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Several readers reached out to the Outpost this morning with a heads-up about this news story in The Guardian, which concerns a federal security contractor that hired a prominent neofascist leader to work on its security patrols last year.

The white nationalist in question is a man named Ian Michael Elliott. He’s a senior figure with Patriot Front, one of the most prominent white nationalist hate groups in the country. The company that hired him, Knight Division Tactical, has been awarded millions of dollars in security contracts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Federal records show that two of those contracts, worth a combined $1,031,506, were processed through the USDA’s Eureka office, which hired Knight Division Tactical to provide security and patrol services during last year’s Dillon and Orleans Complex wildfires in Six Rivers National Forest. 

A federal spokesperson pleaded ignorance, telling The Guardian, “Companies contracted by the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service manage their own hiring, background checks and oversight of personnel, independent of the agency.”

But scholars who study white supremacy aren’t surprised. Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the program on extremism at George Washington University, told The Guardian, “When officials are flooding the zone with the most racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, antisemitic and Islamophobic messages ⁠— take your pick ⁠—⁠ it’s going to embolden groups like Patriot Front. It’s going to tell them: ‘You have an ally in the White House, you have an ally in the Department of Justice.’”

Click on over to The Guardian to read more about Elliott, Patriot Front and their connections to the federal government.