Luna calls for Patriot Front investigation after DC rally

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) on Monday called for an investigation into the Patriot Front white nationalist group after its Independence Day rally and march across Washington, D.C.

“What I find odd about Patriot Front is how under Biden they were never investigated. Well funded. Never investigated,” Luna wrote in a post on the social platform X.

“FBI under Biden looked into Catholics instead. So, looks like @GOPoversight should do some digging,” she added, referring to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Luna’s push for a probe follows Patriot Front’s 400-person march throughout the nation’s capital on Saturday. Many of the people in the march were masked and uniformed, and some were carrying the American flag upside down.

The group is known for its “flash demonstrations,” making it one of the United States’s most visible white supremacist groups, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

On Sunday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said he doesn’t agree with what Patriot Front stands for, but he defended the group’s First Amendment right to free speech.

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Burgum told host Dana Bash, “Certainly what they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with, but one of the foundational principles of the United States, which makes democracy messy, is free speech, and there are plenty of things that I see that I might personally find offensive, reprehensible, but in America, free speech is allowed, and this is by the whole spectrum of things.”

He did not commit to advising President Trump to condemn the organization or the demonstration.

Later on the show, Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) strongly rebuked the group’s actions.

“What I’ll say is that that is not the soul of America. Look, you know, we are all created equally. That is what, what our whole impetus is based on here in this country,” Carter told Bash.

“And I would just, I would just not ignore it, but I don’t pay that much credence to it, because that does not represent the soul of America. We in America believe in equality, and that is simply not reflective, certainly not of the Republican Party,” he added.

Patriot Front has distributed the vast majority of white supremacist propaganda since 2019, according to the ADL.

Patriot Front formed in 2017 under Thomas Rousseau after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., according to George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

The group’s manifesto calls for the formation of a white ethnostate.