunch of dudes from out of state showing up to march around in ridiculous Nazi uniforms, right? The police are notably less concerned about the guys in AR-15s and plate carriers than they are about Patriot Front. Which is, again, it's because of, like, what's actually going on here, you know? what's actually going on here, you know? But there are like armed people frightening and trying to confront

or at least standing around outside of a pride march in a way that, you know, if you're doing that with a bunch of guns, that's concerning. Antifascists show up to protest them and very successfully kind of keep a wall between the folks showing up for pride and the folks rallying with guns.

So that is a thing that is happening. I don't want to, this has been the thing that has kind of like gotten the most attention from Coeur d'Alene. And I don't think that's bad, like from a standpoint of like what is useful, seeing a bunch of Nazis get their shit like wrecked is definitely an ideal takeaway from the Coeur d'Alene event, because especially considering the amount of violence I think we were all worried might occur there. I'm very happy that the primary takeaway is Patriot Frontal got arrested. But the things that we were concerned

about there, again, there's a bunch of dudes show up with guns to stare at a pride rally. That's not a positive development. But this group of Nazis all get arrested. And that is positive because it's extremely funny. And sometimes it's nice for things to just be funny. So the next kind of thing you see from Patriot Front is them all pulled out of a U-Haul on their knees, handcuffed, getting arrested one by one, and taken to a jail in quarterly there's some very funny quotes where like the police are being asked do you even have room for all these people and they're like oh we'll figure it out like don't worry um russo and a bunch of guys are in

getting criminal conspiracy charges um they're all getting conspiracy to riot, which is a misdemeanor. There's some rumors that a journalist posted that a number of them had illegal guns and are getting illegal gun charges. I haven't seen confirmation about that. I'd be shocked if some of them were not carrying guns. In the state of Idaho, anybody can, right? I do think they were specifically violating the law

by having firearms while sitting in the back of a box truck because i think for like reasons of accidents that have happened hunting you're not supposed to do that in idaho um but i haven't seen charges as a result of that um it's debatable as to what's going to stick however there's reasons to kind of suspect that something will because they had uh like seven or whatever page plan for how to yeah like they had their little riot notes oh god they had like sticks and a smoke bomb and stuff so it's not like an impossible case to convict them on conspiracy to riot i will say you know like you're not you're not asking like the moon of the police in this instance to like or of the prosecutors or whatever to be able to actually convict.

So we'll see what happens. What's definitely happening is that this is very funny. Patriot Front is extremely incompetent. I would not take this as a broader sign that like, number one, the police are taking threats against pride rallies more seriously god no no um i would not take this as a broader sign that like fascists are are are getting heavily stopped i also wouldn't there's also been people saying that like and again this is coming from that journalist who claimed that like there's a bunch of gun charges pending and maybe there are but like i think the the the comment she made was like

a massacre was averted i do not believe patriot front was planning to massacre anybody it there's that's just that's not their mo that's not like again not that they're not nazis not that they don't want people dead but like they're like these guys are like the milquetoastest, babiest Nazis, right? They show up and they march around in their fucking, like, Tommy Hilfiger Nazi uniforms, you know? Like, they're not, these are not folks planning in an organized capacity to commit acts of mass violence, because that would be scary to them, because they're mostly like suburban middle class kids. One of the funniest things that has come out of this is like one of the Nazis who got arrested

in Idaho's mom has started doing interviews because she's like, I kicked him out of the house. I keep trying to get him to, I don't know what to do to get him out of this group. So I've told him he can't live with me anymore because after his divorce, he's been living with me. And I'm going to talk to the media about the fact that my son is a stupid Nazi until he stops being one. I don't know what else to do.

And it does sound like she's really legitimately trying to grapple with, I don't know why he's doing this. I don't know how to stop it. But it seems like the best thing I can do is embarrass him, which is, I think, probably a good move on her part. Yeah. There's a fun Daily beast article about that you could really hear her frustration she's like i don't know why he's doing this like it all started around 2016 it's very frustrating you feel for her so i don't know chris you got

anything else to say about patriot front uh i i do think it's extremely funny that like well i i don't know in some sense it's funny in some sense it's kind of disturbing which is that like the right's reaction to this was immediately to uh accuse all of them of being feds yeah i mean which like it's interesting to me that like that's just like anytime something happens in the u.s now like and this is this is across almost the entire political spectrum, everyone immediately goes, this was the feds. Or sometimes you get it was Russia because... Sometimes you get it was Russia, yeah. Yeah, because it's like, if you're someone who, like,

the feds are the good guys, it's like, well, you need another person who did all this stuff. Yeah. So, like, that's disturbing and kind of grim to me, that it's literally everyone with everything has just turned into Alex Jones, and it's like's like yeah i you know i think the motivation for that on all the sides there's definitely like a core of legitimate belief that because the feds infiltrate number the feds have infiltrated a lot of fascist groups and the feds have you know had a history of infiltrating left

wing groups and whatnot like the feds have done a lot of this stuff. So that makes some people paranoid. But also I think if you are on the grifter end of things, right, and you want to talk about this stuff, but you don't actually want to put yourself at risk, that's an easy way to kind of divorce your listeners and supporters and stuff from the stuff that's potentially illegal is by saying, well, that's all the feds. Yeah. And I think also, especially like,

I think people are, I don't know. It's more frustrating on the left because people do it with stuff that like the PR is actually pretty good. But like with people on the right, there's a lot of like, this has become one of their sort of like PR management things of like anytime something looks bad for them. Yeah.

No, it was the feds. And it's like, no. And I don't think that's on the right at least. I think there's more legitimate belief that it's the feds on folks in the left who do this. Yeah. I think on the right, it is nearly always just like, this is how you do damage control. like this is how you do damage control like this is how we this is how we distract from the fact that our guys keep carrying out attacks or whatever or in this case that our our dudes are profoundly embarrassing yeah um is you is you're like no that was the fbi yeah packing 30 federal agents

into the back of a u-haul and getting arrested by the cordoline police a classic fbi caper if i've ever seen one my favorite one of those is the people who like you're never gonna see the names of any of these people like literally two hours later every single person got booked and all of their name like a list of all of their names showed up in every newspaper and it is again this does show you how the cordoline police don't want people coming in from out of town to fuck with people who live in Coeur d'Alene. That's not them being woke. They, like, nobody, no cops like that sort of shit. Yeah, yeah.

Like, these, yeah. Yeah, these guys aren't the hometown fascists, right? Like, they're fine with, like, Shea. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're fine with, like, Biblical Bases of War, dude. It's like, yeah, but these are, are like these are weird out of town fascists and it's like yeah cops i don't know they're yeah and it's they're very territorial one of the one of the ways you can see the territoriality is like the first thing the cordoline police do is be like

oh we're going to give everyone's name and where they live. Like, we're doing that immediately. And of course, the backlash to that from the fascists has been that now a bunch of fascists are doxing and calling in death threats to Coeur d'Alene cops, which again, there's this open question of like, are any of these charges going to stick for Patriot Front? The fact that an organized flood of death threats is going in for the police charging them is not good for their cases oh no like they're just they're just pissing the cops off it's like guys guys this is some free cop advice from me cops don't like getting death threats so that that really makes them angry yeah um so that's funny i don't know what else to say about it uh it is pretty funny

um there's aspect again the broader problem of there were a bunch of dudes with ars yeah showing up to to threaten um a pride gathering was not fun although also a lot of folks showed up to defend and support those people um and i think i think also like from what i remember from the reporting this was like one of the largest pride events i've ever had so like i think it brought out people yeah yeah people people aren't being like as an intimidation tactic it's not working it does not seem to have worked yeah it's it's it's it's work it's it's it's working insofar as it's it's not working it does not seem to have worked yeah it's it's it's it's work it's it's it's working insofar as it's it's you know it's further radicalizing the right but like it's not it it hasn't gotten to the point where like i don't know people like it hasn't gotten to the

point where like these things just are or like pride events just aren't happening because they're because the threat is great enough so yeah and i i would say broadly speaking if you kind of look at all of the things that we saw in the quarterly event it's um a more more positive signs than negative ones um the negative stuff is stuff that we have seen a lot before the militia shit um the folks rallying to defend those people the people turning up for the pride event um that's all positive and of course the most prominent fascists at the event embarrassing themselves like that's positive so i i am yeah i feel i i i i do feel like we were all worried over here about how the event in cordoline was going to go i feel really good

about how it it went which is not to especially i I know that there's folks from Coeur d'Alene there, not to minimize the problems and the threats faced, especially from people in Idaho, because boy, that is rough territory to be organizing in defense of LGBT people. But I think, broadly speaking, more good news than bad news from Coeur d'Alene. So I want to give our appreciation and thanks to the folks who showed up in Coeur d'Alene to support this event, to confront the fascists. Y'all are awesome and doing something difficult

in a place that needs you to be doing that. So thank you. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights

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