Images of khaki-clad men marching with American flags in Washington, D.C., over the weekend sparked outrage and raised questions over the white supremacist group believed to be behind the demonstration.
Patriot Front, a fascist and racist group founded in 2017, reportedly orchestrated the march on the National Mall as another in a string of high-profile demonstrations.
The group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, spoke during the march, which attracted more than 100 people, and he said the demonstration was intended to “show our strength,” the Daily Beast reported.
Pictures showed participants wearing white face masks and sunglasses, obscuring their identities, and sporting navy blue polo shirts and khakis. Social media users reported the group chanted “reclaim America” during the march, and pictures show some of the demonstrators carrying banners emblazoned with the phrase.
The Patriot Front did not respond to a request for confirmation that it organized the event.
The group emerged from another white supremacist organization, Vanguard America, in the aftermath of the nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks extremism. Counterprotester Heather Heyer was killed by a supporter of Vanguard America during the chaos, and Rousseau “rehabilitated” the image of that group by spinning off its platform into a different organization, according to the SPLC.
In a manifesto on its website, Patriot Front lamented the “debasement of our history” and called for the denial of citizenship to all foreigners, even those born in the United States.
“Membership within the American nation is inherited through blood, not ink,” the group wrote in its manifesto.
Patriot Front has made waves with other public demonstrations in the past.
As many as 200 supporters of the racist group marched through Philadelphia on the Fourth of July weekend this year, deploying chants of “reclaim America.”
Participants in the Philadelphia march were not from the area, according to local news reports, and many had traveled in from the group’s base in Texas.
Patriot Front claimed credit for the march in Philadelphia several days later on its website. As of Monday evening, the group had not done so for the latest Washington, D.C., event.
“Flash” events and torch-wielding are hallmarks of Patriot Front’s activism, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The march on Saturday raised a measure of skepticism and confusion among some on social media, given its proximity to a recent episode that was later exposed as a hoax.
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In late October, images of men in khakis and baseball caps, similar to the dress of this weekend’s demonstrators, went viral after the supposedly white supremacist group toted tiki torches and posed in front of then-candidate Glenn Youngkin’s campaign bus as he held an event in Charlottesville for his Republican gubernatorial bid.
Social media users connected the photographs of the alleged protesters to people associated with the state’s Democratic Party, and the Lincoln Project later took credit for staging the event in a widely criticized attempt to connect Youngkin to the violence that had unfolded in Charlottesville.
