JD Vance rages about ‘radical gender ideology’ while white supremacists march along National Mall

On a gray Friday afternoon in Washington, D.C., with the nation’s capital bracing for a forecast snowstorm expected to arrive Sunday and local officials urging residents to prepare for possible disruptions, Vice President JD Vance stood on a stage near the National Mall and delivered a blistering address attacking abortion rights and LGBTQ+ equality as existential threats to the nation. Just blocks away, a white supremacist group marched in tight formation.

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The remarks came during the annual March for Life, a large, long-running anti-abortion demonstration held in Washington each January around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Founded in the 1970s, the march draws tens of thousands of participants from across the country, many affiliated with conservative religious groups, and has become a centerpiece of the modern anti-abortion movement, particularly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022.

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As Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson addressed thousands of marchers, roughly 100 members of Patriot Front, including its leader Thomas Rousseau, paraded along the Mall carrying flags and banners they had unloaded from a U-Haul truck. Dressed uniformly in blue jackets, khaki pants, baseball caps, and white face masks designed to obscure their identities, the group moved in disciplined rows — a visual hallmark of Patriot Front’s efforts to project order and inevitability.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police Department escorted the march on bicycles. Alongside them, a small cluster of counterprotesters followed, blasting circus music through loudspeakers as a way to mock the group of white masked men.

Before the white nationalist group started parading around, Rousseau confronted a man who was using a bullhorn and asked whether the man was Jewish, according to video from the scene. When the man replied that he was not, and said he had already been asked the same question several times by Patriot Front members, Rousseau responded with an antisemitic comment about the man’s nose.

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The Patriot Front emerged from the remnants of Vanguard America after the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has since relied on tightly controlled, anonymous marches to keep its ideology visible while shielding members from identification. Federal authorities have linked Patriot Front adherents to vandalism, intimidation campaigns, and criminal cases tied to extremist activity.

At the main stage, Vance told the crowd that he and his wife were expecting their fourth child this summer — their third son — presenting the announcement as evidence that he “practices what he preaches” when it comes to urging Americans to have more children.

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The vice president praised the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, calling it “the most important Supreme Court decision of my lifetime,” and said it ended what he described as “the tyranny of judicial rule on the question of human life”. The ruling, he argued, shattered what he called a “culture of disposability” and returned the question of abortion to “the people.”

Since Roe was overturned, abortion rights have won at the ballot box, including in red states.

He repeatedly framed Democrats as enemies of faith and family, accusing the Biden administration of using government power “against our faith, against our families,” a posture he claimed had now been reversed under Donald Trump’s second term. He went further still, explicitly attacking LGBTQ+ inclusion. Under President Joe Biden, Vance said, the United States sought to “export abortion and radical gender ideology all around the world,” adding that it was no longer America’s role to promote what he called “radical gender ideology” abroad.