The awful have tried it before

Hartmann Report -  The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script.

On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them.

Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.”  A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can.