Roughly 100 white supremacists chanted their way through the nation’s capital on Saturday, in the latest display of cowardice to come from the white nationalist movement. Clad uniformly in khaki pants, blue shirts, blue winter coats, and branded khaki hats, Reuters reported that, with their faces covered, the craven members of SLPC-designated hate group Patriot Front strolled from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol before ending their hatred stroll at a Union Station Walmart.
The posse of poltroons was protected by Metropolitan Police and U.S. Capitol Police officers as they stomped through Washington, D.C., shouting vile nonsense like “Reclaim America!” and “Life, liberty, victory!” WUSA9 journalist Mike Valerio reported that the group stormed his neighborhood, also noting that they were not welcome. He posted video Saturday that showed the candy-assed wannabe Nazis did not go unnoticed by locals; several voices can be heard taunting the group as they carry their altered American flags.
“These people are neo-Nazis from Charlottesville who killed Heather Heyer. Do not let them into D.C.,” one counterprotester can be heard shouting, as another repeats “Murderers! Murderers!”
The counter-protesters are not wrong. The group, Patriot Front, as the Anti-Defamation League explains, was formed “by disaffected members of another white supremacist group, Vanguard America, in September 2017, in the wake of the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.” Our own in-house expert on such groups, David Neiwert, noted in 2018 that the group’s members “are explicit fascists who even use a fasces as their symbol. One of (their) fliers reads: ‘Making America Safe For Fascism Again.’” Their agenda beyond the simple embrace of fascism, Neiwert added, includes “(s)topping immigration, defending ‘western civilization,’ attacking LGBT rights, attacking nonwhite civil rights and hate-crime laws.”
The group, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “image-obsessed,” was founded by an internet-radicalized Dallas teenager, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, who was photographed just feet away from Heyer’s murderer, James Alex Fields, Jr., during the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Rousseau was, notably, the only PF member not to hide behind a mask and aviators. He’s the one with the ponytail and the megaphone in the video below.
According to the SPLC, Rousseau, who is now old enough to drink, rules his “rebranded” hate group with an iron fist.
Rousseau maintains strict control over PF. Members are barred from holding membership with any rival organization and must regularly engage in activism — such as posting flyers in their local communities — or risk expulsion. Members’ typically mundane local activism is then distributed across PF’s social media accounts alongside ostentatious quotes from PF’s manifesto.
It’s unclear why the group was protected by law enforcement; according to Reuters, Metropolitan Police found no record of a permit for the milksops’ march.
