Anti-mask handouts tied to extreme right organization

When a Bucks County-based group distributed fliers last month at a Central Bucks School Board meeting inviting the community to a mask mandate protest, some were concerned.
The Proud American Patriots Network, which handed out the announcements, reportedly had ties to the militia group the Three Percenters. The group denied the association with the alt-right group, saying on its website at the time that it “renounces anything to do with the Three Percenter movement.”
The planned protest was canceled.
Now, accusations that the Proud American Patriots Network is linked to the Three Percenters have resurfaced in a report from the Digital Forensic Research Lab. The DFRLab describes its purpose as investigating and exposing “falsehoods and fake news, documenting human rights abuses, and building digital resilience worldwide.” It operates in six continents, according to its website.
Jared Holt, a researcher with DFRLab, wrote recently that the Three Percenters has been reorganizing its supporters into chapters “with the same ideology repackaged without the extremist branding.”

Holt’s report said, “One group based in the village of Jamison, Pennsylvania, discreetly laid blueprints for a new national Three Percenter entity under the veil of a proposed 501(c4) nonprofit political advocacy organization, seeming to bury the group’s extreme sentiments beneath the façade of a formal, government-registered nonprofit.”
Although the PAPN has said it’s not associated with the Three Percenters, its co-founder, T.J. Kosin told the Bucks County Courier Times he was a member until last summer. The news outlet’s story reported that Kosin said, he left the Three Percenters because it became too militant and less focused on community concerns.
Kosin also told the Bucks County Courier Times that five PAPN members attended former President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C., but none were involved with the ensuing riot at the Capitol.
On its website, the Proud American Patriots Network describes its mission to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity through the elections at all levels of government of candidates who will uphold the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

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