Patriot Front founder among arrests outside Pride event

All 31 white nationalists who were arrested Saturday for allegedly planning a riot at an Idaho Pride event have bonded out of jail, police said Sunday.

The men, all believed to be part of Patriot Front, were arrested after cramming into a U-Haul packed with riot gear, a smoke grenade and paperwork police say appeared to be an operations plan for their attack on Coeur d’Alene’s Pride in the Park event.

Among them was 23-year-old Thomas Ryan Rousseau, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the founder of Patriot Front after the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. Other arrests included Kieran Morris, Garret Garland and Mitchell Wagner, all identified by the SPLC as active members of hate groups. Wagner was arrested for felony first-degree property damage in March after allegedly defacing a Black history mural at Washington University in St. Louis.

The men came from around the country, including Michigan, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Arkansas, according to the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office.

All 31 were charged with conspiracy to riot.

“It appears these people did not come here to engage in peaceful events,” Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris said Saturday.

A witness who reported the stuffed U-Haul described them as “a little army…loading up into the vehicle.”

Photos shared on social media showed the men on their knees and in handcuffs, all dressed alike in khakis, navy blue shirts, beige hats and a white cloth covering their faces.

Patriot Front is a white nationalist group that frames its racist rhetoric as Americana, according to the SPLC, including threats that non-white communities are trying to take over. The accused Buffalo supermarket shooter spewed similar theories about the Great Replacement Theory.

The Pride in the Park event went ahead as planned in Coeur d’Alene.