Patriot Front Showed Up In DC To Make Fools Of Themselves. Again.
And Dom was there!
On the afternoon of Friday, January 23, I found myself sitting at a table full of signs on the National Mall surrounded by obnoxious Bible thumpers demanding an end to all abortions. The annual March for Life was gearing up to shuffle through the streets of DC bearing crosses and garish photos of corpses. Not content with ending federal laws protecting abortion access, this lot wanted Uncle Sam to go even further than turning a blind eye to the prosecutions of patients and doctors: they wanted federal laws to ban all abortion.
The large crowd was singing joyfully. Some danced. Some prayed. Some belted overly complicated chants the crowd struggled to repeat.
There were elderly nuns and clergy in fancy robes. Thirty-one flavors of deep-pocketed dominionists hoping to turn the US into one convoluted theocracy. Teenagers from blink-and-you’ll-miss-it towns off highway exits in the Midwest NeitherWorld frolicking around large piles of horse shit. Some carried PVC banners, others had hastily scribbled signs on poster board. Others passed out self-published books on how we are living in either The End Times, The New Beginning, The Second Coming, and so on, which argue that this is all part of the great cosmic plan orchestrated by the great invisible, infallible, interdimensional and omnipresent space man in the sky.
I could recognize a number of faces in the crowd. Fr. Calvin Robinson was there. A far-right British Brexiteer, he was booted from his congregation in Michigan last year over an alleged Nazi salute. He was greeting supporters and praying with them, and he did not like having his photo taken.
Vice President JD Vance had just finished a speech that I couldn’t hear. I didn’t bother to listen to his speech last year either. I’m not following their pompous march to the Capitol building.
It’s not why I was there.
I was there for actual fascists. (OK, other actual fascists. A specific group of fascists within this larger group of fascists.)
For the last several years, Patriot Front, a group of goofy, new age American fascists with ties to the neo-Nazi movement have shown up to lurk on the outskirts of the M4L. They usually just stand around trying to look simultaneously stoic and spooky. A few of their members will wander around in an attempt to convince people to join or financially support their paramilitary white boy’s club with flyers full of overt rhetoric lifted from other white nationalist movements.
Occasionally, they’ll bark at people calling them neo-Nazis, and attempt to pick a fight. Eventually, they retreat to the Metro for a train out to the far suburbs.
I was taking photos when one of them attempted to start a fight with me. I had been trying to get close-up shots with natural framing, so I was walking between their sloppy ranks and shoving my lens just below their faces. The group of a few dozen boys was just standing there, attempting to stand at something that resembled a military parade rest.
Like any group of weirdos with a costume fetish, they demand to be taken seriously.
“That’s it,” a masked voice said. “You’ve taken enough pictures.” He put his hand in front of my lens. “You’re too close to my men.”
“’Your men?’” I said with a mocking scoff.
“Yeah, my men!” He snapped. He swiped at my camera and shoved me.
I’ve covered political and extremist actions for over two decades. I’ve been shot at with lethal and non-lethal weapons. I’ve had fully loaded large and small caliber weapons pointed in my face with the safety off. I’ve been beaten up by groups on the right, and the left. I’ve been kettled, detained, spat on and mugged by crooked cops in more cities than most people will ever see in their lifetime. But I don’t take shit from Nazis, let alone boys no bigger than I am who are too chickenshit to show their faces in public.
I lowered my camera, looked him directly in the eyes and said, “Don’t tell me where I can take photos. We’re on the National Mall. I have a First Amendment right to take photos wherever the fuck I want.”
He called me a “kike” and “a faggot.” I told him to “suck my fucking dick,” and started taking his picture.
After several hours of standing around as protesters played circus music through a megaphone, Thomas Rousseau, the group’s short, self-proclaimed leader in a oversized cowboy hat, ordered his “men” to march back to their van.
They marched with less coordination than a high school JROTC color guard at a pee-wee football game. Some of them tripped on loose shoelaces, attempting to keep step with one another while balancing their upside down American flags in the blustery wind.
When they reached their double-parked U-Haul van at the corner of 14th and Jefferson, they hastily rolled up their flags and vinyl banners and threw them in the back. Rousseau then ordered them to “march” to the Metro station.
Once at the Metro station, one of them was detained for attempting to skip through a turnstile. A Metro Special Police officer approached the boy and informed him that he hadn’t paid the fare — a crime. Most of the group was already down on the train platform.
Various police forces and members of the National Guard, which is still on deployment throughout DC, stood by as the Special Police officer ID-ed the kid and informed him that he was not only being fined, but he’d still have to pay the fare. Rousseau and several other members of Patriot Front unmasked and began waving around a Metro SmarTrip fare card, apologizing and saying they could pay his fare. A few moments later, Rousseau informed the police and Guard that “his men” would be coming back up to the station mezzanine as they had gotten on the wrong side of the train platform.
One police officer did not find this as amusing as several other people did.
So they all filed up the escalator, walked around the station, and then filed back down another escalator to the platform toward suburban Largo, Virginia.
An elderly man who was sitting on a bench when they started massing around him got up and started walking to the far end of the platform. He walked up to me and and whispered, “Who the hell are these guys?”
I gestured for him to walk a little further and whispered back that it was Patriot Front, a white nationalist group with ties to neo-Nazis.
He looked appalled and asked me to do him a favor: “Take my picture while I say, ‘Fuck these assholes.’”
So I did.
Seig fail!
I love that last guy! FUCK those assholes.