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A federal security contractor that has been awarded millions of dollars by the Department of Agriculture hired a prominent white nationalist leader to work on its patrols last year.
Ian Michael Elliott, a longstanding senior figure in the neofascist group Patriot Front, was part of “crisis relief missions” undertaken on the US west coast by Knight Division Tactical, according to an image shared on LinkedIn in September by one of the company’s executives.
Elliott is shown posing alongside other people as he helps hold up a flag with the contractor’s logo on it. “Stellar company, sharp agents, quality work!” he would later write, in a five-star review posted on Knight Division Tactical’s Google Maps page.
Knight Division Tactical did not respond to multiple requests for comment, though the company executive deleted his LinkedIn post showing Elliott after the Guardian reached out.
Elliott has long been a senior figure in Patriot Front, which researchers have identified as responsible for producing the majority of white supremacist propaganda in the US.
The group, which markets itself to disillusioned white men, has been likened to a “white nationalist pyramid scheme”. In 2023, five of its members were convicted over a plot to start a riot at a gay pride event.
Patriot Front is perhaps best known for organizing militaristic white nationalist marches through US cities, with nearly all of the participants hiding their faces. After a March in Louisville, Kentucky, last year, Courier Journal columnist Joseph Gerth called them “masked cowards” who “despise anyone who believes in an inclusive society”.
Earlier this month, Patriot Front members were present at the National Mall in Washington DC during the annual anti-abortion March for Life, where JD Vance spoke. Video posted by the group on Telegram shows that Elliott, who frequently serves as the bodyguard of the Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau, was among them.
Last year, Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 revealed that Elliott is one of the leaders of efforts by Patriot Front to develop a 122-acre (49-hectare) compound near Tellico Plains, Tennessee, where white nationalists receive combat training in preparation for what they believe is a coming race war.
“They’re kind of an entry portal, a place that seeks to recruit young, disillusioned white men who are interested in mixed martial arts, interested in fighting, interested in the idea of saving western civilization,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the program on extremism at George Washington University who studies US white supremacist movements.
He added that Patriot Front is one of several groups that has contributed to “the mainstreaming of fringe concepts that have helped radicalize young men, like the ‘great replacement’ theory, something now echoed by figures close to the White House like Stephen Miller and Elon Musk”.
Elliott also leads Patria Gloria, a white nationalist grappling team affiliated with Patriot Front, and the neo-Nazi active clubs movement – Telegram posts show that Patria Gloria invited several active clubs to participate in training at the Tellico Plains compound last spring.
Experts have warned that active clubs make up a decentralized network of combat-ready white nationalist cells, and the Southern Poverty Law Center reported last year that Patriot Front secretly controls about a dozen of them; video posted on Patria Gloria’s Telegram channel shows that Elliott represented Patriot Front at a tournament hosted by the Southern California Active Club last year.
Recently, a Russian street fighting promoter, whose ties to US white nationalists and active clubs the Guardian revealed last October, posted to Instagram that Elliott is joining its stable of fighters under the alias Norman.
Images posted on Telegram show Elliott training fellow white nationalists at Patriot Front’s Tennessee compound. CNN reported last month that the building where Elliott held the training has been put up for sale, though Patriot Front intends to move forward with its plans to build out a large compound on surrounding land.
Elliott did not reply to a request for comment via Telegram. The app shows a message sent to his account was viewed.
How a prominent white supremacist leader came to work for a federal security contractor is unclear.
“It’s not that surprising that there are white supremacists getting hired by government contractors,” said Lewis. “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.’”
State records show that, in 2023, the company was incorporated in Wyoming, a popular location for business registrations because there is no state income tax. It subsequently established branches in several other states and, according to its website, maintains offices in College Station, Texas.
Knight Division Tactical recruits heavily on social media, especially Instagram, where it has amassed 60,000 followers and frequently shares stylized memes promising potential recruits lucrative assignments in exotic locales.
For example, the company has in recent months claimed to have upcoming “missions” in Mongolia and Nigeria and has encouraged people in France and Switzerland to apply for work, advertising that successful applicants can earn up to $1,000 a day.
Meanwhile, federal procurement records show the company’s sole government contracting activity in the US has been providing unarmed security and patrol services for the US Forest Service, the subagency of the Department of Agriculture that oversees the country’s national forests and grasslands.
Knight Division Tactical was awarded $1.8m in contracts by the agency in the 2024 fiscal year and $2.1m in 2025.
Among them were two contracts around the time that one of the company’s executives posted the image of Elliott as part of its crew on LinkedIn.
The first, valued at $350,275.48, was for security services in Eureka, California, from 17 July to 8 August 2025. The second, valued at $681.230.50, was also for security services in the area from 28 August to 16 October.
In videos posted on Knight Division Tactical’s social media pages, co-founder and chief executive officer Michael Schulz has stated the company performs background checks on applicants early in the recruitment process. (Elliott’s involvement with Patriot Front and other white nationalist groups can be uncovered with a basic Google search.)
“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,” said a spokesperson for the agency in a statement.
In addition to heavily recruiting online, Knight Division Tactical and its leadership also frequently post about conservative social issues and their professed Orthodox Christian faith. “We are elite Private Security Contractors,” wrote Schulz in a 2024 Facebook post. “We uphold the highest order of Christian virtues.”
The company’s logo is a double-headed eagle, one of the most prominent Orthodox symbols dating to the Byzantine empire. In a 2024 Instagram post, Schulz said the company encourages contractors to participate in prayer and scripture studies together.
In November, co-founder and chief operating officer Matthew McCalla shared a social media post extolling historical Orthodox leaders who oversaw the killing of Muslim combatants in wartime.
In addition, Schulz is listed on incorporation records as the director of a traditionalist men’s Christian organization called the Guild of Gentlemen that claims to “restore European civilization and the cultures within it”.
On its website, the guild blames feminism for the “destruction of women” and refers to the concepts of “racism” and “transgenderism” as “evil Marxist talking points”.
The site says the group held a conference in Dallas in 2024 and that Knight Division Tactical provided security for the event.
In an August 2025 podcast interview, Schulz and McCalla also claimed their company was developing a proprietary “crisis prediction and threat prediction technology” that can anticipate forest fires, hurricanes and terrorist attacks using unspecified data and information models.
Earlier this month, the company said on Instagram that it was “launching a pre-cursor to a major new technology”. For the time being, it added, that precursor was a server on the Discord app that costs $49.99 per month.
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