When the Hurricane-Relief Worker Turns Out to Be a Neo-Nazi

The fit, helpful strangers who descended on Horseshoe Beach, Fla., after Hurricane Helene were a welcome sight. The men swiftly chopped through downed trees and cleared mounds of debris for distressed residents in the small gulf-coast town west of Gainesville.

These weren’t typical disaster-relief volunteers. They were members of Patriot Front, an organization branded by the Anti-Defamation League as a white-supremacist group.

Neo-Nazi groups aggressively escalating their activity in recent months across the U.S. have seized upon a potent new recruiting tool: the surging tide of misinformation surrounding hurricanes.

The contentious U.S. presidential race that has sharply politicized the storms is providing a new opening for hate groups that were already on the rise. Hurricane falsehoods about government malfeasance have spread rapidly on social media, often seizing on the hot-button debate of immigration by claiming relief funds are being diverted to migrants or favor minority victims over white applicants, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency denies.

Exploiting public confusion, grief and communication breakdowns, white supremacist groups are now showing up in vulnerable storm-ravaged communities in Florida and North Carolina. They blend in among the many legitimate church or other charity workers that have rushed in to help. But these militia groups offer aid while filming propaganda videos that both amplify falsehoods about the government response and help the groups remake their image as patriotic civic organizations for men.

Horseshoe Beach Mayor Jeff Williams said he didn’t realize, until after a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter, that the group was Patriot Front. Williams said he went online and looked them up after the call. “Plain as day, they are white supremacists,” he said, adding that he would have never known by their trim looks. “Typically when you see white supremacists, they are not as clean cut looking as what I saw.”

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At Horseshoe Beach, where local officials say Hurricane Helene destroyed the town hall and more than 90 homes, a Patriot Front crew filmed its cleanup work and then posted a video to its 20,000 subscribers on Telegram. A member, face obscured and his voice backed by the sound of buzzing chain saws, introduced the workers as Patriot Front and said: “It is important for American men to gather and help fellow Americans in need, while the federal government is occupied ushering in foreigners and giving them homes and giving them food and giving them water.”

“There is nothing here,” he continued, implying that the town’s only assistance consisted of “a couple of firefighters” and ordinary citizens.

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Williams condemned Patriot Front’s ideology, but said he’ll take all the assistance he can get.

“As long as they’re not here trying to press that on our people—I take the help,” he said. “I don’t care where they’re from.”

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Texas-based Patriot Front didn’t respond to requests for comment. The group formed after it broke off from Vanguard America in the aftermath of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau said in a May podcast hosted by influencer Patrick Bet-David that to be “American,” one must be “a member of the European race.”

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Earlier this year in Richmond, Va., where Patriot Front is the target of a federal civil lawsuit over the alleged vandalizing of a mural honoring Black tennis icon Arthur Ashe, a lawyer for Patriot Front argued the group doesn’t advocate violence and its members aren’t white supremacists. Instead, he said, they are separatists advocating for a “white ethnostate,” believing that “good fences make good neighbors” and that “it is better for ethnic groups to have their own separate territory.”

But the judge wrote in a March opinion that “the Court cannot reasonably infer that Patriot Front seeks separation for any reason other than white supremacy.”

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The hurricanes have set off an unusual level of viral rumors on social-media sites such as Elon Musk-owned X. Among them are posts alleging the agency doesn’t have money because it has been siphoned off to help migrants. FEMA plays a role in border management but that pot of money is separate from funds for responding to natural disasters.

The militia groups are actively spreading these claims about a failed or corrupt government hurricane response across the internet, with some going farther in recent days by showing up in person to work at storm clean up, and then sharing videos and commentary online.

One video from Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene notes, “We in Patriot Front are here to help out the local communities…Our politicians can hem and haw and switch over quickly to their talking points about Israel, but we truly are supporting our communities and being America first.”

The video was shared by an X user who wrote, “While FEMA is nowhere to be found, Patriot Front is boots on the ground,” receiving dozens of likes or retweets.

Another X user stated: “FEMA spent their whole budget this year on housing invaders. Hence, volunteers like us in Patriot Front are a necessity.”

Patriot Front helped clean up a family-owned plant nursery in Asheville, N.C., and touted its work on Gab, a social-media site favored by far-right groups where conspiracy theories run wild.

The group, which blurs faces in its videos, was also seen in a video helping cut up downed trees with chain saws to clear a resident’s driveway. A man on a tractor asked where the group was from, and the response was: “All over, mostly North Carolina.”

While at the residence, a Patriot Front member says in the video that the Appalachian people have been “stomped upon by the federal government and they are again in this instance.” The member gave the resident a flier before leaving, saying, “We’re from Patriot Front. It is a fraternal organization.”

A Proud Boys member last week posted that “FEMA is completely inept…they want us dead and replaced with ‘migrants.’” {snip}

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