Ross: Leaked Patriot Front conversations reveal an obsession with media attention

Last week in Idaho, police arrested 31 members of the white supremacist Patriot Front, who were in a U-Haul truck headed to a downtown Coeur D’Alene park where a Gay Pride event was going on.

They wore khaki uniforms. They had shields and a smoke grenade. And they had documents with plans for a confrontation.

The police chief put it this way:

“We likely stopped a riot from happening downtown,” Chief White said.

All 31 were booked on misdemeanor charges of conspiracy to riot, and they’ve all bonded out. The Seattle Times published some of their names in yesterday’s paper so you can find out if you know any of them.

And I’ve always wondered what goes through the minds of people who go to the trouble of buying a uniform and a shield and piling into U-Haul to confront people they don’t even know.

Well, thanks to social media, we can get a few insights.

Because an organization called Unicorn Riot has posted hours and hours of the chat room conversations of Patriot Front members, and you can listen to their online conversations.

And you know what? It’s all very calm. No ranting. No diatribes. No Alex Jonesing. They talk about their wives, their girlfriends, and their disgust for black people and Jewish people and white people who don’t share their disgust – and others who are destined for Hell.

They believe in strong families, but can’t seem to form any themselves.

One guy talks about his girlfriend who couldn’t tolerate his activism anymore and finally told him she was not willing to lose all her other friends, and left. He admitted to his online pals he would miss the sex, but he was better off without her.

I’d like to play you some audio clips of all this, but as I read Washington State law, we cannot broadcast private conversations without consent.

So I will just summarize what I learned.

Apparently, it’s hard to keep girlfriends close, or even keep relatives close when you’re a white supremacist. So they get their satisfaction by seeing themselves in the news.

I didn’t hear a single complaint from any of them about being harmed in any way by the groups they hate. But they have learned that openly expressing their disgust gets attention. And THAT they like very much.

They love it when Antifa tweets about them. They love seeing their banners create panic, they love seeing their graffiti and their stickers go untouched day after day, month after month. It is the most exciting thing in their lives.

And unless women can start doing a better job of distracting these guys, or cities get serious about scrubbing the stickers and graffiti, or diversity training starts working, they’ll be around for a long time.

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