The Jew banker–world control paranoia was echoed by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, when he attacked what he called “the Clinton Machine” for meeting secretly with moneyed donors. “We’ve seen this firsthand in the WikiLeaks documents,” he thundered in one characteristic speech. “In which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends, and her donors.” At one point, Trump released a meme on Twitter that showed Clinton smirking against a backdrop of stacks of cash. Next to her was a red six-pointed star, which read “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” He later insisted it was meant to be a “sheriff’s star,” not a Star of David.

Not coincidentally, the 2016 election saw the meteoric rise of the so-called alt-right, a group that will cop to being nationalists but has different reactions to being called racist, ranging from indignant denial to shrugging acceptance (the Proud Boys, for instance, are a nationalist men’s group who rather dubiously insist they have no racist overtones—and threaten to sue news outlets who report otherwise—but will cheerfully acknowledge being Islamophobic). The best-known US figure is Richard Spencer, who is an open racist interested in forming a white ethno-state. (Spencer’s views on Jewish people are somewhat veiled: he’s been explicit that he considers Jews a race unto themselves, and has tweeted dismissively about the “Holocaust industry” after Trump cut millions from the budget for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.)

Spencer was made famous by an ocean of not-mean-enough profiles by mainstream media outlets, many of them marveling that he had a discernible chin, a passable haircut, and owned a suit. He popularized the term “alternative right” in 2011 when he first took over the National Policy Institute, a dusty academic racist organization that he managed to turn into his personal vehicle for stardom. Seeking political power and public acceptability, Spencer’s goal was to keep a careful distance from unabashed racists like those who gathered in Kentucky (though he did, at various times, have a respectful working relationship with Heimbach).

To that end he effectively built relationships with alt-right types across Europe, working toward a global movement. Spencer created a company, Altright Corporation, with the leaders of Arktos Media, a Swedish bookseller, which claims to be the leading (and probably only) publisher of the alt-right, as well as with a European white supremacist YouTube channel called Red Ice. The goal of the new partnership, Spencer told Buzzfeed News when it was first announced, was to extend connections with his fellow European ideologues to help “displace the conservative movement.”

Patrik Hermansson, an activist from Sweden in the group Hope Not Hate, infiltrated the alt-right movement both in the United States and abroad and spent several months among its leaders. Given their glorification of Norse culture, he was welcomed with open arms. What he discovered was a world that looked remarkably like standard-issue neo-Nazism, one of “extreme racism, antisemitism, Holocaust denial, esoteric Nazi rituals, and wild conspiracy theories … a movement that sometimes glorifies Nazi Germany, openly supports genocidal ideas and is unrelentingly racist, sexist, and homophobic.”

That evening in the field in Kentucky the unapologetic, ungenteel variant of hatred was blasted at top volume by Art Jones, the elderly anti-Semite from Illinois with a surprisingly strong set of lungs. “Now President Trump, he has surrounded himself with hordes of Jews,” he yelled, not entirely accurately. “Including a Jew in his own family!” His audience, seated at long wooden tables under a white tent, muttered in disgusted agreement, save for two little girls who were coloring obliviously. “I’m sorry I voted for the son of a bitch,” he shouted some more. A woman bounced a fretful baby; a squat little man in a tan shirt and a swastika armband poked around behind Jones at the lectern, looking for another beer.

Ostensibly, poor whites from Kentucky were the reason the racists had trekked out to Pikeville. But the actual townspeople of Pikeville weren’t present at the gathering. A local man donated his land for the white nationalists to use—his sympathies were unclear—but almost every one of the attendees was from out of state.

The forces of whiteness were a varied bunch: some of them were young racists and some were slightly older. The National Socialist Movement was there, a neo-Nazi party whose leader, “Commander” Jeff Schoep, lives in Detroit. (The NSM’s use of military titles is part of a pretension to military rigor that’s common among white supremacist groups.) The Global Crusaders: Order of the Ku Klux Klan were there, an arm of the KKK that seemed especially young: most of them were from Alabama, skinny, acne-pocked, chicken-necked. A few representatives from the Original Knight Riders Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were beside them, older guys in paramilitary black; one went by the name Sky Soldier and bore an unsettling resemblance to Willie Nelson. He shyly handed me his card when I asked for an interview. SOLDIERS OF GOD, it read, MILITANT CHRISTIANS SINCE 1118 A.D.

Vanguard America was there, too, a younger, hipster-looking white nationalist group that seemed to make everyone else a bit uncomfortable, although its members’ sentiments were indistinguishable from the party line: a separate country for whites, Muslims out, beware the Jew. (“Know your enemy,” one of their flyers read, over a sagging, eyeless visage of George Soros wearing a red Star of David on his lapel. “He knows you.)”

And Brian “Sonny” Thomas was there, a white nationalist from Ohio with a graying mullet and a love for classic rock. He made headlines in 2010 for tweeting about wanting to shoot Latinos (“Illegals everywhere today! So many spicks makes me feel like a speck. Grr. Where’s my gun?”), despite having had a child with a Latina woman. He ran an online radio show and periodically popped up in the local news for doing things like unfurling Confederate flags during school board meetings; a state politician got in trouble not long before the conference for appearing on his show to promote a ban on sanctuary cities.

I wandered over to Thomas to chat. “Are you gonna be fair?” he demanded.

“I hope so,” I replied. He grinned and genially lapsed into a long near-monologue on a variety of subjects: Donald Trump (“He’s totally surrounded by cucks and Jews,” he says, using the derisive supremacist term for a conservative sellout or a weakling of any kind); the president’s recent bombing of Syria (an outrage, we agreed, for different reasons); Venezuela; states’ rights; fathers’ rights; the gold standard; Charleston mass shooter Dylann Roof (a false-flag attack, Thomas thought, or maybe simply a victim of MKUltra or similar mind control). He was also concerned about child molestation: “Deep within the upper echelons of power, there’s a lot of pedophilia,” Thomas explained. “It’s arrogance. These people think they can’t be touched.” Pizzagate had made inroads here, too, although nobody used that name for it.

Thomas blamed most of the world’s problems on the globalists, people like CNN founder Ted Turner and Bill Gates, but placed America’s moral decline firmly at the feet of the Jews: “The whole media is owned by six companies, which are all owned by Jews.” But he could feel a new and encouraging shift, he added: “I can talk to people like you at a gas pump and we’re not talking in hushed tones, you know? Communication is the first step.”

“I’m Jewish,” I told him. His face registered several different shades of polite surprise.

“That’s fine!” he said at last, reassuringly. “You might think I’m full of shit. And that’s fine.”

Art Jones, the yelling elderly anti-Semite, hailed from the Chicago suburbs and was the head of the America First Committee, a group of which he seemed to be the sole member. He’d been generating headlines since the 1970s for making outrageously bigoted statements, like calling the Holocaust “a big international extortion plot that was greatly exaggerated.” He also ran repeatedly, unsuccessfully, for Congress. His wife came along, too, wordless and frail-looking, wearing a tragic wig and blocky glasses. An old Chicago Reader profile of Jones from 1994 includes a revealing, heartbreaking anecdote: Jones’s father, a World War II veteran, was outraged to see American neo-Nazis goose-stepping down the street. He ran out from the pub where he was drinking, fists up, ready to kick the ass of the man leading the Nazis. When he saw that it was his own son, he collapsed in tears and walked away.

There were only a few women present, and four or five children. Otherwise, the crowd was male. As I was pondering that, I noticed Mike Enoch wandering among them, a white supremacist cohost for a show called The Daily Shoah on a site he ran called The Right Stuff. Back in January, Enoch temporarily vanished in disgrace when it was revealed by anti-fascists who doxxed him (published his real name and other personal information) that his wife had Jewish heritage. Enoch’s cohosts said he was temporarily unavailable to host the show because he was in the process of separating from her.

Meanwhile, Heimbach and a few TWP helpers were focused on corralling a small group of reporters, whom the crowd was eyeing warily.

“Can the Lugenpresse please come forward?” Heimbach boomed cheerfully, using the Nazi term for the lying press. We walked over as the crowd giggled.

“No media past the Porta-Potties this way,” he said, gesturing. “That’s for everyone who wants privacy.”

“I’m in a fuckin’ union job,” one guy cracked. He was wearing a T-shirt that read MY BOSS IS AN AUSTRIAN PAINTER. “I don’t give a shit.” The white supremacists chortled. This friendly, convivial evening was unusual. For a very long time, white supremacist groups were riven by disagreements and factionalism and infighting. “There was bad blood,” Thomas explained. “Things were said. Girlfriends were stolen.” It was more than that: a lot of racist groups in the United States fall apart almost as quickly as they are formed, either because their members murder one another or because they end up in prison. But in the age of Trump, racists were hoping to usher in a new era of cooperation and an advancement for the white, Jew-less, Muslim-less, Latino-less country of which they all dreamed.

“It’s not about the uniform you wear or the colors you fly,” “Commander” Schoep of the NSM told the audience. He was wearing a pinstripe suit, for some reason, which looked out of place in the context of his being in a grassy field with men in pseudomilitary outfits. “It’s about the color of our skin. Our enemies have thrived on our infighting, but nationalism is rising in the United States.”

Still, the turnout was a little disappointing: in the end, this mass meeting of the champions of whiteness amounted to about one hundred people, quietly eating fried chicken and biscuits out of Styrofoam containers as speaker after speaker droned on at a rickety podium. As the speakers wound down, they turned to their anxieties about the following afternoon, when a rally was planned in downtown Pikeville. They expected anti-fascist counterprotesters to show up, and both sides had been talking a big game online: after recent violent clashes at Auburn University and UC Berkeley, they thought that Pikeville might be the next explosive battleground. “If I see anybody running or breaking ranks, you better hope the Reds catch you,” Schoep told the crowd. “You better hope the antifa catch you.”

They needed to make a good impression on the townspeople, too, “Major” Mike Schloar of the NSM sternly reminded everyone. “I told people at a rally in Harrisburg last month, ‘Don’t use foul language or racial slurs,’” he commanded the audience, irate. “Apparently people had their ears closed. We’re going to be in front of a lot of media. Keep it clean. Don’t use any foul language: spic, spook, kike, gook—do I have to go through a whole list?” The crowd tittered. “If you say something at some hoodrat ghetto thug, they’ll think you’re no better.”

The big question is always whether racist ideas are spreading. How much damage can they do? How does the rank contagion of their prejudice affect the rest of us? The contagion certainly isn’t spreading very far or fast: in an August 2017 poll by ABC News and the Washington Post, just 9 percent of those surveyed said it was “acceptable” to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views. Ten percent said they supported the alt-right movement, while 50 percent said they opposed it (the remaining 40 percent had no opinion, indicating they weren’t familiar with the meaning of the terms).

There was wide division of opinion about whether the alt-right held white supremacist views: one 40-percent segment of those surveyed said it did, while another 40-percent segment said it did not. A more recent study by a University of Alabama researcher found that though people might not use the term “alt-right,” plenty of white Americans are willing to say they agree with those beliefs. “Roughly 5.64 percent of America’s 198 million non-Hispanic whites have beliefs consistent with the alt-right’s worldview,” the author George Hawley wrote, or about eleven million Americans.

Whatever the figure, barely veiled racist ideas drew closer to the mainstream after 2016 than they had been for a while or should ever be. Trump, after all, ran on a platform of xenophobic populism that proved attractive to a lot of people: he continued to use the slogan “America First” long after groups like the Anti-Defamation League pointed out its controversial (and conspiratorial) history. The original America First Committee opposed the United States’ entering World War II for reasons both isolationist and anti-Semitic. In 1941, Charles Lindbergh, a spokesperson for the group, blamed American Jewish leaders for rushing the country into conflict: “I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people,” he said. “Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”

Moreover, much of the TWP’s specific rhetoric on immigration—its fretting about “mass migration” from non-white countries—is about two steps away from actual policy of the Republican Party and the White House. Trump launched his presidential campaign with an infamous speech about Mexican “rapists” and “criminals” crossing the border. Former Breitbart chairman and White House advisor Steve Bannon made the ills of legal immigration and accepting refugees a cornerstone of his politics, and racist rhetoric existed on Breitbart for years, tagging some stories as “Black Crime.” The alt-right figure Jason Reza Jorjani claimed to have had “connections” with the Trump White House, although these ended when Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon were ousted, he said.

No small number of marginal anti-immigrant groups have also made their way into the mainstream. The far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform was, in the early 1980s, a fringe organization, fear-mongering about immigrants sneaking across the border, filling the country with garbage, and stealing jobs. Today, FAIR and such related groups as the Center for Immigration Studies have wide support in the Republican Party. All of them advocate for a drastic reduction in legal immigration, and, not that far under the surface, there is the implication that nonwhite immigrants mean to do us harm. The Trump administration listened, dedicating itself to mass deportations, tightened immigration rules, and a brutal new chapter of increased power for Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Trump himself also frequently used crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, particularly murders, as talking points in his stump speeches and on Twitter.

FAIR’s specific allies inside the White House presumably included advisors Kellyanne Conway, who publicly defended policies such as separating migrant children from their parents, and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller; Conway also did polling for years on behalf of the anti-Muslim Center for Security Policy, a group led by Frank Gaffney, who claimed that Obama was a secret Muslim and that the government was overrun by secret members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaffney, whose center distributed pamphlets urging people to oppose mosques opening in their communities, was praised by Bannon as “one of the senior thought leaders and men of action in this whole war against Islamic radical jihad.” He was even reportedly brought on at one point to advise the Trump campaign.

Another former White House defense advisor, Sebastian Gorka, also had a reported history of associating with far-right and anti-Semitic groups in Hungary, where he spent much of his adult life. He denied being anti-Semitic, but Gorka and his wife, Katharine, built their careers as self-identified experts in radical Islamic terrorism and what he calls “global jihadism.” In NPR interviews Gorka declined to say whether the Trump administration considers Islam a religion, and counterterrorism experts told the Washington Post that his ideas about Islam and terror are “dangerously oversimplified.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations has a simpler descriptor for the Gorkas: “Islamophobes.” After Gorka left the White House, he landed as a bloviator on Fox News.

Beyond the Trump White House, 2017 and 2018 also saw an uptick in the number of white supremacists running for office. Paul Nehlen, an unapologetic anti-Semite with a maliciously, gleefully provocative Internet presence—he was eventually banned from Twitter—ran to replace House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin. James Allsup, a twenty-two-year-old affiliated with the hate group Identity Evropa, won a Republican precinct committee officer position in Washington State. A man named Steve Smith, associated with the Pennsylvania skinhead group Keystone United, had won a similar position there in 2012 and was reelected in 2016. Corey Stewart, a candidate whose main issue involved preserving the Confederate flag, won the Republican primary in a Virginia district, even after being pictured in a grinning buddy clinch with Jason Kessler, an infamous “pro-white” blogger who went on to organize the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And Art Jones, the Pikeville speaker, became a semi-successful candidate by winning his Republican primary race in Illinois after no one else bothered to run, given that the district was heavily Democratic. “I snookered them,” he exulted to Politico. “I played by the rules, what can I say?”

Matthew Heimbach was cheered, certainly, by the rise of Trumpism, by the more open discussion of white supremacist ideas in the public square, by various kinds of fellow travelers making their way into electoral races. But his vision for America was one that would preferably see it fracturing into little pieces. A realist of sorts, he liked the idea of forming separate nation states within the United States, even, he assured me, leaving space for the deluded souls who still believe in diversity.

“My hope is that we can agree that this was cute and a nice experiment but it didn’t work,” he said, referring to the republic of fifty states united as one. “If there are areas that want to be multicultural, they can do that. We just kind of want to opt out. If there are other people who want to be more progressive and multicultural, you should be able to do that. And if Idaho, Kentucky, and Tennessee want to opt out and be a white ethno-state, they should be allowed to do that. If the black belt in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia wants to be self-determined like the Black Panthers, I don’t see why they shouldn’t, or Chicanos in the American Southwest.” In the end, he said, “I don’t want to force anyone to live in a way they don’t want to. I don’t want anyone to force me to live in a way I don’t want to.”

Heimbach also outlined what sounded like a reasonable set of immediate policy proposals, designed, it seemed to me, to appeal to a liberal reporter’s sympathies. The events in eastern Kentucky were planned there “because it’s a place where the war on poverty was launched. Democrats and Republicans alike have abandoned it. In the last ten years dental care for children has actually gotten worse after a slight improvement,” he said. “Some of these problems that have been worked on for decades are compounding each other: income inequality, long-term wage stagnation, the opioid epidemic. There’s a lot of problems.”

Heimbach also pointed to a host of environmental issues that have devastated Appalachia, like mountaintop removal mining. Especially when he spoke to reporters, he often talked about the dangers of climate change. “Donald Trump has abandoned the people when it comes to clean air and water,” he told me. “We’re coming to an area that doesn’t have any advocates and hasn’t historically. We want to be able to step in as a third-party alternative.” The sole goal of Heimbach’s proposed Nationalist Front, he concluded, was to act as a voice for the forgotten white American. “Our mission for the Nationalist Front is to have groups come together to advocate for our people.”

“Your politics must be … confusing for a lot of people,” I said, searching for the precise term.

“Whiteness is part of our policy,” he replied. “Advocating for white people. But I also really want to be able to have jobs and justice and smash capitalism and Wall Street. People usually don’t see those things intersect. Our big mission in bringing those pro-white groups together is being an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist force.”

Heimbach was good at staying on-message and being blandly pleasant a lot of the time—and he was very good at not talking about the World Jewry part when speaking to journalists, focusing instead on the kinds of story lines that proved so irresistible through the 2016 election cycle: angry white voters and how they got that way. But on the Daily Stormer, Heimbach took a different tone. “We are winning this war,” he wrote in a guest post.