By Emma Weidmann | Editor-in-Chief
A graduate student was walking from Truett Seminary to Dutton Garage on Jan. 17 when she spotted a sticker on the back of a street sign. She had seen one last semester while gassing up her car at H-E-B. But this time, she looked closer.
The sticker depicted a Revolutionary War soldier holding a fasces, a bundle of wooden rods with the blade of an axe protruding from the side. Fasces are common fixtures on Roman statues, symbolizing imperial authority and power. But in the millennia since, they’ve come to be a hallmark of fascism, providing the root of the word and used by Benito Mussolini during his regime in Italy.
Next to the soldier stood a militia member holding a police shield, his face covered by a white gaiter. “For the nation, against the state,” it read. Below that, “Patriot Front.”
According to FBI records, Patriot Front is “a cluster of Texas-based neo-Nazis who created a new blend of traditional white supremacist ideology, alt-right sensibilities and activism, and militia style armed insurrection.”
It officially formed after the September 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a man drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring dozens of others. Earlier that summer, the founder of Patriot Front, then a member of white supremacist group Vanguard America, ousted the leader of his group. After Vanguard America marched in the rally, the new leader of the group announced the formal creation of Patriot Front and began to siphon off membership until Vanguard America became practically defunct.
The student said she ripped off the sticker after realizing what it was promoting.
“I want Truett to be a safe place and to have that right outside of my school that I come to daily, especially as a Mexican American, just kind of felt scary,” she said. “But at the same time, it felt very empowering. They’re the one wearing the mask, and we’re not. We’re showing our faces, and we’re proud to be here. A lot of our students of color are [first-generation] … I am, and a lot of my friends were the first ones [in their family] to go to college, so we’re going to be here, and we’re not going to allow hateful speech on campus.”
Lori Fogleman, a spokesperson for Baylor University, said on Jan. 8, BUPD received a criminal mischief report regarding a group placing the stickers on campus, which is private property. Baylor Facility Services then removed around 180 stickers across campus and was aware that others had been placed at various locations in Waco. According to Fogleman, the investigation is ongoing.
Texas has experienced some of the highest rates of extremism in the country, according to a 2023 report by the Anti-Defamation League, with a 60% increase in the distribution of white supremacist propaganda across the state from 2021 to 2022. The majority of this propaganda, the report states, is the work of groups like Patriot Front. Though they operate nationally, the group reports that Texas is among its top 10 states in the nation for activity.
Members hung a banner in Waco and placed stickers in San Marcos and Sugar Land on Jan. 7, just a day before the police report to BUPD was made. On Jan. 21, members held a seven-mile “ruck march” and handed out flyers in Dallas, according to Telegram, a messaging platform used by the organization. And in 2023, the group was present at the Donald Trump rally in Waco, The Texas Tribune reports.
The graduate student who spotted the sticker near Truett said she has heard anti-immigrant speech on campus in class and feels that creating a safe space on campus for minorities is important to students’ well-being. She said she fears this rhetoric becoming more and more common on campus and nationwide, especially as new policies and executive orders go into place to enable mass deportation.
“It absolutely scares me, because today it’s rhetoric, tomorrow it’s action,” she said.
As this group and others like it spread hate and extremism in cities and on college campuses across the country, Felipe Hinojosa, endowed chair in Latin America at Baylor, said Americans can no longer let this rhetoric go unchallenged.
“People of good conscience, Christians in particular, need to speak up,” Hinojosa said. “This is a time for us to let our voice be heard and to not to succumb to this hateful, hateful rhetoric that is demonizing people that are simply here to either escape violence, to escape political instability in their homelands and that are here to make a better life for themselves.”
Laura Johnson, associate vice president for equity and Title IX coordinator at Baylor, said the university has a hard-line policy against harassment and discrimination on the basis of legally-protected characteristics such as race, color, disability, national origin, ancestry, sex, age over 40, citizenship and more.
“We don’t condone treating anybody differently because of a protected characteristic, and we have a high standard in terms of what we expect of our campus community, meaning the standard we expect is even higher than what’s required by the law,” Johnson said. “We expect people to treat each other with kindness and dignity and aren’t willing to tolerate any less.”
Students who see more stickers, flyers or other materials advertising a hate group are advised to make a report to BUPD rather than to remove it themselves.
“I think it’s always best to report it, because if it were just to be removed, we wouldn’t have an opportunity to look for patterns of behavior or see if this were connected to anything else on campus,” Johnson said. “We want to utilize all the campus resources we have to address it and do what we can to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
