The Clear and Present Danger of the First Amendment
The Patriot Front and the image of innocent defiance
America doesn’t get to have a First Amendment for free. The First Amendment demands maturity and accountability. I said this in September 2025 when Charlie Kirk was assassinated:
In the wake of a troubled nation’s 250th anniversary that highlighted its failures instead of its successes, it’s worth repeating.
Luckily, a photograph by Cheney Orr does it for me.
During the July 4 weekend, one lone woman rode a Washington, D.C., Metro train car. She had no reason to think it wasn’t just another day. She was heading to wherever she was heading. Nobody knows where. Nobody knows who she is.
Then, this happened.
Members of an insurrectionist group called Patriotic Front, too cowardly to show their faces, surrounded her. There were no known active threats of violence against her. There didn’t need to be. The hateful garb did that for them.
The look on her face became the iconic expression of a 2026 Independence Day holiday in the midst of insurrection. She became all of us, and we became her.
What’s beautiful about her expression is that it doesn’t display fear as much as it reflects our current battle. It reflects our war against the Christo-nationalist insurrectionists who have taken over the U.S. government.
It is a look of innocent defiance. For me, it has a look of “Sure, I’m scared, but don’t you even think of trying something.” It is a look that says, “Our whistles will defeat your guns.”
I suspect there are dozens of other ways we can interpret her expression. Only she knows what she felt in her heart.
Yes, we are all scared. But we are defiant. We are the rebellion against a king. We are July 4.
Sadly, because this is America, there will be a concerted effort, not just by doxxers, but by reporters from mainstream media, which regularly mainlines on America’s depraved celebrity culture, who will seek her out and try to identify her.
I hope they fail, unless she wants to be heard.
Meanwhile, we all gain from her experience. In one instant, she became an unwitting hero who probably just wants to be left alone. This makes her like all the rest of us, doesn’t it?
None of us wants what the diseased orange flesh in the Oval Office is offering. We want to finish our day in peace. We want to go to work, to school, to our dance and yoga classes, and talk about anything but him.
When you wake up in the morning, do you look forward to learning about the latest babbling from the lunatic in the Oval Office? Did any of us rush to YouTube or the news channels this weekend to hear the words of a toddler's mind speechifying at Mount Rushmore with stuff like this?
There is nothing like what we are doing. The birth and survival of the American nation under God is quite simply the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands ever. That is ever, ever, ever.
The only people interested in what he had to say were those eager to generate AI gifs of the toddler-in-chief in diapers. And a few desperate MAGA holdouts. And perhaps, if we’re feeling generous, a few psychiatrists and mental health professionals.
The Mount Rushmore speech was full of gems like this:1
Our rights here given to us by the God who made us and those rights shall not be infringed. Americans believe in self-reliance. We look at success with envy not, and I say that, some people are envious and some people are not. We are not, but with admiration and we earn it and we will always earn it and we will always respect it. We are an incredible, good, kind, and generous people, always ready to help a friend or a neighbor in need.
The First Amendment certainly protects the rights of an American President to babble incoherently.
But it doesn’t protect the rights of the Patriot Front to exist, much less speak its hatred.
A unanimous Supreme Court opinion in 1919, Schenck v. United States, made that clear. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the decision that freedom of speech and freedom of the press under the First Amendment did not exist in circumstances that present “a clear and present danger.”2
This is where I ask you to look at the image by Cheney Orr again.
It deserves this caption: “A Clear and Present Danger.”
Understand who Patriot Front is before you diss the “Clear and Present Danger” argument.
The lady in the photograph was surrounded by men covered in hateful imagery. The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of America’s stalwarts against racism and now a target of the insurrectionist regime’s Department of Injustice,3 describes the hate group as follows:4
Patriot Front is an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism. Patriot Front focuses on theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country.
Its imagery is an act of violence.
Vanguard America was a hate group that mostly broke apart shortly after the August 12, 2017, “Unite the Right” rally.
Insurrectionist literature is in boldface everywhere the Patriot Front is. Here’s a sampling:5
“The time of the Republic has passed in America as the system grows too weak to perform its duty. … The damage done to this nation and its people will not be fixed if every issue requires the approval and blessing from the dysfunctional American democratic system. Democracy has failed in this once great nation.”
“The American Identity was something uniquely forged in the struggle that our ancestors waged to survive in this new continent. … To be an American is to realize this identity and take up the national struggle upon one’s shoulders. Not simply by birth is one granted this title but by the degree to which he works and fulfills the potential of his birth.” — Patriot Front manifesto.
“An African, for example, may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American. He is, as he likely prefers to be labelled, an African in America. The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people as well as to those who do not share the common unconscious that permeates throughout our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.”
— Patriot Front manifesto.
Patriot Front’s founder is an insurrectionist named Thomas Rousseau.
Rousseau was a member of Vanguard America, the group that led the charge during the 2017 Charlottesville riot. He helped lead cowards in masks toward the death of anti-racist protester Heather Heyer.
Heather died when another insurrectionist, James Alex Fields, Jr., under the leadership of Rousseau, barrelled his car into a crowd of protesters.
Fields is now serving multiple life sentences for his participation in the insurrection. The Insurrectionist-in-Chief would surely pardon him if he could, but Fields was convicted by a state court in Virginia. He also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.6
If pardoning him from those federal hate crimes released him from prison, we can assume the hater-in-chief would do so, but why bother? Fields is in for life on the state charges. A federal pardon will have no practical effect.
Patriot Front founder Rousseau has been explicit in his call to violence and insurrection:7
“Americans are members of the European racial collective. America is a people and a nation as an organic entity and the United States has engaged in a practice of giving citizenship to all manners of other nationalities and all manners of alien races. So, it is very clear that the boundary that the government has of what is and what isn’t an American is very different from the true definition and the true realization that it is a, as it says in our manifesto, that membership in the nation is inherited through blood. It’s not given through ink.”
The Patriot Front manifesto, written by Rousseau, calls for the creation of a white ethnostate in the United States. In other words, the Patriot Front is another Confederacy wannabe. There’s a pretty long list of those.
The young lady in the Reuters image was experiencing a clear and present danger when her Metro car was taken over by Patriot Front riders.
It doesn’t matter how innocent their travel to Trump’s empty festival in D.C. appeared to be. The imagery is the violence.
The imagery is the clear and present danger.
We need to stop being afraid of challenging the First Amendment.
It is not sacrosanct.
Especially now that the government itself has been taken over by insurrectionists.
When Jack Smith testifies in his 2029 confirmation hearings for Attorney General, Senators need to ask him if he’s willing to take these hate groups on.
And Congress will need to expand the court so that the corrupt, racist Supreme Court doesn’t stop him if he says yes.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
If you have a solid support system, you can watch or read the whole speech here:
Call FiscalNote, Roll. “Protected: Factbase Transcripts.” Roll Call, April 22, 2024. https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-mount-rushmore-250th-birthday-semiquincentennial-july-3-2026/.
Contributors. 2003. “United States Supreme Court Case.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. January 14, 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States.
PBS News. “Southern Poverty Law Center Seeks Dismissal of ‘Vindictive’ Justice Department Indictment.” PBS News, May 26, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/southern-poverty-law-center-seeks-dismissal-of-vindictive-justice-department-indictment.
Southern Poverty Law Center. “Patriot Front,” August 8, 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/patriot-front/.
Southern Poverty Law Center, ibid
Convicted during Mad Clown 1.0, when there were still guardrails:
Southern Poverty Law Center. “Thomas Rousseau,” February 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/thomas-rousseau/.