THE INFILTRATORS

Who’ leading the way in investigating far-right extremists: FBI. agents or leftist vigilantes?

- DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Colton Brown, who lived with his father and stepmother in a single-story house outside Seattle, earned about fifty thousand dollars a year as an assistant electrician—but his real passion was fascism. In recordings of his private conversations, he argued that an “international cabal” of “hook-nosed bankers” was conspiring to replace white Americans like him with people of non-European descent, and he expressed alarm that the U.S. population would soon be less than half “ethnic American.” This so-called “great replacement” may have felt personal: his stepmother was Vietnamese. Brown, who has blue eyes and short, wavy blond hair, wore clothing with Nazi iconography, believed that white people deserved their own ethnostate, and told his dad that other races could “go to hell.”

In 2021, when Brown was twenty-two, he became a regional director of Patriot Front—one of the most active of the white-nationalist, neo-fascist, and anti-government organizations that academic researchers collectively characterize as the modern far right. (Such groups lie beyond even the fringes of the Republican Party.) Patriot Front’s leaders routinely summoned members to travel across the country, on short notice, for demonstrations: hundreds of young white men marched in identical uniforms, with protective helmets disguised as baseball caps, and neck gaiters pulled over their faces. At some rallies, Brown shouldered one of the tall metal shields that Patriot Front members were trained to use in street battles. The members frequently marched through racially diverse neighborhoods, almost baiting residents into fights (while maintaining that marchers would never throw a first punch).