Al Jazeera correspondent Phil Lavelle visited Boone County, Arkansas, to interview Thomas Robb, the 35-year head of what was formerly the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — now rebranded as The Knights Party. What he found was a white supremacist organisation performing a cosmetic makeover while its core doctrine remains unaltered: no Black people in the church, no non-white people count as American regardless of birthplace, and a racial litmus test for national belonging that Robb stated plainly on camera. The rebrand playbook is familiar. Robb dropped the "grand wizard" title for "national director," allowed mail-in membership to reduce the stigma of showing up in person, and reframed the group's message around "family and faith." But the moment Lavelle pressed on specifics — would a Black person be welcome? Are US-born children of Muslim immigrants American? — the old architecture surfaced intact. "I don't care where he's born. He's not American," Robb said of Michigan-born Abdul El-Sayed, because "they're white" is the only criterion for belonging. The more significant data point is not Robb's group but the environment it's operating in. The Public Religion Research Institute's 2025 survey of more than 20,000 US adults found 32 percent agreed that "immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background" — the foundational claim of great replacement theory. That's not a fringe. That's a structural constituency. The Southern Poverty Law Center counts at least 152 active white supremacist organisations in the US, part of what it calls a rising trend over the past decade. The Patriot Front marched through Washington, DC, on Independence Day this year. These groups operate in an environment where the sitting president has told The New York Times that "white people were very badly treated" in academics, dismantled federal diversity initiatives, launched probes into whether universities and companies like Nike discriminate against white people, and prioritised white South Africans in refugee admissions based on a false genocide claim. Robb himself claims the current wave began in 2008 with Obama's election, not with Trump. But the distinction matters less than the feedback loop: mainstream political rhetoric normalises the grievance framework, organised groups offer a home for those grievances, and the rhetorical overlap between the two grows harder to distinguish. Trump dined with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes in 2022. He described the Charlottesville clash — where a white nationalist killed a counter-protester — as involving "fine people on both sides." What's notable about the Robb interview is its candour about the movement's limits. He acknowledged that formal membership is "a line they're a little hesitant to cross." He refused to provide membership numbers. "Maybe we're wrong. Maybe everybody hates us. I don't know," he said. The organised KKK remains a small, stigmatised group. The more potent force is the ideological diffusion: the 32 percent who hold the belief without joining any group, and the political infrastructure that validates their worldview without wearing the robes. The twenty-year question is not whether the Knights Party grows — it probably won't in any meaningful organisational sense. It's whether the ideology the KKK once had a monopoly on continues to mainstream through political rhetoric, policy, and media. The rebrand is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is that one in three Americans now agrees with the premise.
