When white nationalists met up in a small city in north Texas to participate in one more combat night time occasion, we set about finding the place it befell.
Billed because the third in a sequence courting again to 2022, the occasion was hosted by white nationalist group Patriot Entrance. Final yr, Bellingcat geolocated an occasion to a health club house within the Los Angeles metropolitan space.
On March 8, 2024, a Telegram channel related to US far-right extremist Robert Rundo posted eight images of the fight sports activities occasion (Bellingcat isn’t naming the outlet to keep away from amplification). The outlet promised {that a} promotional “documentary” movie of the occasion can be “coming quickly” and claimed the occasion befell in north Texas. As well as, the outlet claimed that Rundo’s far-right style model was accountable for organising the occasion.
Bellingcat solely wanted the very first photograph within the publish, and some minutes of internet looking out, to geolocate the occasion to a corridor out there for hire in Muenster, a city of fewer than 2,000 folks in north Texas.
Right here’s how we did it:
The primary trace was the American flag.
In a Telegram chat discussing the occasion, one individual commented on the presence of the massive US flag hung within the constructing. Somebody who claimed to have attended the occasion replied “it was a part of the venues [sic] ornament so it couldn’t actually be eliminated.” This led Bellingcat to imagine that different public images of the venue would probably have a big American flag hanging inside.
The second trace — and the one which led Bellingcat proper to the venue — was a small element on the desk within the entrance of the picture.
The letters ‘MVFD’ are seen on the desk (although the wrong way up), suggesting that the desk belongs to a volunteer fireplace division (i.e., ‘VFD: Volunteer Hearth Division’).
With this clue, Bellingcat then looked for ‘MVFD Texas’.
We discovered outcomes for a number of cities starting with the letter ‘M’ in north Texas whose fireplace departments used that abbreviation, and checked out there photographs from these cities to see if something resembled the venue seen within the images.
Scrolling outcomes from Muenster, Bellingcat observed a photograph of a similar-looking venue, together with the same ceiling, home windows and two doorways at one finish.
Subsequent, we looked for “corridor Muenster Texas” and located extra images of a venue — Fuhrmann Corridor on the Heritage Park Occasions Heart, a venue out there to the general public to hire.
We have been capable of match the the massive American flag, the ceiling, the air conditioners and the sunshine fixtures and doorways to the pictures posted in Telegram.
Thus, Bellingcat was capable of find the Patriot Entrance occasion to the Fuhrmann Corridor situated an hour’s drive from the Dallas-Fort Price Metroplex.
Bellingcat contacted the Heritage Park Occasions Heart and requested them whether or not they have been conscious that that they had rented their amenities to representatives of a far-right community. We had not acquired a response at time of publication.
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