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The Great Descent: #PatriotFront, The New Best Thing On The Internet

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By on The Insider

If you’re looking for a rabbit hole this weekend – one that might just restore a little of your faith in humanity – then we highly recommend going to Twitter and searching on the hashtag #PatriotFront. Money back if you’re disappointed.

For the uninitiated, the Patriot Front is a neo-fascist group in America that formed after the ‘Unite the Right’ Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017… a rally which led to even more splintering of white supremacists groups around the United States.

The Patriot Front boasts about 200 members, but what they lack in numbers they make up for in enthusiasm, as a series of recently leaked training videos shows. Granted, they have a certain Monty Python-Holy Grail-esque quality about them, but the shields are very nicely painted.

The training for the ‘Great Showdown’ appears to have had limited success, as this video shows them ‘losing the line’ and fleeing wildly from a small group of unarmed men, reportedly at a march in Philadelphia in July. Seinfeld fans will note the name of the truck rental company: these boys, it seems, are not ‘Penske material’.

As you can imagine, it’s also led to countless parodies: the hashtag will give you plenty of variety, but this one, focussing on the marching practice – no seriously, they had marching practice – is set to Benny Hill music, so, you know… instant front runner.

It’s probably defeated by this one though, described by one user as the “mating ritual of the Hamadryas baboon”.

Unfortunately, the marching practice didn’t appear to help very much either, as the video below demonstrates. If any one of the 50 or so marchers is in step with anyone else at any given time, it’s purely coincidental. That potentially had something to do with the drummer, who got a little, well, creative.

This video is for those among us who have actual marching experience. The primary reason marching bands have a Drum Major up the front is so that everyone – particularly those at the back – know what everyone else is doing. Like getting ready to stop at intersections. Otherwise, this happens….

And here’s some more marching practice… but with a twist. Note the encouraging ‘awesome’ from the trainer at the end… ‘awesome’ being a relative term that you might use to encourage the ‘less sharp’ among us who struggle with their lefts and rights.

You can’t make this shit up. This training video, which focussed on how to do a body search, is apparently in the running for Best Musical Score at the next Academy Awards.

And this parody is up for Best Digital Manipulation… focus in on the protest sign.

Arguably the greatest response is from Twitterer Vinny Thomas, who seeks to describe the fashion on display at the rally. It includes one of the greatest phrases ever uttered in the history of human speech: “Now the aesthetic we’re going for is ‘Ku Klux Klan, Bitch’, but it’s at Best Buy.”

The Patriot Front is not to be confused with the United Patriots Front, an Australian group headed by former jailbird, burglar and steroids fiend Blair Cottrell, which folded in 2019 after their Facebook page was deleted.

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Launched in 2004, New Matilda is one of Australia's oldest online independent publications. It's focus is on investigative journalism and analysis, with occasional smart arsery thrown in for reasons of sanity. New Matilda is owned and edited by Walkley Award and Human Rights Award winning journalist Chris Graham.

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