IT WAS THE picture, taken on what should have been a day of American unity and celebration, that semaphored around the world, landing on the front pages of national newspapers and dominating social media. It will almost certainly appear in America’s history books, if the unvarnished story of this era is ever written.

It’s a picture that delivers a punch to the gut before the brain processes what the eyes have seen; a devastating verdict on the truth and consequences Trump’s return to power.

The image of Bernita Bowlding, a 33-year-old Black mother of two children, on a Washington Metro train, apprehensive yet unflinching, surrounded by dozens of masked Patriot Front members, marks a continuum of a centuries long history of oppression and menace.

We’ve seen plenty of chilling images documenting the rising tide of white supremacism in America over the past decade. From the August 2017 neo-Nazi march at Charlottesville, Virginia, with their tiki torches and chants of “Jews will not replace us”, to the white nationalist insurrectionists laying waste to the Capitol on January 6th.

But there’s a chilling symmetry of sorts to this white supremacist resurgence. On 4 July 1926, the Ku Klux Klan marked America’s 150th Birthday with a march on Washington, their identities concealed by pointy white hoods and full-length robes.

Ku Klux Klan Parade in Washington, September 13th, 1926. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

One hundred years later, their Patriot Front doppelgängers prefer dark polo shirts and chinos, baseball caps and sunglasses. Their heads, necks and faces are covered with what retired Air Force Colonel Moe Davis, the Pentagon’s former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, witheringly refers to as ‘face diapers’. New outfits, same old shit. 

Their march on the same DC streets as their KKK forebears is calculated to induce the same feelings of dread amongst minorities – and outrage amongst the majority of white Americans who want no part of this.

They celebrate their ability to swarm DC’s transit systems and public places unchallenged as a white power flex. Their prejudices may be blinding, but their spines are not so strong that they’re willing to risk their social and economic security to openly proclaim them. 

There is no law in the US against belonging to any of the 300-plus extremist hate groups that have proliferated in the US over the past decade or so. The Biden........

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