Patriot Front, the white nationalist group that's been popping up at protest marches around the country, hasn't quite convinced controversial podcaster Joe Rogan that they're a real group.
According to Rogan, the group seems to have suddenly arisen “out of nowhere.”
“Look at these guys. Where’s the fat people? How come they’re all wearing the same clothes,” Rogan in a recent episode of his show while viewing footage of a Dec. 4 march by the group. “Maybe they’re real, but I’m calling bullsh**.”
But as Gizmodo points out, the group isn't entirely disappointed that Rogan disparaged them. In fact, they're just happy that they were mentioned on a show with 11 million followers.
“There’s so much coverage out there and both sides hate us. That’s when you know you’re doing something right,” a member of the group wrote in a leaked chat from December.
“Exactly. What a time to be alive,” said another.
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Gizmodo's Dell Cameron and Tom McKay write that the group has good reason to convince themselves that Rogan mentioning them was beneficial.
"The group relies on recruiting disaffected young men who, in the broadest terms, fall within Rogan’s massive demographic, and the leaked chats show the group’s leader, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, was 'desperate' for any opportunity to break out of a plateau in membership in the low 200s," they write.
The nonprofit media outlet Unicorn Riot released more than 400 gigabytes of messages and other media from two internal Patriot Front forums, showing that the group plans to collect mentions of itself in the mainstream press to craft videos designed to market itself more efficiently.
“Just pick out a few clips saying that we marched through DC, maybe some descriptions of us as long as it isn’t over-the-top calling us bloodthirsty neo-nazi’s, etc,” a member said in private chat less than a week after a march. “Also, extend Rogan’s clip a little bit, I think right after it ends he says ‘you need to see this video,’ let’s try keeping that in.”
Read the full report over at Gizmodo.
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