“The white majority are fed up with all of these lying, cheating, thieving, war-mongering, child-molesting, political pimps and whores,” Arthur “Art” Jones roared. “Of this corrupt and decadent two-party, Jew-party, queer-party system!” He was gesturing wildly, waving liver-spotted hands. At his throat, his tie quivered, bedecked with a two-headed enamel pin: an American flag and a red flag with a black swastika, fused together.

It was a glorious, soft late April evening in 2017, and a coalition of white supremacists were gathered high in the lush green foothills of southeastern Kentucky. Their meeting place was a grassy, lumpy field on private land, overtaken with trucks and dotted with a few tents and a duo of Porta-Potties. A very pale, very male crowd, laughing and smoking, was lingering among the cars as the sun set. A guy who looked to be barely out of his teens bounced by, wearing a T-shirt for the Daily Stormer, a website popular with neo-Nazi Internet trolls. A bald man with a neat, professorial beard and round silver glasses stopped in front of me and the photographer I was traveling with.

“Do y’all have any unscented lotion?” he inquired, gesturing at the new tattoo on his leg, scabbed over and looking itchy. We didn’t, but I made a show of looking in my purse anyway, to be friendly, I guess. The purpose of the evening, after all, was to make new friends, to try to bring together disparate racist groups into a harmonious whole, to denounce the vicious Jewish cabal enslaving the country and the world, and to prepare for possible war the following day.

For Matthew Heimbach, this meeting of the different groups was a moment he’d been waiting for his whole young life. Heimbach was the founder and most recognizable face of the Traditionalist Worker Party, and at this moment in Kentucky, he was busy capitalizing on two things: increasingly open rage and disaffection from white voters, and Donald Trump’s shameless pandering to those feelings a few months into his presidency.

The TWP is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a neo-Nazi group that advocates for racially pure nations and communities and blames Jews for many of the world’s problems.” Put more simply, the TWP was Heimbach’s baby, the conduit for all his white nationalist ambitions.

Personally, I couldn’t help thinking of Heimbach and his cadres as the Social Justice Racists. At the time of the rally, Heimbach was barely twenty-five, chubby and beaming, with a beard creeping up his face and down his neck. He lived in a trailer in Indiana with a wife, a baby son, and another one on the way. He often mentioned his family when he was getting floridly poetic about his determination to organize in defense of the downtrodden white man.

Heimbach’s focus on his family would seem quite ironic in a little over a year, when he was humiliated and the TWP fell apart after it was revealed that he was accused of domestic abuse and had had an affair with the wife of his father-in-law, Matthew Parrot, cofounder of the TWP. Meanwhile, though, his popularity was at its peak, due to his affable demeanor, his ability to forge alliances, and his surprising set of policy positions. Heimbach’s TWP was against climate change but supported better drinking water and healthcare in poor, heavily white regions of the country. He talked a lot about Appalachian children’s teeth and the safety net that failed their parents. The TWP also fulminated against “mass immigration” and promised that under the glorious white ethno-state it hoped to build, only “white Caucasians who are descendants of indigenous Europeans” would be allowed to immigrate, and would, moreover, have to assimilate “to the dominant culture for the sake of national unity.”

Slightly more quietly, Heimbach wanted to see white supremacist groups organize in a concerted way against their common enemy, world Jewry, which was the purpose of the evening in Kentucky: the rebranding and relaunch of a white nationalist coalition, uniting several groups—the TWP, the National Socialist Movement, Vanguard America, and League of the South—to be called the Nationalist Front. This was, in fact, the second try at forming such a coalition: the first was launched by the NSM in Georgia in April 2016 and called the Aryan Nationalist Alliance. The TWP joined several months later. The coalition had decided to re-form around November 2016, with the Southern Poverty Law Center speculating that the NSM was, at Heimbach’s encouragement, trying to lightly veil its appreciation for Hitler.

In early 2017, the TWP announced that it would hold a rally and conference for the white nationalist groups near Pikeville, Kentucky, a small town in a region that was hard hit by the collapse of the coal industry. Between 2010 and 2015, the county lost 5 percent of its population, driven elsewhere to look for work. Pike County is an overwhelmingly white area, and about 80 percent of its registered voters went for Trump. “We didn’t vote for Trump because we’re racist,” Chase Goodman, who’d lived in Pikeville most of his life, explained to me. “We just want our fuckin’ coal jobs back.”

Heimbach hoped to tap into the thick, ropey veins of anger and despair over those lost jobs; he was also hoping to be there when the anger turned on the new president. Just before the rally, he told me that he felt the common man’s inevitable disappointment with Trump would work to his advantage. “I knew he wasn’t one of us,” he said. “I never thought he was a closet white nationalist. I was just hoping he would buy us more time and further polarize politics, which he has done.”

In time, he said, the white working class would reject Trump and the Republican Party more generally: “They’ll lose any hope they had in conservatism. They’re not going to become Democrats. And if you like Trumpism, maybe fascism is something you’ll like. Where else can they go?”

The “conference” portion of the event was held on private land after the neo-Nazis were unable to get a permit to hold it in a state park. To get there, the photographer and I joined a convoy of cars proceeding out of a Walmart parking lot in the town of Whitesburg. A few young guys in black T-shirts wandered the lot carrying semiautomatic rifles, looking chipper.

From Whitesburg, the convoy followed a narrow, winding road through a landscape dotted with billboards for personal injury attorneys, the US Army, organ donation. As the towns got smaller, the billboards gave way to campaign signs tacked onto trees: GIBSON FOR CONSTABLE, one announced. Another: TRUMP DIGS COAL! The towns themselves turned into vanishing tiny pinpoints with alluring names: Rowdy, Dwarf, and finally Democrat, marked by a hand-lettered sign, permanent marker on plywood, stuck with an American flag in the corner. Trees crowded the road. Little girls played ball in the front yard of a house with a sagging wooden porch cluttered with stuff. They waved sweetly at the convoy of cars; the white supremacists waved back.

The slimiest, dankest pool of the overlapping conspiracy ponds is extremism, and, particularly in the United States, white supremacist-based hatred. Hate groups all over the world are fueled by terrified, wild conjectures about the people they hate, from globalist Jew bankers pulling the global strings to Islamists spreading Sharia law across America. One Klan group, the Original Knights of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, posts dire warnings on its website about the secret plots of moderate Muslims: the Common Core curriculum is, they advise, an attempt to promote “Islamic Supremacism” in schools. Supermarkets are even selling halal meat without noting that it’s halal (tricking non-Muslims into eating halal meat is, I suppose, part of some other dreadful plot).

For many of these groups, it is the Jews, above all, who are the hidden, rotten core of every evil, the most powerful foe, the hooked nose behind everything wrong in America. There are detours—white supremacists also make the vilest claims against black and Latinx people—but after many years and new flavors of hatred, the extremists have maintained one steady and consistent focus. Conspiracy theories about Jews are some of the oldest in history: depending on who you talk to, Jews have poisoned wells, stolen children for blood rituals, or formed a many-headed hydra to run the world’s governments and financial systems. Their power is legendary: “The Jew never sleeps,” said Brian Culpepper of the National Socialist Movement, addressing the crowd in Pikeville. “He works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to eradicate us.”

The history of racist extremism in America is heavily larded with conspiracy theorism: neo-Nazism is premised on secret Jewish control, of course, as well as a generous dose of Holocaust denial. The Christian Identity movement, some of whose proponents became the earliest sovereign citizens, relies on the concept that only European whites are part of the Lost Tribes of Israel, while Jews and nonwhites are those mud people plotting to enslave the world. That’s just one aspect of American hatred, which is a much longer, blood-drenched book. We’ve never been free from hate groups, whether it’s the Klan’s emergence just after the Civil War, its resurgence during the 1920s, or the birth in the early 1970s of the frequently racist far-right militia movement, beginning with the loosely organized Posse Comitatus.

A big preoccupation for conspiracy theorists on the far right, as discussed, is an imminent one-world government takeover, an army of shock troops who plan to put the country under the savage thumb of tyrannical control. (The anti-globalization movement on the so-called radical left isn’t really the same: anarchist demonstrators in Seattle in 1999 protesting the World Trade Organization, for instance, weren’t concerned with “one world government,” per se, so much as the human rights and environmental issues they saw as an endemic part of corporate-backed globalization.) Right-wing militia groups took the one-world government fear to particular lengths: they identified the New World Order as the main threat of the 1990s, and were thrown in an intense tizzy about it when they heard George H. W. Bush echo the term in a speech. Other, more Nazi-oriented folks, referred to the threat as the Zionist Occupation Government—the ZOG—a term that’s been kicking around since the mid-1970s.

Vanquishing the ZOG is a central theme in the seminal The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, founder of the National Alliance, a white supremacist group. It centers on the Order, a cell of brave white men who orchestrate a violent guerrilla war against the System, a Jewish-controlled government that has snatched everyone’s guns and made it a hate crime for white people to defend themselves against the savage hordes. Taking its name from The Turner Diaries, an actual group called the Order also borrowed its most gruesome tactics, assassinating a Jewish radio host named Alan Berg in Denver in 1984 for the crime of mocking them on-air. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was also a big fan of the book; he justified his attack by calling it a counterstrike in a war against an oppressive government system. Photocopies of pages from The Turner Diaries were found in the car driven by McVeigh just after the attack.

New World Order fears and anti-Semitism are evident even in one of the oddest conspiracy theories ever constructed, which holds that many world leaders are secretly twelve-foot-tall evil human-lizard hybrids. That pioneering concept was popularized by David Icke, a one-time sports presenter in Great Britain. In 1991, Icke disappeared for a few months, reappeared in all-turquoise garb, and declared himself the “Son of the Godhead.” He also announced that the world would end in 1997.

When that didn’t pan out, Icke tried again. His new theory, which he began advancing around 1998, is that the world is ruled by the Babylonian Brotherhood, a group of “reptilians” disguised as human world leaders, among them Queen Elizabeth, Henry Kissinger, the Clintons, and a large number of Hollywood celebrities.

Icke warned that the reptilians, which he also called by their proper name, the Anunnaki, were propelling us all toward a fascist system of one-world government. He was barred from speaking in Canada in 1999, after many organizations took his talk of lizard domination to be a reference to Jews. “HOW FUNNY!” Icke wrote, in caps for some reason, in a release about being unable to enter the country. “SINCE I BEGAN TALKING ABOUT THE REPTILIAN CONNECTION, THE OPPOSITION HAS BEEN INCREASED SUBSTANTIALLY.” In the same missive, he called the allegations of anti-Semitism “a fiction,” while referring to the Anti-Defamation League as an “Illuminati front.”

While he might have at first meant human-lizard hybrids, in subsequent years Icke’s theories shifted toward a scenario in which the Earth is, in fact, controlled by a global cabal with Israel at its center. It’s not blatantly anti-Semitic—more like blatantly anti-Zionist—but Icke does argue that what he calls “Rothschild Zionists” are lurking among the vast masses of ordinary Jews, plotting all manner of dark deeds. “Rothschild Zionism is an elite secret society at its rotten core,” he wrote in 2015. “And the people I am naming here and so many more are not agents of Jewish people as a whole, but agents of the secret society that has mercilessly manipulated the Jewish population for centuries to advance its goals.” He’s also made frequent reference to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic forgery, making his claims that he’s only talking about some Jews significantly less believable.

Icke’s heyday was in the 1990s, around the same era that proved to be an especially fruitful time for the more serious hate groups in the United States. Extremist organizations have tended to wax and wane, and although a few died out or changed form (specifically the last of the Posse Comitatus crowd, whose main organizers faded away), there was also a resurgence of public neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, beginning in the late 1980s and taking off in 1998. The militia movement, a heavily armed, better organized offshoot of the earlier Patriot group, was an indisputable heir to Posse Comitatus ideas.

Neo-Nazism tends to be an ugly, distorted reflection of what is happening in the broader culture at any given moment, and the early 1990s saw a potent wave of anti-immigrant feeling, tied to an economic recession, which, though it lasted less than a year, gave rise to a disproportionate sense of scarcity. As tends to happen, a corresponding fear developed of undocumented immigrants “taking” dwindling public resources. A raft of anti-immigrant legislation was adopted, most infamously California’s Proposition 187, in 1994. Known as the Save Our State provision, it barred undocumented people from using virtually any public services in the state. It passed overwhelmingly through a voter referendum before being struck down in a court challenge five years later.

Another factor in the growth and shocking violence of the neo-Nazi movement at this time was a concept called “leaderless resistance,” popularized by former Klansman Louis Beam. He encouraged far-right hate advocates to organize in small groups and protect themselves against prying law enforcement and government eyes as they were plotting their acts. Their violence continued, and even heightened: in 1991 the Church of the Creator—founded in 1973—lauded its members for killing a black sailor named Harold Mansfield in a parking lot.

At the same time, as these groups were becoming bolder, they were also sowing the seeds of their own destruction. The Mansfield killing prompted the Southern Poverty Law Center to sue the Church of the Creator on behalf of Mansfield’s mother, Connie, seeking damages for both the pain and suffering caused by his death as well as a host of other minor crimes committed against the family in the commission of the murder, like illegal transport of firearms across state lines. The lawsuit managed to bankrupt the church into nonexistence, although a new leader, Matthew Hale, quickly emerged to restart the church. (It eventually became the World Church of the Creator and continued as a potent force until Hale’s arrest in 2003. It exists today as the “Creativity Movement.”)

Lawsuits are a tactic that has been useful several other times in defanging hate groups. In 1993, the Ku Klux Klan received a serious blow when the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan lost a lawsuit brought by the SPLC for a 1987 attack on civil rights activists marching to observe Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. After a protracted court battle, the Invisible Empire was forced to hand over its membership list and pay $37,500 to some of the civil rights marchers.

A new strain of anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking followed the September 11 attacks when various fringe websites started claiming that Jews and/or Israelis who worked in the World Trade Center were told to stay home. (Poet Amiri Baraka infamously cited the Israeli aspect of that conspiracy theory in a work called “Somebody Blew Up America.”) And the attack of course kick-started a virulent anti-Arab, anti-Islam paranoia that never dissipated: during his campaign, Trump falsely claimed to have seen crowds of Arab-looking people celebrating after the Twin Towers fell. “There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down,” he told ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos. “Not good.”

In the decade after September 11, the now-familiar menu of far-right fears and conspiracies entered deep into the mainstream: gun confiscation by the federal government, the imposition of martial law, an invasion by the UN to take all our guns, and 9/11 as an inside job (which was just as popular on the left). But in 2010, the SPLC noted a new flurry of activity on the “extreme right” of the conspiracy culture, triggered by the election of Barack Obama, who was seen by “Patriots” as a Manchurian candidate sent to usher in the New World Order. Journalist Alexander Zaitchik, writing for the SPLC, noted what he called “an anti-Semitic flavor.” Regardless of the subtle historical tides washing in and out, the persistent paranoias clung to the shore: Jews and Muslims are infiltrators. Jews want to take control through powerful institutions like the financial system and Muslims want to force everyone to convert and implement Sharia law.