What latest wave of Neo-Nazis says about us

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 surfaced in the capital, marching out of a downtown Metro subway station 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 particularly 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 smartphones, 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 "patriotic" apparently does not include non-whiles, non-Christians or apparently non-males. They were founded by Texan Thomas Rousseau after the bloody 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when they split from another racist organization called Vanguard America. I first heard of the group in 2021 when they staged a protest at Chicago's City Hall, which they apparently planned to coincide with the annual anti-abortion "March for Life" rally in the Loop. (The organizers of the latter were not pleased.) I was suitably disgusted but not shocked, as I've observed these kinds of groups before. Today's Patriot Front reminds me of Frank Collin, the neo-Nazi leader who famously waged a legal battle in the late 1970s for the right to march in Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb with a heavily Jewish population. Collin later settled for the right to march in Marquette Park on Chicago's South Side. Yet today's young fascists have learned from the mistakes of Collin's "Illinois Nazis," whose campy cosplay was memorably lampooned in the movie "The Blues Brothers." As NPR reported, Patriot Front scrupulously avoids swastikas and Nazi salutes, preferring to wrap themselves in classically American symbols and to present themselves orderly and public-spirited. On July 4, they got the publicity bump they were hoping for. A Reuters photographer captured a Pulitzer-worthy news-photo of a Black woman, sitting quietly alone on a subway car, surrounded by masked Frontmen, on their best silent behavior. Sights like that cause me to keep reminding myself that, no, this is not the 1960s. We've come a long way since those bad old days, to be sure. But as today's politics keep reminding us, we still have a long way to go. We're a nation that elected a Black man to our highest office, but we also elected Donald Trump. But I'm still curious about what motivates the 400 or so young men to leave their homes and take to the streets dressed like demented preppies. Their grievances, I have to say, are not very well articulated, judging by the Patriot Front website. Is it to fill a void of fellowship and meaning in an increasingly online world? Is this the dark side — or, if you prefer, the white side — of the social media "manosphere"? That's a popular label for the myriad websites, blogs, podcasters and online forums that promote a hyped-up version of masculinity, misogyny and anti-feminism to an audience that seems endlessly hungry for such content. It's hard to disentangle the ideological strands of the online hard right, but a similar discourse has grown up around white identity. A thread that runs through neo-Nazi and other hard-right groups is the fear of other races, whose numbers and place in society seem to them uncomfortably on the rise, at the expense of white men. Consider the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This is the notion, endlessly propagated online, that white populations in modern Western countries are being replaced by brown and black alien populations, and that this replacement is a project — commonly attributed to Jews. This was behind the infamous chant at Unite the Right in Charleston: "Jews will not replace us!" It also supplied the motive of the murderer who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, as well as numerous other attacks. As a nation we have been slow to understand the hate-inflected extremism that flourishes in a new media landscape with no editorial oversight and no sanction for the harm bad actors may do. Nor is it obvious what to do about it. Yet I'm still old-fashioned enough to believe we do our young men — and women — a very valuable service by encouraging them to live, learn and work together across racial, religious and gender lines — as Americans. That's true patriotism to me, front, back and sideways.