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Emily Wood considers herself news savvy. She stays on top of current events and is an active member of the Bucks County subreddit.
Yet on her walk to the local library, the 34-year-old Quakertown resident did not recognize the white nationalist recruitment poster stapled to a telephone pole.
Quakertown is the latest Bucks County borough to receive recruitment flyers from Patriot Front, one of the country’s most active white nationalist hate groups, drawing concern from residents and local advocates.
Wood saw the poster April 22 and sent a photo to her husband, asking if he thought the sign was pro-labor or anti-immigrant. He texted her back that she needed to take the flyer down—that it belonged to a neo-Nazi group.
“I actually couldn’t tell fully what it was,” Wood said. “I had heard of them, but I didn’t fully put it together, and then when he sent that back, I realized it was a neo-Nazi thing.”
Recruiting in the suburbs
Patriot Front formed after splintering from the hate group Vanguard America following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
To build up the organization’s ranks, Patriot Front uses social media expertise to spread its propaganda, taking advantage of a range of online platforms. Through the use of non-mainstream sites — Telegram, Gab and Odysee — Patriot Front spreads video packages of their demonstrations, targeting a younger audience.
INTERVIEW: Journalist Jordan Green on Why the Neo-Nazi Movement Is an Escalating Threat to US Democracy
Recruitment posters, like the one found in Quakertown, include a link to the organization’s website where potential members can fill out an application.
According to data from the Southern Poverty Law Center, collected through self-reported instances of hate group flyering since 2018, Patriot Front put up one poster in 2023 and zero in 2024 across Bucks County. In 2025, that number jumped to three.
The Quakertown Police Department did not respond to the Beacon’s request for comment.
Early intervention
The uptick in recruitment has not gone unnoticed. Advocates in Bucks County said they have seen increased efforts by extremist groups to reach young people in recent years.
Barbara Simmons is the Executive Director of The Peace Center, a Langhorne-based non-profit focused on preventing violence and fostering inclusive communities. She explained that kids who fall prey to groups like Patriot Front are often in search of a sense of belonging, and ultimately find a community with extremists.
Recently, a guidance counselor reached out to The Peace Center, concerned that a 13-year-old was expressing white supremacist ideology. What Simmons and the team found was not a hateful child, just one looking for a connection.
“We found out just how lonely he was,” Simmons said. “No one ever said ‘how are you doing.’”
The boy found a community online that began to indoctrinate him with hateful ideologies. The team worked with the child so he could understand how harmful these stereotypes are, while at the same time making sure not to place blame on the teenager.
READ: Bucks County’s Peace Center Isn’t Going Anywhere
“This kid was lonely,” Simmons said. “You [multiply] that by a couple thousand kids that don’t have the attention that they need, this can be the outcome of that.”
Simmons spoke about a similar flyer spotted in Bristol that warned borough members “immigrants are here to replace us.” She said the key to combatting white supremacist rhetoric and conspiracy theories like this is community awareness.
“The more informed the community is, the more they can step in and do something about it,” said Simmons, who recently led a town hall to educate and help residents combat extremism in their communities.
Reporting these activities is another important step to solving this issue. Simmons records each case in the center’s database, but also recommends notifying law enforcement.
Research has documented that 40 to 50% of all hate crimes are not reported to the police.
“What happens is people ignore it,” Simmons said. “It’s when we ignore it the problem can get bigger.”
Hidden in plain sight
In the mid-2010s, white supremacy went through a sort of rebranding, according to Steven Windisch, Director of the Terrorism Research Center at University of Arkansas.
He explained that David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, has been telling people to avoid looking like a stereotypical white supremacist. Instead of getting swastika tattoos, become a lawyer, a doctor or a police officer.
Become a politician to “change the system from the inside.”
“His whole thing is become a white collar supremacist,” Windisch said. “Hide in plain sight.”
Patriot Front has followed this trend, sanitizing their group’s image and avoiding outright neo-Nazi or racist propaganda. Instead, it the group has opted for patriotic slogans like the one found on the recruitment poster in Quakertown: “Defend American Labor.”
READ: Active Clubs Are White Supremacy’s New, Dangerous Frontier
The organization has also implemented military training and clean living, promoting activities like combat sport clubs known as “Active Clubs” that encourage a healthier lifestyle.
“Keep your body clean because your body is a vessel—it’s the vessel for the white race,” Windisch said.
White supremacist groups like Patriot Front use this idea of discipline and bodily purity to prey on young white men who feel disenfranchised and isolated. Windisch explained that they feel they have been discriminated against because they are white.
“It’s not trying to brainwash them, it’s trying to validate them,” Windisch said. “You are a victim and what you’re feeling is right and you’re not making this up in your head, so why don’t you come and join us and you can see the truth?”
Too close to home
A marketing professional, Wood said she understands why a white nationalist group like Patriot Front would recruit in her town. Appealing to people who have strong feelings about American manufacturing makes sense to her in a borough where 34% of workers are blue-collar, 7% higher than the national average.
In the past three presidential elections, Trump has won the Quakertown borough each time. Throughout his second term, Trump has elevated supremacist viewpoints, and Patriot Front’s slogan — “Reclaim America” — has been seen in the crowd at one of the president’s rallies.
The current administration has given these organizations “a pretty obvious permission slip” for these kinds of activities, said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor at American University who researches how extremist groups recruit and radicalize their audiences.
“White nationalist groups are definitely more emboldened in the last several years and you have seen these kind of recruitment drives elsewhere around the country,” Braddock said.
Wood wants to have good relationships with her neighbors, but support of the current administration makes it “complicated.”
“It completely makes sense that they would pick Quakertown,” Wood said. “But it’s weird to see Nazi propaganda hanging up in your town.”
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