Jacksonites scraping white nationalist propaganda off Teton County street signs

Teton County leaders condemn hate group's blitz, refuse intimidation.

JACKSON — Iván Jiménez first noticed the flyer April 23 as he left Whole Foods.

Pasted onto a utility box near the Tesla chargers, the decal wasn’t standard fare for the Jackson Hole community. Stickers stuck to infrastructure here typically praise the library, poke fun at ski culture, and put public officials on blast.

Instead, the flyer was emblazoned in red, white and blue with an image of a masked man carrying what appeared to be a riot shield. “For the nation against the state,” it read.

At the bottom, it had a URL for Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization known for peppering communities with propaganda masked with Americana aesthetics, as well as for draping racist banners over highways, showing up in masks for “flash marches,” and protesting outside LGBTQ gatherings.

Finding the sticker was “disheartening, but not surprising,” Jiménez said. He quickly started working to get it taken down, by talking to Whole Foods and Lower Valley Energy, which owns the box. It was gone by the end of the day.

“News flash: People who have and share the ideologies of Nazis are still around,” Jiménez told the News&Guide Monday. “These forces will continue to rise up unless we actively take steps to combat them when needed.”

Jiménez has been doing exactly that, in his own way. Inspired by a Cheyenne woman who made headlines by removing similar propaganda in 2024, he bought a paint scraper and started removing similar stickers he found around town.

The flyer at Whole Foods was only one piece of Patriot Front propaganda that’s been identified in recent weeks. Jiménez posted about the sticker on social media, asking his friends if they’d seen similar iconography elsewhere in Jackson. The answer was, “Yes.”

In the past week, Jiménez and his connections have documented at least 20 other stickers across Teton County in locations ranging from Jackson Lake Dam to the welcome sign at Blacktail Butte, to gas pumps, stop signs and light posts throughout downtown Jackson.

How old the stickers are is unclear.

The first report Jiménez received was from April 20, when someone found a sticker at Jackson Lake Dam. Patriot Front’s social media, meanwhile, says that its members placed stickers and other posters in Jackson Hole in posts dated Sept. 27 and 28.

Teton County leaders condemned the agitprop blitz.

“First and foremost, this is not reflective of our community,” Jackson Mayor Arne Jorgensen said. “I have no patience for the kind of hatred and violence that these groups represent.”

Jorgensen said the town will do everything it can to investigate and follow up on the stickering. While the mayor emphasized that he respects people’s rights to free speech, he said there are limits and argued that the people posting these stickers are defacing public property and increasing costs to the public.

The News&Guide was not able to find a way to contact the Patriot Front before press time Tuesday.

Coded rhetoric

Extremism researchers weren’t surprised to see Patriot Front pamphlets pop up in Jackson Hole.

One of Patriot Front’s Telegram app channels highlights members distributing propaganda in Cheyenne, Rock Springs and Green River. In 2023, posts on that channel indicated that the group’s Wyoming members were the seventh most active in the nation, tied with a smaller state in the northeast: Connecticut.

Patriot Front is responsible for the bulk of America’s white nationalist propaganda. Members are not only required to distribute a certain amount of it every month, but also to pay for it themselves, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that tracks antisemitism and other hate speech.

But whether propagandist efforts always lead to in-person demonstrations is murky, said Freddy Cruz, who monitors online extremism for the Western States Center, a nonprofit that counters white nationalism.

There are a couple of factors that come into play, Cruz said, including how the community responds.

“Is there a ton of pushback that’s happening from the local community?” Cruz said. “Or is there very little pushback, so they feel a little more emboldened?”

Some white supremacist organizations, like the Active Club, are focused on training adherents for upcoming “race wars” and explicitly display Nazi iconography, said Luke Baumgartner, a fellow for George Washington University’s program on extremism.

Patriot Front’s messaging, meanwhile, is more tactical and coded.

The group started in 2017 after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia when another white supremacist group, Vanguard America, splintered.

At the rally, a Vanguard-aligned demonstrator drove into a crowd, famously killing one person and injuring dozens more. Thomas Rousseau, who had ousted Vanguard’s previous leader before the rally, took control of the organization and rebranded it as “Patriot Front.” He tried to distance the organization from the highly publicized rally, where demonstrators had displayed swastikas and chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

Patriot Front “was one of several hate groups that sought to recast itself as mainstream, patriotic Americans by dressing up their propaganda and rhetoric in Americana,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that monitors hate groups and promotes Americans’ civil rights.

Now the organization’s imagery is steeped in American imagery.

Members fly the Betsy Ross flag, and its propaganda is almost always cast in red, white and blue hues. But the Patriot Front sees America as a country “conquered” by Europeans exclusively for people of European descent, i.e., white people, and not for other citizens like LGBTQ people and African Americans. Its manifesto states Black Americans are “not American.”

“They kind of cloak themselves in this nostalgic Americana,” Baumgartner said. “That’s an attempt to appeal to the ‘normies’ that might not look too much further into them.

“But if you look deeper into who they are, what they stand for, and what a lot of their rhetoric is like, you’ll find that it is essentially just a bunch of neo-Nazis dressed up in American flags,” he said.

In 2017, Patriot Front members hung a sign over a Texas highway telling Black people to “Take a knee, back in Africa.” They protested LGBTQ pride events in Cour D’Alene, Idaho. In Jackson, one sticker says “No Zionists in government. We serve one nation.” Another says “American spirit, European blood.”

Jackson responds

Jacksonites were dismayed to see the hate group’s material surface in Teton County.

“There is definitely work to be done for us as a community to recognize it for what it is, as both a recruitment tool and an intimidation tactic,” said Teton County Commissioner Natalia D. Macker. “That’s not who we are as a community. And I think we have to refuse to be intimidated” by it.

White nationalist stickers

While some stickers may be months old, Jiménez recently participated in a training with the Western States Center that helped him recognize what he was seeing on the utility box near Whole Foods.

When Jiménez found the flyer, he reported it to the Jackson Police Department to establish an administrative record. Afterward, Lt. Russ Ruschill told the News&Guide that his department has heard about the Patriot Front, primarily through its fliers, but has had no contact with its members.

Teton County Sheriff Matt Carr and Sgt. John Faicco said they haven’t heard much about the group locally until now.

Carr said investigating people for placing fliers on infrastructure would be a challenge. There are stickers all over Jackson Hole, many of which are celebrated by the community.

“We’re pretty sticker rich,” he said.

Policing what people say in person is also difficult.

In the 2010s, the Jackson Police Department arrested an anti-abortion protester, who in turn claimed the officers violated his first amendment rights. The case settled. In the past five years, Patriot Front has also won a similar First Amendment lawsuit in Idaho.

“In an area where they start to become more active, they’ll start with the stickers or start with the flyers, and then they will eventually move into what they call ‘flash marches,’” Baumgartner said. “But what they do is, by the book, legal both under First Amendment considerations, and under local and city ordinances.”

Carr, however, said it’s still worth “keeping an eye” on groups like Patriot Front.

“We want to be aware of those groups,” he said. “If they come and have a presence, we would ensure it would be peaceful in nature.”

Jiménez, for his part, has been scraping the stickers — or at least the Patriot Front URLs — off of street signs across Jackson Hole. After he put out the call on social media, other community members have followed suit. By the time he reached some reported signs, the stickers had already been partially or completely scratched off them.

Today, many people feel despair about being unable to take on larger national issues, Jiménez said.

“But anyone can carry a paint scraper,” he said. “It’s something that’s incredibly simple but incredibly powerful and can signal to our neighbors — who share marginalized identities, who are not white, who are not straight, who are not men — that we are not standing for these ideologies.”

This story was published on April 30, 2025.