The weekend of Jan. 21-23 brought the annual anti-choice March for Lifeto Washington, DC, followed two days later by the Defeat the Mandates rally to oppose vaccine mandates. The two events brought thousands of conservatives to the nation’s capital, along with throngs of far-right extremists looking to recruit from their ranks.
A phalanx of members from the avowedly fascist group Patriot Front formed their own column along the March for Life, under heavy police protection as antifascist counter-protesters confronted them. Patriot Front’s appearance, in turn, appeared to act as a magnet for other extremists. Two young men wearing khaki pants, camouflage jackets, work boots and skull masks, as captured in a video by a team member of the veteran-owned open-source intelligence firm Sparverius, showed up and heckled the counter-protesters as Patriot Front members marched past.
One of the men signaled his white power beliefs in ways that were both subtle and blatant: a patch with the red-and-white checkered insignia of the Croatian Legion, a division of the German Army during World War II; stickers on his helmet depicting the image of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell and the slogan “White Lives Matter”; and a Confederate battle flag patch on his military-style backpack.
“These accelerationists — the guys wearing skull masks, they wear that because they… were signaling to each other that they are extremists, but to the general public they are telegraphing that they are tough, something to be feared, masculine,” Kristofer Goldsmith, Sparverius’ CEO, told Raw Story. “They’re attracting people who think it’s a drinking and street brawler club, and they’re putting them in a pipeline to extremism that ends in domestic terrorism.”
Accelerationists at March for Life