While Patriotic Americans Celebrated This Weekend, An Old Ugliness Reared Its Head
Freedom loving Americans have beaten it every time before. Now it's our turn.
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The young, black woman is seated on a Washington Metro train, looking straight ahead. Around her, standing so close their arms nearly touch her shoulders, are white men in masks with cloth covering their faces, matching khaki pants, caps pulled low. There are so many of them in the frame that you cannot see the other seats, cannot see anything except the men and, at the center of it, this one woman, composed in a way that the photograph itself almost cannot contain. She has not flinched. She has not looked at them. She is simply sitting on a train on a holiday, waiting to get where she is going, surrounded.
That image was taken on July 4th, 2026 — America’s 250th birthday — as members of the Patriot Front rode the Metro toward a march on the nation’s capital. Dean Withers wrote that your great-grandchildren will see it in their history books. He is probably right. But what it will represent when they do — whether it marks the moment these forces won, or the moment the country looked at the image and decided enough — is not yet written.
Patriot Front is a white nationalist group founded in the aftermath of Charlottesville in 2017, dedicated to what it calls the creation of a white ethnostate on American soil. Hundreds of them descended on Washington carrying American flags alongside Confederate ones, chanting “Reclaim America.”
The woman in the photo has not been publicly identified. She doesn’t need to be. The photograph identified her the moment it was taken: as an American citizen, in her own capital city, on the day her country was celebrating 250 years of the promise that all people are created equal, surrounded by men in masks who believe that promise was never meant for her.
The photograph went viral within hours, with people across the political spectrum arguing about what it means. Some called it the defining image of the era. Some on the right dismissed it as a staged provocation. Or, in a move that has become reflexive, claimed without evidence that the masked marchers were federal agents in disguise.
That particular deflection is itself worth noting: when confronted with the undeniable existence of organized white nationalism on American soil, the response is to insist it cannot be real. It is real. It was real in Charlottesville. It was real on January 6th. It was real on the Metro on the Fourth of July.
The night before, at Mount Rushmore, President Trump gave a speech to mark the eve of the 250th anniversary. The language he reached for was not unity or shared purpose or the common inheritance of American ideals. It was the red scare. He warned of a “communist menace” inside the United States. He used the word “vanquish.” He framed the midterm elections as a battle against forces that want to destroy the country from within. The crowd cheered.
I want to be precise about what McCarthyism was, because history may not repeat, but it rhymes. Senator Joseph McCarthy spent four years, from 1950 to 1954, destroying the careers and lives of Americans he accused of communist sympathies, almost always without evidence, almost always for the crime of disagreeing with him or knowing someone who did.
Screenwriters, professors, diplomats, soldiers — people who had spent their lives serving this country were branded as traitors on the basis of rumor and innuendo. It ended not when McCarthy ran out of targets but when a lawyer named Joseph Welch looked at him during a televised hearing and asked a question that broke the spell: “Have you no sense of decency?”
The country heard it and understood. McCarthy was finished within months.
The playbook has not changed. The enemies have different names — communists became socialists became the radical left became whatever the speech requires — but the architecture is identical. Identify an internal enemy. Attribute to that enemy a desire to destroy everything good about America. Claim that you alone stand between the country and its annihilation. It worked for McCarthy for four years. It stopped working the moment enough people named it plainly.
What I want to say to you today is that none of this is new. These forces have been present in American life since the beginning. They were present when Frederick Douglass stood before an audience in Rochester, New York, in 1852, and delivered a speech about what the Fourth of July meant to a man who had been enslaved.
And, this is incredibly important for our battle today: he did not reject the holiday or the ideals behind it. He claimed them. He said the principles of the Declaration of Independence were freedom’s principles, and he demanded that America be made to live up to them. He was called a radical and a troublemaker. He was also right.
The same forces were present when suffragists were told that wanting the vote was a form of extremism. When labor organizers were called communists for asking that workers be paid enough to live on. When civil rights marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge were met with clubs and tear gas by men who also called themselves patriots. In every case, the people defending the expansion of American freedom were accused of destroying it. In every case, history has rendered its verdict.
The Patriot Front chanted “Reclaim America” as they marched through Washington yesterday. I want to ask what exactly they think they are reclaiming it from. From a black woman on the Metro who was trying to get somewhere on the Fourth of July? From the naturalized citizens who swore an oath to this country and meant every word of it? The America they want to reclaim never existed. It is a fantasy built on the exclusion of everyone who doesn’t look like them, and it has been losing ground to the real America for 250 years.
I was in the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. I have seen what these forces look like up close and what they are capable of. Let me be extremely clear: I am not telling you not to take them seriously.
I am telling you something different: that every generation of Americans has faced a version of this fight, and every generation that chose to engage rather than despair has won it. The tools available to them were a printing press, a pulpit, a march, a vote, a question asked on live television at exactly the right moment. The tools available to us are not so different.
The photograph from the Metro is going to be in history books. But what it will represent — whether it marks the moment these forces finally won, or the moment the country looked at the image and decided enough — is not yet written.
That part is ours to determine. It has always been ours to determine. Have they no decency?
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