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Residents of downtown Portland found a handful of Neo-Nazi recruitment flyers littering their neighborhood last night.
As first reported by Portland State Vanguard, Allen Mottard, a resident of the Park Plaza Apartments near Southwest Park Avenue and College Street, was walking his dog at around 11 pm Saturday when he discovered propaganda from a group called "Patriot Front."
The group is a brand-new white supremacist organization started after a "Unite the Right" rally that drew white supremacists to Charlottesville, Va. in August.
"My initial reaction was confusion and shock," Mottard writes in an email. "Am I really seeing Nazi propaganda outside my home?"
The flyers were found on car windshields and park benches less than a block from Portland State University, suggesting they were intended to recruit college students.
The anti-Marxist slogan "Not Here Not Ever" adorns the flyer, along with a bald eagle capturing a hammer and sickle in its claws.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 18-year-old Texan Thomas Rousseau founded Patriot Front as a more activism-focused off-shoot of the Neo-Nazi group Vanguard America. Rousseau was photographed at the Charlottesville rally marching alongside fellow Vanguard America member James Alex Fields.
Fields drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters later that day, allegedly killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. He has since been charged with first-degree murder.
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Patriot Front "a blend of traditional white-supremacist ideology, alt-right sensibilities and activism, and militia-style armed insurrection." The group was allegedly founded after infighting arose in Vanguard America following Fields' crime.
Though Rousseau and Fields wore identical uniforms at the rally, the white supremacist group has since denied any affiliation with Fields.
The group's Twitter feed recently posted some of its anti-immigrant marchers in Southern California holding a banner that read "Deport them all. America is our birthright."
White supremacy scholar Randall Blazak says the group's recruitment flyers have been a recent topic of conversation at Oregon Coalition Against Hate meetings.
He says similar flyers have popped up at Portland Community College and Clark College in Vancouver, Wash.
"It's really nothing new," says Blazak. "There's always been an effort to recruit college students in an attempt to legitimize the movement as attracting 'quality' white people instead of stereotypical rednecks. It's like spam."
Park Plaza Apartments sits adjacent to the Portland State University campus. Other flyers were recently sighted in Seattle and Tacoma, Wa.
Other white supremacists, including skinheads and Identity Evropa members led by ex-recruiter Jake Von Ott, have marched in Portland streets all year. Von Ott said he's no longer affiliated with the alt-right and knows nothing about the new group.
Patriot Front did not immediately respond for a request for comment.
Mottard used one of the flyers to pick up dog shit and shredded the other two after showing his neighbor, Jeremy Alva.
"Personally, being a gay man of color in Portland, I'm deeply offended by the attempts to spread this ideology," says Alva. "Portland's deeply racist history deserves to stay in the past where it belongs."