A white supremacist group claims it’s helping flood victims in central Texas. Patriot Front has declared it’s part of “disaster relief” efforts, according to The Guardian, after catastrophic flooding swept through Kerr County early Friday, killing at least 120 people, including dozens of children, and leaving more than 170 missing.
Raging flood waters from the Guadalupe River overwhelmed unsuspecting holiday campers and Fourth of July revelers who had almost no warning before the disaster struck as the river overran its banks before dawn, rising more than 25 feet in just a couple of hours.
“Patriot Front is on the ground in Central Texas after a flood killed over 100 Americans,” the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, a Texas native, posted in a video on the Telegram app.
We’re “responding to the flooding, which has destroyed communities and taken the lives of scores of Americans,” he continued, adding that his group is special: “something sets us apart.”
“Activists are currently in Hunt, Texas, doing disaster relief just outside of Camp Mystic – where dozens of young girls were killed while at summer camp,” it added.
Hunt is about seven miles away from the girls summer camp, which became a death trap when a wall of water slammed into it killing 27 girls, counselors and the camp’s owner Richard “Dick” Eastland, who died trying to rescue five campers.
Rousseau couldn’t help including his racist views in his post, adding that his group “is prioritizing their ‘people’ and ‘European peoples’ in those operations,” according to The Guardian.
That kind of hate speech doesn’t surprise Heidi Beirich. She’s the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism and has been researching rightwing extremism for decades. She told the news site it’s part of Patriot Front’s playbook to be “inserting itself into disaster relief in Texas.”
“The group was founded there, and like other extremist groups, they want to take advantage of relief efforts to mainstream their ideas, present themselves as non-threatening and helping the community, and ultimately use what they hope will be positive PR to recruit and grow,” Beirich said.
It’s also common for far-right extremists to try to disguise their racism under the guise of humanitarian endeavors
“We’ve seen David Duke do this in the past, and more recently, Veterans on Patrol inserted themselves into the relief efforts in Asheville after last year’s hurricane. The concern is that it works – and Patriot Front’s white supremacist agenda gets laundered as positive, and that helps them spread hate and recruit,” she continued.
And their ploy is having an impact, at least on social media, after all, when a group responds to desperate people in a desperate situation, their real motives might be overlooked.
Patriot Front was founded in 2017 after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where hundreds of white nationalists had gathered. Violence erupted when a crowd of counter-protesters showed up. Rousseau later faced charges for his part in the ugly demonstration.
Great Job Shelby E. & the Team @ Atlanta Black Star Source link for sharing this story.
