In many respects, the American Front is a typical racist skinhead group that espouses racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.  In the 1980s, its members sported the fashions and tattoos popular among racist skinheads and went to skinhead events.  However, its ideology was somewhat unusual, as the group’s first leader, Bob Heick, adopted so-called “Third Positionist” beliefs.  Third Positionism is a peculiar blend of right-wing extremism that rejects both capitalism and communism in favor of an ill-defined “third way.”  Third Positionism was always more prominent in Europe than in the United States; the American Front was one of few right-wing groups in the U.S. to adopt that position. 

Following the Third Positionist line, the American Front viewed capitalism as a “disease.”  It advocated overthrowing the government to rid society of capitalism, which was, in the words of one member, “a creed of exploitation and death,” which would eventually result in a “judeo-european ‘master’ class” and a “mixed-race, cultureless, brown-skinned slave class.”   As this phrase suggests, the American Front was strongly anti-Semitic.  In the words of one leader, “The Zionists and the Race that spawned them are a filthy, evil people the world would be better off without.”  The American Front supported the Islamic terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah because of their stance against Israel.

James Porazzo, an American Front member who took over leadership of the group from Heick in 1993 and moved the group’s headquarters to Harrison, Arkansas, vocally supported Third Positionism. Porrazzo described the American Front as a “Revolutionary organization whose aim is to secure National Freedom and Social Justice for the White people of North America. An important part of this goal is also making sure our people’s cultural and Racial identity is preserved. We see the creation of the National Revolutionary Nation on the soil of North America as the stepping stone to a New Dawn for mankind…American Front and I stand against race-mixing because we recognize it as a destabilizing force Culturally and physically.”

David Lynch, who had been an active racist skinhead since the mid-1980s and became involved with the American Front in the early 1990s, became the de facto leader of the group in 2002. Under Lynch, the American Front dropped the Third Positionist rhetoric and became a more typical racist skinhead group.  Lynch himself also eventually adopted Odinism, a Norse pagan religion favored by many white supremacists.