1. United States
2. S.C.
3. Letter

Masked white supremacists marched on the U.S. Capitol on America's 250th birthday, and Trump's government gave them a shrug. Saturday morning, a few hundred men from the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front, four hundred by their own generous count, moved through Capitol Hill to drummers, in matching khakis and white masks, waving Confederate flags beside upside-down American ones and chanting about driving immigrants out of the country. Every single man had his face covered, on the birthday of the country they claim to own. These men belong to a geoup called Patriot Front, a White nationalist grouo. Patriot Front is the remnant that crawled out of Charlottesville, founded by a then-teenager named Thomas Rousseau when the last group imploded after a neo-Nazi murdered Heather Heyer. Their entire act is costume theater. They show up unannounced, march for their own cameras, inflate the headcount, then scatter into Metro cars and rented U-Hauls before anyone can respond. The one time they planned something real, in Idaho in 2022, police pulled 31 of them out of a single U-Haul, packed like cargo, and charged them with conspiracy to riot. They once lost a federal lawsuit over defacing Arthur Ashe's mural because they were too cowardly to show up in court. That is who was under the masks. Here is what the government of the United States had to say about hundreds of uniformed men calling for ethnic cleansing outside the Capitol: "First Amendment activities." There were no arrests and no condemnationof their ideology. A reporter asked a National Guard soldier who they were and got one word back: protesters. There were none of the typical accusations of not having a permit, or disrupting the peace, etc. that follow peaceful ANTIFA protesters. There were no arrests, unlike on Wednesday, when it took Capitol Police only minutes to handcuff an Air Force major on those same steps for calling for Trump's impeachment. The men in the masks got waved through. And then they ran. That's the act's final beat, every time. Flags rolled up, drums packed, back onto the trains they came in on, gone before the holiday crowds even thickened. Men who came to reclaim a nation and could not show it their faces, because these men are cowards clothed in hatred. By nightfall the National Mall was full of the actual country. Americans of every color and origin were watching the fireworks in the same place that those men fled.