DIEGO SANTOS
A Patriot Front flyer was found on a transformer box outside NDPP on NE Campus Jan. 20
Recruitment flyers for Patriot Front, which has been classified as a white nationalist group, were plastered onto transformer boxes outside a NE Campus building.
Southern Poverty Law Center classifies Patriot Front as a hate group that broke off from Vanguard America after the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
One flyer said “American spirit, European blood” and the other said “For a new American nation-state.” Both were covered in statements written in Sharpie from those who opposed the flyer’s rhetoric.
NE students Kyle Cowart and Solaris Khalid discovered them on the first day of school on Jan. 20. While eating lunch in their car, they noticed something on the transformer outside NDPP and after further inspection they googled the URL listed on the flyer.
“It’s a white supremacist group,” Cowart said. “Their whole thing is that they want to either get rid of, one way or another, all nonwhite people from America.”
Among videos of men marching in white masks carrying the Betsy Ross flag, Cowart and Khalid said there was text calling for “a revolution of people born to the nation of European race,” along with Telegram posts of men beating each other up.
“I view it as violence,” Khalid said. “They want to form a ‘new and just state.’ So, a state where people who share this mindset of ‘only white Americans should be allowed to live here.’”
Both said they believed this could potentially be harmful to the campus community.
“This is a really densely populated area, and it’s highly diverse,” Khalid said. “I mean, every other person you see is a nonwhite person. So it’s like, who is putting up white supremacist posters? Who is putting different posters up that are saying this hateful rhetoric.”
While they were on campus, Cowart said they weren’t close enough for a faculty member to notice it, a location only people walking from student parking to campus would see.
“[Patriot Front] is going to look for people who are vulnerable. College kids are vulnerable. High school kids are also very vulnerable,” Cowart said. “They’re looking for people to recruit.”
Khalid said while she personally didn’t think people would notice them, she did feel the college should do something about the situation.
“There’s nothing wrong with that rhetoric in their mind, so they’ll die doing what they did,” Khalid said. “So, the college should have a response to that, at the very least.”
Cowart said by the second day of class they were gone.
Vice Chancellor for Communications and External Affairs Reginald Gates said the college was still investigating the situation.
“They’re saying that if you do not think our way, you are an enemy of us. If you do not look like us, you’re an enemy. If you’re not exactly like us, you’re an enemy,” Cowart said. “They want to have people afraid.”
