The Ku Klux Klan in Pinstripes - How Trump’s Republicans Are Attacking Black Voting Rights Before the Supreme Court

America is negotiating with itself. About whether equality remains a fundamental right - or a relic of a time when people still believed that history could mean progress. This week, the Supreme Court of the United States is dealing with perhaps the most consequential case since Brown v. Board of Education. It concerns the Voting Rights Act, the centerpiece of the civil rights era, and the question of whether Black Americans will remain politically visible - or whether the Republican revival of the old white majorities will once again become official state doctrine.

Louisiana stands at the center of this attack, but the shadow stretches across the entire South. The state, one-third of whose population is Black, was forced by the courts to create a second majority-Black district - a modest correction to a system that for decades ensured that white votes counted twice. As soon as this progress became tangible, the Republican government, flanked by the Trump administration, once again went before the Supreme Court. The goal: to overturn that very district - and with it, the foundation of the Voting Rights Act itself.

“Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution,” wrote Louisiana’s Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill in her brief. A sentence that sounds morally elevated but in truth dresses up the old logic of segregation in new words. It is the legal continuation of a racist mindset that has learned to wear suits and cite footnotes instead of hoods and whips.

Donald Trump had long since set the tone. In his speeches, he speaks of “real Americans” and “unfair advantages for minorities,” and his governors - in Texas, Missouri, Florida - followed his call to “reorganize” their electoral maps. A euphemism for what it has always been: securing power, depoliticizing skin color, turning democracy into decoration. The attack on the Voting Rights Act is not a legal correction - it is the continuation of white dominance politics by means of law.

That Chief Justice John Roberts is leading this debate is a bitter irony. Even during the Reagan era, he fought against the civil rights mechanisms that had made Black voters visible in the first place. In 2013, he wrote the decision that abolished the requirement for Southern states to have voting law changes pre-approved by the federal government - with the reasoning, “Our country has changed.” In reality, only the language has changed. Racism remained. It now carries the label “constitutional law.”

“Race continues to play a significant role in Louisiana’s current voting patterns,” says Sarah Brannon of the ACLU. It is a sentence that echoes through the decades. The maps of power have barely shifted: Black communities are split, diluted, pushed to the margins. Districts that snake across the state are said to be “unnatural” - when in fact, they are the exact reflection of a history that has never been confronted: slavery, Jim Crow laws, economic dispossession. The lines drawn on paper today follow the wounds of the past.

The new right no longer wants to hear that history. It wants to erase it. With legal precision, not burning crosses. What the hooded men of the Ku Klux Klan once tried to do through violence, today’s politicians, lawyers, lobbyists, and federal judges accomplish through paragraphs: they protect the privilege of invisibility. No scream, no blood, no gallows - only the quiet, deadly efficiency of modern racism disguised in the language of order. Out of this disguise, however, grow the violence, the groups - and somewhere, far in the distance, one can see them burning again: the crosses of the Ku Klux Klan.

Still the face of evil - today he has little power left - but he was the seed.
David Duke was never just the monster, the leader, in the white robe, but the strategist behind a dangerous shift: the attempt to translate the open racism of the Ku Klux Klan into an “academic”-sounding, politically palatable language. As early as the 1980s, Duke no longer spoke of “white supremacy” but of “white civil rights” - he called anti-Black discrimination “racial policy” and declared the protection of white majorities a human right.

Today, this sounds eerily familiar in the Republican platform of Project 2025: the state is to secure “cultural purity,” diversity programs are defamed as “discrimination against whites,” and every discussion of structural racism is labeled “political indoctrination.” These are not simply political concepts - they are Duke’s ideology in a suit.

The difference from before: back then, hatred wore hoods. Today it wears ties, sits in think tanks, drafts policy papers, and calls itself “conservative.”
What Duke once formulated as white replacement fear - the idea that “white Christians will become a minority” - can now be found in campaign speeches, television interviews, and party-aligned documents. In Project 2025, it is systematically operationalized: as a policy of cultural reconquest.

That this line now reaches the very center of Republican power is no coincidence. Many of the authors and supporters of Project 2025 - from the Heritage Foundation to Christian nationalist networks - use the same codes Duke popularized decades ago: family, order, tradition, patriotism. Only now they no longer whisper. They govern.

The Klan burns again

Images from 2025 show scenes that seem torn out of time: people in white robes and hoods gathered around a cross engulfed in flames. They are not archive images. They were taken this year - in the old South, a so-called border state of the United States, not far from the very places where the civil rights movement began.

What is happening here is not folklore and not a macabre masquerade. It is the continuation of an ideology that preserves hatred through ritual. And although the Ku Klux Klan is officially considered marginal, such scenes prove that its symbolism lives on - often in the shadow of new movements calling themselves Christian, patriotic, or “traditional.” The Klan has fragmented into splinter groups, but its myth has survived. It flickers wherever fear is politically useful - and where history still refuses to end.

Today, the Ku Klux Klan no longer appears as a unified organization with a Grand Wizard and central leadership, but as a web of dozens of small groups, digital circles, and local splinter cells blending old symbolism with new agitation. Names such as Trinity White Knights, Loyal White Knights, or Knights Party appear in various states - loosely connected by ideology, not hierarchy. It is a network of hate, decentralized yet astonishingly uniform in its rhetoric, quick to connect. If there is a geographic backbone of the Klan, it runs through Arkansas, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. More on that in the coming weeks.

What is being argued in Washington is therefore not a dispute over districts. It is the question of whether the Black voice in America will once again become a concession of white power. If the Supreme Court supports this attack, it would not be a victory of logic - but of racism. It would be the legal continuation of the same idea that once justified slavery and tolerated lynching: that freedom is a kind of property that can be distributed.

Cleo Fields, the representative whose seat in Louisiana is at stake, knows this cynicism. Back in the 1990s, he won the same district only to lose it again because courts ruled that “race” had played too large a role. Today he says, “We would never be in Congress if it weren’t for the Voting Rights Act - and if there weren’t majority-Black districts.” It is not a lament, but a sober observation: without legal protection, Black representation in the United States would be nothing but a myth.

The case now before the Supreme Court is thus more than a legal dispute. It is a test of character - for the justices, for the nation, for the idea of democracy itself. Will America finally recognize that equality does not lie in the absence of race but in the acknowledgment of its consequences? Or will it repeat the old reflex - the reflex to erase everything Black from history in order to feel innocent again? If the Supreme Court follows that path, the country will not merely fall back. It will expose itself - as a democracy that has learned to dress oppression in judgments, and still applauds itself for it.

Our prognosis - after months of observation, research, and conversations in the courts

After everything we have seen and documented since the beginning of the proceedings - in hearings, briefs, background conversations, and judicial undertones - much points to a familiar pattern: the Supreme Court will not attack the Voting Rights Act head-on but will gradually hollow it out. It will not issue a ruling openly directed against Black voters but one that pretends not to see skin color anymore. That is where the danger lies. The Court will likely declare that race must not be “overconsidered” in redistricting - while ignoring that it has never ceased to be the decisive factor in reality. They will speak of “equality” but mean indifference. Of “constitutional principles” but mean power.

What follows will not be a judicial thunderclap but a quiet, cold judgment. One that leaves an impression of order while cementing structural injustice. The Supreme Court will use the language of justice to mask the spirit of racism - and that is precisely the perfection of this system: it makes discrimination sound like refined English. For Black voters in Louisiana, Alabama, and across the South, it will mean less representation, less influence, less voice. And for America as a whole: further proof that democracy can be destroyed without being abolished - simply by declaring it “balanced.”

In the coming weeks, we will open doors that America prefers to keep closed. We will take you into spaces where loud politics ends and the darkest structures begin: into the hidden networks of neo-Nazis, Trump circles, and Klan offshoots, into the legal workshops that legitimize racist power, and into the salons where the language of democracy is dressed in paragraphs. Through our research, we have been able to open backroom doors; we will present documents, photos, and testimonies that show how historical violence continues in suits and files - and how its influence reaches even beyond the Atlantic.

This is not a mere inventory - it is an investigation that demands the public’s conscience. You will see an America you have never seen before: not louder, but deeper; not mythological, but factual; and uncomfortable in a clarity that cannot be ignored.