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In late June 2021, numerous reports circulated claiming a statue of George Floyd in New York City was vandalized and spray-painted with a white nationalist slogan less than a week after the monument was installed to commemorate Juneteenth. The claim was true. First, the 6-foot statue to memorialize the 46-year-old Black man who was killed by Minneapolis police in 2020 was unveiled on June 19 — the anniversary of one of the final acts of emancipation of slaves in the U.S. Then, on the morning of June 24, the wooden monument was found covered in black spray paint, including an inscription in white spray paint reading, PATRIOTFRONT.US, according to visual evidence from the scene on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and the New York City's police department (NYPD). The PATRIOTFRONT.US label represents a group of white nationalists that was founded in 2017 by Thomas Rousseau, the same person who led a Neo-Nazi group called Vanguard America, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors far-right extremism. SPLC describes Patriot Front as an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism.
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