While Fascist Goons Hide Behind Masks, Republicans Pretend They Don't Exist
Whenever members of the white nationalist Patriot Front organization march in Washington, as they did again on July 4, they hide their faces behind white gaiters – as if aware of the shame and revulsion that their drum-beating theatrics inflicted on the United States during our 250th birthday. With a paranoia that matches their racist dogma, the fascist marchers fear the social ostracism they would suffer on social media if their true identities became known.
But Patriot Front’s habitual masking also offers a convenient excuse for the most extreme Republicans to disclaim these ideological mutts, whose militant expression of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideology constantly embarrasses MAGA figures in politics and the media. Patriot Front is too close for comfort, so the MAGA right constant attempts to blame its existence on Antifa, the “left,” or the FBI – all conspiracy theories with no basis but plenty of purchase on the right-wing brain.
Consider Mike Lee, the ultra-right Republican senator from Utah, who posted a clip of Patriot Front’s DC demonstration on X/Twitter. “Patriot Front: Brought to you by leftists who don’t know that patriots don’t wear masks.” Lee must have forgotten already about the “patriots” enlisted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who wear masks while carrying out dragnet raids and even while shooting down innocent American citizens. Lee never had a problem with ICE masking.
As many noted in posts roasting him, Lee also appears to have forgotten his own prediction, posted on X at the dawn of the second Trump administration, that Patriot Front would “disappear immediately” as soon as the Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director. “What a coincidence that would be.” In other words, MAGA man Patel would shut down this “false flag” front group as soon as Trump got control of law enforcement.
Like so many Mike Lee posts, that quip has not aged well.
Nor did a similar broadside from Laura Ingraham, who reacted to the fascist marchers in Washington with a dismissive tweet. “I call fake. Looks more like Antifa in costume,” the irascible Fox host wrote. “No one should be allowed to cover their faces.” No one except ICE, she surely meant.
Asked about the fascist demonstrations on CNN, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum declined to condemn them. Burgum saw no need to criticize their noxious conduct, which he depicted as a harmless First Amendment exercise.
“Part of my response to that is that there are protests on the mall that people say things that I think are reprehensible about President Trump, and yet they’re allowed to go on because of free speech in our country,” Burgum replied. He went on to suggest that at least some of those critics are “communists,” the preferred canard for Trump, who has never forgotten what he learned from the late McCarthyite Roy Cohn.
There is no significant cohort of communists lurking anywhere these days, just as there is no evidence that Patriot Front is a government operation or a leftist front (a fact that its maskless founder Thomas Rousseau desperately emphasizes in every media interview). Research organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center have long identified the Texas-based outfit as one of the “most active” neo-fascist groups in the country ever since it split off from another group known as National Vanguard in the wake of the deadly Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. There is no question that these fascist formations have grown and prospered in the MAGA era – a phenomenon that ought to trouble the Trump followers, but introspection or even rational thought don’t come naturally to them.
Fabricating conspiracies is so much easier – and more profitable.
