White Supremacist Group Joins Chicago Anti-Abortion Rally

The white supremacist group Patriot Front attended Saturday’s March for Life in Chicago carrying a banner reading “strong families make strong nations” — some very casual authoritarian propaganda. Independent journalists estimated the group to be about 50 people. Some anti-abortion marchers heckled them for hijacking their event; others gave the shielded men in navy jackets, white neck gaiters, and fashy khakis a nice thumbs up.

Patriot Front has now attended the Chicago anti-abortion march every year since 2018, though in 2021 it was a flash demonstration as the official event was cancelled due to covid-19.

According to audio leaked to The Daily Dot in December, a man who is presumed to be Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau said that anti-abortion groups welcome them. “These people at the March for Life events have really come to support us over the years and because of the last year’s cancellations of these events, we are expecting even larger crowds of supportive individuals,” he said.

Group members left the area in cars with taped-over license plates.

Patriot Front broke off from neo-Nazi group Vanguard America after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a man who rallied with Vanguard America killed civil rights activist Heather Heyer with his car. After that weekend, where fascists notoriously chanted “Jews will not replace us,” Patriot Front “was one of a number of hate groups that sought to recast itself as mainstream, patriotic Americans by dressing up their propaganda and rhetoric in Americana,” per the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups.

The group’s manifesto calls for the formation of a white ethnostate. In 2018, the independent media outlet Unicorn Riot reported on leaked audio recordings from the group’s Discord servers which indicated that rape is acceptable to achieve the ethnostate of their dreams (emphasis theirs):

Recorded conversations between members show an obsession with firearms, a non-stop tirade of racist, sexist and otherwise abusive language, and a desire to take action in the real world. Patriot Front members are also told that raping women is acceptable, “as long as you’re raping, like, people in your own race” and describe how in their ideal society, “ethnostate rape gangs” would be allowed to freely target unmarried white women who did not adhere to “traditional values.”

Abortion bans only further their goals of turning pregnancies by rape into babies.

The national March for Life is in Washington, DC, on Friday, January 21, the day before the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It will be…interesting to see if white supremacist groups like Patriot Front show up.