In the early hours of June 24, 2021, four masked men in a black Jeep SUV arrived in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and parked one block away from an intersection where five days earlier, on Juneteenth, artists and politicians had unveiled a statue of George Floyd. Surveillance cameras captured the men walking toward the bust, one of them shaking what appears to be a can of spray paint with one hand and carrying a stencil in the other. A red light, possibly from a GoPro camera, glowed on the chest of another masked man.

The New York Police Department said that these men then vandalized the statue, dumping paint over the bust of Floyd and stenciling its base with the address of a website belonging to a notorious extremist organization: Patriot Front.

Minutes later, the men returned to the Jeep and drove off into the night. Locals discovered the vandalism as the sun rose over Brooklyn. By that afternoon, news headlines broadcast the cruelty of the act the defacement of a statue of a Black man by a white supremacist group in a predominantly Black neighborhood across the country.

A racist, loathsome, despicable act of hate, tweeted then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. We will bring these cowards to justice.

More than six months later, the perpetrators are still at large, even as another George Floyd mural on Bowery and Houston streets in Manhattan was vandalized with a Patriot Front stencil.

And it wasnt just in New York: From Philadelphia to Louisville to Nashville to Austin to Portland, Oregon, Patriot Front has held brazen public demonstrations and vandalizations intended to get eyeballs on its white nationalist cause. In December, about 100 Patriot Front members marched through the National Mall in Washington, D.C., all dressed in khaki cargo pants, brown combat boots, navy blue jackets, white gaiters, sunglasses and beige baseball hats. Some carried shields and wore shin guards, prepared for violence.

The name Patriot Front is a rebrand a variant that evolved from Americas burgeoning pandemic of Trump-era hate groups and cross-pollinated with far-right strains originating in Europe. Patriot Front grew out of another white supremacist organization called Vanguard America, which fractured not long after a man associated with the group, James Alex Fields, drove his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters during the infamous 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. He killed one person and injured 19 others.

One photo shows Fields standing near Thomas Rousseau , a Dallas-area native who adopted white nationalism as a teenager. Rousseau formed Patriot Front after Charlottesville once it became clear that Vanguard America would be forever linked with Fields attack. His new organization changed its color scheme to red, white and blue and had its members refer to themselves as American nationalists, a euphemism often used by far-right groups in Europe to rebrand fascist ideology and iconography.

Patriot Front, per Rousseaus manifesto, seeks a hard reset on the nation we see today a return to the traditions and virtues of our forefathers. Decrying mass immigration, rampant consumerism, increasing diversity and the declining fortunes of white Americans, Rousseau espouses the renewal of a true American volk through racial primacy, physical prowess and the renewal of the nuclear family.