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<\/a><\/p>\nFounder of the white supremacist group Patriot Front Thomas Rousseau, unmasked, and fellow members gather at Eastern Market metro station on July 4, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Finn Gomez\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The marchers in Washington wore masks and some carried Confederate flags, according to reports and video from the scene. At times, they chanted \u201cReclaim America!\u201d \u2014 a rallying cry channeling the group\u2019s nativist agenda.<\/p>\n
While Patriot Front\u2019s public activities mostly center on its anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ agenda, the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly cited the group, founded in 2017, as the largest purveyor of antisemitic materials in the United States.<\/p>\n
One of the group\u2019s signature slogans, which members displayed on a banner in Washington in 2023, is \u201cNo Zionists in Government.\u201d<\/p>\n
The previous year, the group\u2019s internal communications, obtained and leaked by an independent media collective, showed that some members used Nazi slogans and that one member was accepted on the basis of an application in which he declared that the \u201cbiggest threat to America is Jewish domination over the world.\u201d Group leaders criticized how the chat logs had been obtained but did not challenge the veracity of their contents.<\/p>\n
In a statement on Sunday, the ADL called Patriot Front \u201cthe most visible white supremacist group operating in the U.S. today\u201d and noted that its previous public rallies had been much smaller.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe size of the march is concerning,\u201d the ADL said about the Saturday rally.<\/p>\n
Patriot Front\u2019s founder, Thomas Rousseau, was a leading participant in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which attendees chanted \u201cJews will not replace us\u201d while carrying burning torches. The chant refers to an antisemitic conspiracy theory positing that Jews are engineering mass immigration in order to displace white people. Rousseau later testified that he heard the chant but thought attendees might have been saying \u201cyou will not replace us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 2017 rally fueled criticism of President Donald Trump, who did not immediately comment on it and then placed blame on \u201cboth sides\u201d while condemning the display of \u201chatred, bigotry and violence.\u201d It also animated the presidential run of Joe Biden and spurred a successful lawsuit against the rally\u2019s organizers by an advocacy group called Integrity First for America, whose leader, Amy Spitalnick, is now CEO of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.<\/p>\n
\u201cPatriot Front is an offshoot of one of the white supremacist groups we (successfully) sued for orchestrating the Charlottesville violence,\u201d Spitalnick said in a JCPA statement on Sunday. \u201cThey are emboldened because their extremism has been wholly normalized by the administration and others.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has not commented publicly on this weekend\u2019s Patriot Front march, which took place during festivities to celebrate the United States\u2019 250th birthday. A top administration official did not directly answer when CNN\u2019s Dana Bash asked him whether he would urge Trump to denounce the group.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with,\u201d Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told Bash, who is Jewish and has made antisemitism a focus of her recent coverage. \u201cBut one of the foundational principles of the United States, which makes democracy messy, is free speech.\u201d<\/p>\n