The entire world is absorbing disgusting images of the most embarrassing national birthday bash in American -- and perhaps any national -- history.

If you thought the Donald Trump’s White House lawn birthday UFC fight, with meathead Joe Rogan snickering and holding a mic under the drooling mouth of an oiled half-naked ape-man as he called Michelle Obama “a man,” was the low moment of the long White Rave, you were wrong.

As nations go, 250 years is not that long at all. China has lasted for 4,000, the Indian subcontinent for 5,000 years, and the Egyptians and Mesopotamians go back 3,000 years. Their relics are in museums..

Here is what has now been recorded photographically for posterity of the United States of America on its 250th year of existence: Hundreds of self-anonymized white men in matching beige khakis, navy shirts, wearing white gaiters to hide their faces, marching with Confederate flags, in front of the U.S. Capitol, beating drums and chanting about reclaiming America. And surly MAGA civilians cursing at the very law enforcement they proclaim to revere while being evacuated off the National mall because of dangerous storms.

The funny thing about MAGA and its crypto-Nazis is that while the movement encourages and abets private armed fascists, some MAGAs are still embarrassed about the public display of what’s arguably the plutonium pit of their movement. They are fine with Donald’s dog whistles, they are cool with ICE dragging brown people out of homes, workplaces and children’s schools, but they’re still not quite ok with displays of unabashed racism and menace like Charlottesville and, now, the Patriot Front marching in DC on the 4th of July 2026.

Patriot Front was founded by a man named Thomas Ryan Rousseau after he and his followers split from another neo-Nazi gang, Vanguard America, after the deadly Unite the Right Charlottesville rally, in which a raving racist killed a white female anti-racist protester.

Hilariously, Fox mouthpiece Laura Ingraham, kicked off what was apparently the MAGA message machine’s official statement on the spectacle: these men were actually leftist plants! In a Tweet posted over a video of some of the Patriots, she wrote: “I call fake. Looks more like Antifa in costume. No one should be allowed to cover their faces.”

MAGA Utah Sen. Mike Lee picked up the refrain, calling the march a “false flag” financed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Trump DOJ has charged the SPLC with funneling $3 million over decades to some of America’s violent racist organizations, apparently as its researchers were infiltrating those groups. The SPLC has filed to dismiss the suit and its lawyers say the moneys were for an informant program that ultimately saved lives.

Those lies didn’t get much traction since Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau appeared unmasked with the group at one Metro station and gave an interview before his men started marching around suburban Maryland and downtown Washington.

In the comments to Lee’s and Ingraham’s tweets, one can see the ongoing internecine argument erupting, between warm water Trumpers agreeing that no true MAGA would indulge in street Nazism, while the whole-hog fascists decried those critics as “cucks” and urged their fellow whites to come out of the closet and support the brave patriots, who, some said, only wore masks because “the left” would make their lives miserable if their identities were public.

The fact that so many MAGAs on social media will pretend overt fascist displays among white nationalism are “fake” is just further proof of the success of the Trump political movement in separating its followers from agreed upon reality. Among them, the January 6 rioters are now almost universally accepted to have been organized by undercover federal agents serving Deep State Democrats and RINOs.

With Trump having eradicated the Deep State, though, the mythological planters of false flags are now privately-financed communists paid for by George Soros.

The masked racists didn’t join the revelers at the National Mall - or if they did, they changed out of their uniforms. There, the intense heat delayed Trump’s scheduled appearance for hours. It broke late in the day as storms rolled into Washington. Authorities broadcast messages on large screens telling people who had waited for hours to get seats to watch their beloved leader speak, to begin “immediate evacuation.” The crowd booed in response, yelling “USA, USA, USA.” Lightning filled the darkening sky and the wind picked up as staff urged people to head to the nearest exit. Eventually the surly mall-goers were herded to safety inside some of the Smithsonian buildings - including, ironically, including the Museum of Black History and Culture.

One observer, Charlotte Clymer, posted a picture and wrote that she had “never seen such a Lord of the Flies moment.”

Before midnight, the President, after publicly dozing, finally delivered a speech in which he lied about the Declaration of Independence. It does not say, as he said, that “we are all made in the image of one Almighty God.”

It actually states that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

All are created equal.

Ever since Trump bewitched American racists and their cohorts - all suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome, the enduring mental illness suffered by some whites in the wake of a successful, legally elected, Black president - we’ve been in a kind of social centrifuge, divided into separate elements. The Patriot Front’s Washington DC march and this iconic Reuters shot adds a fresh stain to the long and grotesque record of white nationalism in this country.

The image of the day from America’s 250th birthday is the one the world has seen before many times, to our bottomless shame. Sometimes the pictures include dogs and terror, sometimes the open mouths of shrieking women with carefully coiffed hair. Sometimes the images are uglier and involve torture and death.

The record of July 4, 2026, the one that live on in the great data centers of the impossible to predict long future of our species will show that on the 250th birthday of the United States America, a nation founded on the notion that all are created equal, a lone Black girl sat in a DC Metro train car packed with white racists hiding their faces (for they too are - they must be - somewhere in their souls - deeply ashamed) preparing to hoist the Confederate flags and march.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow