After last year’s deadly Hill Country flood took at least 135 lives over the July 4 weekend, volunteers flocked to the area to support disaster relief efforts. Among those volunteers were members of Patriot Front, a neo-Nazi organization that is one of the nation’s largest and most influential white nationalist groups.
On July 23, Patriot Front posted multiple photos on their official Telegram account showing about two dozen of what the group described as their “activists” doing disaster relief work in Kerr County. The faces of the participants were blurred other than that of the group’s North Texas-based leader, Thomas Rousseau, and a well-known podcaster and Holocaust denier. In a video also posted to Telegram two weeks prior, Rousseau described the intent of the mission, which appeared to be part of a broader strategy that extremism experts say is meant to launder the group’s image and recruit new members.
“Patriot Front is here in Central Texas responding to the flooding,” Rousseau said in the video. “We are prioritizing the interests of our people in this mission. While every other race and religion across the country and the world, for that matter, can establish charities, communities, and institutions that explicitly exist by and for their own, it is regrettably a revolutionary act to do so for Americans, that unique nation, descendant of the European peoples who discovered, settled, and founded America.”
Patriot Front’s participation in the relief effort was previously reported by The Guardian, but the River Inn photo helps reveal the identities of additional participants—and contains evidence that has led the Observer to identify a network of North Texas businesses with ties to Patriot Front.
Through an analysis of business records, social media, and publicly available information, in addition to interviews and in-person observation, the Observer has identified Veteran Brothers Roofing & Restoration as one of four businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that are operated either by members of Patriot Front or individuals with multiple connections to Patriot Front. These businesses do roofing, home construction, and junk removal work across several counties.
None appear to feature Nazi imagery or messaging in their public-facing websites or social media. But a 2020 internal Patriot Front document and interviews with experts suggest that the neo-Nazi group is engaged in a strategy to establish an independent ecosystem of businesses that can employ Patriot Front members and insulate them from consequences if their involvement in the group is exposed. In the previously unpublished “Tactics and Strategy” document, which the Observer obtained through researcher Tristan Lee’s past undercover infiltration of the group, Patriot Front internally advocated the creation of “an almost exclusive economy which can greaten the prosperity of the collective and make it increasingly impervious to outside attacks.” This strategy is also apparent in a trove of internal Patriot Front communications published by Unicorn Riot: One chat room, called “#positive-investing,” included a meeting about “The Core Factors of Starting & Running a Business” hosted by a Patriot Front regional leader.