On July 4, the nation’s 250th anniversary, a mysterious group of young men in khaki pants, navy blue shirts, logoed baseball caps and white face masks appeared in the capital, marching out of a downtown Metro subway station in Washington and into the news.

By now, they look oddly familiar, part of the menagerie of uniformed street brawlers and torch carriers that emerged in the tumultuous first term of President Donald Trump.

And there are unsavory historical echoes as well. Though smaller in number, the neo-Nazis in the capital brought to mind the 1925 parade down Pennsylvania Avenue by thousands of robed Ku Klux Klansmen in a visible show of strength.

Indeed, the Patriot Front — the group that marched this month — appears to have similar publicity-seeking aims as the Klansmen of yore: to red-white-and-blue-wash their violent bigotry. Unfortunately for them, passersby appeared to be much more concerned about the stifling 100-degree heat dome that settled over the city with particular ferocity.

Performers must sometimes suffer for their art.

The word “performative” gets thrown around these days — partly, I gather, as a result of the technological revolution that has enabled us all to carry a TV studio, also known as a smartphone, around in our pockets.

Given the opportunity to perform, a lot of people will do precisely that, across a wide variety of media, as long as they can pull in an audience.

That’s very true of the Patriot Front, an ethno-nationalist group whose idea of........

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