Patriot Front: The masked white supremacists who marched through Washington on July 4
The group sees immigration and diversity as threats to their vision of the US. Their march produced a lasting image: a young Black woman surrounded by racists
The Fourth of July, marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, left behind this Saturday images of patriotic celebration, scenes of a suffocating heatwave, a false alarm over an electrical storm and plenty of Donald Trump. It also produced a disturbing photograph from Reuters. In it, a young Black woman can be seen in a Washington Metro carriage, surrounded by a dozen masked racists.
They belong to a white supremacist militia called Patriot Front, which gathered in the U.S. capital on Independence Day and marched through its streets shouting: “Reclaim America.” They carried Stars and Stripes flags — some of them flown upside down — as well as Confederate banners, nostalgic for the slaveholding era that preceded the Civil War.
The Reuters image evokes a more recent past: the Jim Crow era. And that young woman sitting on public transport calls to mind Rosa Parks, the civil rights heroine who refused to give up her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
Patriot Front is a white supremacist group based in Texas. It emerged in 2017 from a split within a neo-Nazi organization called Vanguard America. The group says it is loyal to the “American nation” and advocates creating a new state that defends “the interests of its founders.” At Saturday’s march, the roughly 400 masked participants wore caps bearing 13 white stars, representing the 13 colonies that approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, severing ties with the British Crown. Their emblem is a symbol of Roman origin later appropriated by early-20th-century Italian fascism.
The Center for the Study of Extremism at George Washington University, based in the capital, describes it as “a white nationalist and fascist organization that promotes the idea of a homogenous, white ethnostate in the United States. The group advocates for the preservation of white European culture, viewing multiculturalism, immigration, and diversity as existential threats to its vision of America.”
Patriot Front also embraces the “great replacement” conspiracy theory — a theory coined by the French fascist novelist Renaud Camus which claims there is a plot to replace the white population with compliant immigrants to advance left-wing interests.
The leader of Patriot Front is a Texan named Thomas Rousseau, who spoke in Washington on Saturday and played a prominent role in the Charlottesville, Virginia, unrest in the summer of 2017, when far-right groups staged a series of rallies to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Those demonstrations, organized under the slogan “Unite the Right,” culminated in a terrorist attack when a man named James Alex Fields drove his car into a counterprotest in downtown Charlottesville. One young woman died, and 35 others were injured.
Flags flown upside down
The practice of flying the American flag upside down — traditionally used by sailors as a signal of distress — serves as a way for the group to express its belief that the nation is in a critical situation. The same symbol also appeared in left-wing protests against the deployment of Trump’s immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis.
Saturday’s march began at Union Station, one of the main gateways to the city, not far from the Capitol dome. Participants marched through several streets around Congress before dispersing at around 11 a.m. Hundreds of videos recorded by passersby flooded social media. But it was a single photograph — taken by freelance photographer Cheney Orr and distributed by Reuters — that went viral.
A Washington police spokeswoman said shortly afterward in a statement that law enforcement “recognizes the rights of individuals to peacefully express their views and remains committed to maintaining public safety and security for DC residents and visitors.”
When asked on Sunday if he condemned Patriot Front, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told CNN: “What they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with,” but added that the fundamental principle at stake is the protection of free speech.
After the 2017 Charlottesville terrorist attack, Trump — who was serving his first term as president — said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the protests.
During his second term, Trump has designated the left-wing movement Antifa as a terrorist organization, even though it does not exist as a formal organization. On his first day in the Oval Office, January 20, 2025, the Republican president granted pardons to roughly 1,600 people convicted in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including several members of the neo-fascist militia groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers,
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