Around America and the entire European world, we see that nationalism is on the rise, and young men are taking to the streets to fight for their people. No longer will the Jewish minions and their lying media hacks be allowed to dominate the public sphere; our time is now. There is no option to sit on the sidelines any longer, we must push forward in order to secure the future we so desperately desire for our families.

The final sentence is a clear echo of the white supremacist slogan coined by a man named David Lane, the so-called fourteen words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” (Lane had spearheaded the Order and died in prison, sentenced to one hundred ninety years for his involvement in the murder of Alan Berg.)

Heimbach added to his post, referring to the gathering in Kentucky:

With all of the fun and festivities it is also important to remember what we are up against. Dr. Joseph Goebbels once wrote “If someone is attacked by the Jews, that is a sure sign of his virtue. He who is not persecuted by the Jews, or who is praised by them, is useless and dangerous.” In the American context, the Jews like to hide behind their various minions whenever possible: the degenerate left and their “cuckservative” controlled opposition.

The System is agitating all of its forces against us, and when the forces of Organized Jewry are set on the warpath, it means that you are onto something.

Heimbach has occasionally lost his hold on his reasonable affability at public events, too. At a 2016 Trump rally, he reportedly shoved a black woman protester and was charged with misdemeanor harassment. The woman, Kashiya Nwanguma, sued him in civil court. In a characteristically interesting twist, Heimbach argued in court filings that Trump himself encouraged him to shove protesters when the candidate shouted, from the stage, “Get ’em out of here.” In his response to the lawsuit, Heimbach wrote that he “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J Trump” and that “any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.”

“In many ways, and some people disagree with me on this, Heimbach is David Duke 2.0,” Ryan Lenz said, referring to the infamous white supremacist and former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, who was, for a while, making inroads into American public life to a surprising and unsettling degree. Lenz, a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been talking to Heimbach for years in a sort of curious not-friendship where, as Lenz put it dryly, “he always picks up the phone when I call, for some reason.”

Heimbach “knows how to package the ideas in a way that he feels will lead to real political power in this current era,” Lenz said. “He’s smarter than Schoep and much more of a politician.” He knows “what faces to put on to make the audience that he’s talking to happy with what he says. I sometimes call him the consummate glad-hander of the radical right.”

Heimbach also took advantage of the broader cultural conversations that have occurred about why people voted a racist into office and the public resurgence of white supremacists. The temptation of journalists and pundits has been to blame white supremacist conspiracy thinking on a loss of economic status: people have lost so much and they need someone to blame. Certainly that explanation—that Trump tapped into economic anxiety and frustration—was offered to explain his popularity among conservative voters.

But Chip Berlet, a left-leaning researcher who focuses on right-wing extremism and conspiracy thinking, found that to be an overly simplistic, ahistorical framework to explain how hatred takes root. “How come the KKK grew in the boom cycle in the twenties?” he asked in a phone interview. “As many as five million or more joined. If you go back and you read the newspapers being put out by the Klan, that newspaper was obsessed with the Jews taking over America and destroying the country. It wasn’t economic. Most people were doing well. It was the fear of falling, as Barbara Ehrenreich puts it. The middle class is always afraid of falling down the economic, social or cultural ladder.” Or, perhaps, the fear of losing one’s place on a narrow ledge to someone seen as inferior.

The dinner in Kentucky ended quietly, with the white supremacists trooping back to their cars at around 10 p.m. (or, in a few cases, weaving unsteadily, reeking of beer). A campfire was dying down; the owner of the property, a paunchy local guy who looked to be in his midfifties, stood mournfully by the fire, playing a trumpet, staring into the embers.

The following morning, the antifa forces beat the white supremacists, by several hours, to downtown Pikeville; they were mostly young, with many more women, and seemed woefully unprepared to deal with angry racists with guns. Nonetheless, they traded jeers with the League of the South, a neo-Confederate secessionist group. The League hadn’t been at the previous night’s party, but they were out that day, standing alone in a large barricaded-in area in front of Pikeville’s courthouse, in the area designated for protesters.

The counterprotesters stood behind barricades on the other side of the street. State and local police were placed in between, looking grim.

“Why don’t you have any women with you?” one counterprotester yelled.

“Our women are mothers!” a League of the South guy yelled back, indignant. “They have no business with us here today!” That prompted a chorus of laughter, boos, and something I didn’t catch from a woman on the antifa side.

“We can’t understand you because we don’t speak nigger!” a League member shot back, although the woman he was screaming at was white. I heard a chorus of gasps. A moment later, a backup group of antifa arrived, seventy or so, carrying a banner that read ANTIFASCISTS WORLDWIDE UNITED. A couple were banging drums or hooting into vuvuzelas.

“Every nation, every race! Punch a Nazi in the face!” they chanted. “From the Midwest to the South, punch a Nazi in the mouth!”

Michael Hill was watching all of this in disgust. He founded the League of the South back in 1994, after, ironically, working for decades as a history professor at Stillman College, a historically black university in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. (Hill resigned in 1998; in subsequent years, according to the SPLC, he’s done things like send the names of some of his former students to a racist email list as a bit of comic relief.)

Hill, too, was worried about the Jews. “We’re always concerned about people with dual citizenship,” he said amiably. “And most American Jews have dual citizenship. A lot of problems, from the Southern perspective, come from the Jews. The Jew has been no friend to the South. They’re behind every left-wing organization that wants to take down our monuments, you know. Where we can oppose them, we will.”

He stopped to curl his lip at the counterprotesters. “Look at that crowd,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “Cheering on their own destruction.”

It was hours before Heimbach and the rest of the white brigade arrived (according to the Guardian, one leader blamed their lateness on car trouble). They took up their place in the designated area to lots of booing from the other side of the barricades.

Then, despite all their posturing, for the next several hours everyone just stayed put: the police, the protesters on their respective sides, and a gaggle of local folks, looking on in dismay.

“These people aren’t from here,” a man in a Johnny Cash T-shirt complained. (He declined to tell me his name: “I work for the government. I’m not giving you my name.”) “Neither side. They’ve singled us out for some unknown reason. This is pathetic. This entire fiasco. Please don’t portray the locals like we’re part of this. None of us were involved.”

He looked back and forth between the two sides, getting heated. “Do they even realize there are black coal miners?” he asked, shaking his head. He pointed out that Pikeville—a university town—also has a hospital with an excellent medical school. “We have a large Islamic population here now. I owe my life to a doctor from Palestine.

“I’m not naive,” he said, before walking away. He knew that Pikeville has its racists. “But we’re not all dumb hillbillies.”

They might have all stayed put, but they didn’t keep quiet. “You’re on the side of the Jews who own the banks!” a League of the South protester yelled energetically across the street. The NSM guys chimed in, leading a rousing chant of “Race traitor cucks! Race traitor cucks!”

“Shut the fuck up!” the antifa side of the street chanted back cheerfully.

I walked around the back of the white supremacist pen to chat with the current leader of Vanguard America, who was standing guard, holding a very large German military assault rifle. “Commander Dillon,” as he called himself, was a young a former marine (his real name is Dillon Hopper, I later learned, changed from Dillon Irizarry). After a few minutes of pained conversation I managed to elicit that he was from New Mexico.

“Me too!” I said delightedly. I told him that as a child, my family split time between Santa Fe, where I mostly grew up, and a ranch that my dad and uncle ran in southern New Mexico, in a town so small Dillon had never heard of it.

“That’s weird,” he muttered.

We got to talking about the Jews. Like Michael Hill, he was pretty sure we all have dual citizenship, and he’d like us to go “back to Israel” under his preferred form of nation-state.

“What about me?” I asked. “I’m not from Israel. I’m from where you are.”

Dillon looked at me thoughtfully. “Well, it’s complicated,” he said at last.

After hours in the broiling sun listening to antifa yelling and Nazi droning, it was over: a column of state police in riot gear appeared out of nowhere and led the white supremacists out of their pen, back to their cars. The antifa and other counterprotesters followed, still staying safely across the street. An NSM member posed next to his ratty Toyota Corolla for a photographer. A guy in a muscle tank top reading DONALD PUMP and with a ’roided-out image of the president stood in the back of a pickup truck, yelling insults. Some of the youngest neo-Nazis piled into a sagging Honda together and sarcastically waved at me as they pulled away. I smirked at them and waved back, although I wasn’t sure what I meant by doing so.

What is it that I spent the day looking at? From one angle, it all seemed like a shabby, threadbare showing by a bunch of hateful shitheads with no real money or power behind them: sweaty white guys in ridiculous uniforms perspiring under a merciless sun, while the locals they came to save wished they’d all just go away.

But I knew that there are more people like them who didn’t make an appearance. And what worried me, particularly, was the youth of the ones who did show up. I was thinking about the readers of the Daily Stormer, which promoted the rally. Andrew Anglin, the site’s founder, was in his early thirties, Ohio-born, shave-headed, and in photographs, slightly bug-eyed; in 2012 he launched a website called Total Fascism. That one wasn’t very popular, but his audience grew: the Daily Stormer is believed to reach about 220,000 readers in the United States every month, according to Quantcast data.

That’s less than a needle in the haystack of Internet traffic; more of a pinprick on the face of the sun. Nonetheless, it can have a real impact. In the spring of 2017, Anglin was sued by the SPLC for inciting what it called a “troll storm” against a Jewish real estate agent in Montana named Tanya Gersh. Richard Spencer’s mother, Sherry Spencer, accused Gersh of trying to pressure her into selling her property in Montana. And in support, Anglin rallied his readers to send vile threats and harassment to Gersh, her family, and her twelve-year-old son, much of it Holocaust-themed. After the SPLC lawsuit, Anglin’s readers raised about $150,000 dollars for his legal defense fund. Anglin didn’t attend the Kentucky rally in person, though—he seemed to be hiding at the time (rumored to be in Germany or the Philippines or a remote part of Russia, though I personally believe he was in a relative’s basement in Ohio somewhere). But his readers were there, people willing to get off the computer and spill into the street.

Even then, it was hard to envision most of these men ever getting or maintaining real political power, given that some of the leaders were too scared to show up, and given how damp-browed and maladjusted and just plain at a loss they are in dealing with the larger world. They even seemed unnerved by little old me: I stayed at a Holiday Inn in Pikeville alongside a bunch of League of the South guys and a few scattered white supremacist types from the East Coast. To my great delight, they meekly fled the breakfast bar every time I entered the room, a sort of one-woman reverse invasion of Poland.

Still, the rally had some of its intended effect: a show of force, however small, and the media attention that went along with it. Heimbach beamed the whole day, basking in the glow of a dozen television interviews, being chased by a perspiring blond documentarian who had been filming him throughout the weekend in Kentucky. “I’m very happy,” he told a camera.

Sonny Thomas, the mulleted racist from Ohio, came by to chat as the rally wound down. He was wearing a bright-red WHITE PRIDE T-shirt, and he seemed happy, too. “Went pretty good,” he said, and wandered off.

A minute later, he returned. “I know you’re a Jew and all,” he said, not quite looking at me. “But you’re a beautiful woman.” He grabbed my hand and kissed it, then walked away without looking back.

The relative peace at Pikeville turned out to be misleading. A few months later, in the fall of 2017, at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, given the name Unite the Right, the peace imploded. Most of the same groups showed up again: Heimbach and the TWP, Vanguard America, some KKK affiliates. Marching with Vanguard, wearing their polo-and-khakis uniform, was James Alex Fields, Jr., a twenty-year-old from Ohio. A few hours later, in front of a horrified crowd and dozens of cameras, he drove his Dodge Charger directly into marching counterprotesters as they turned up a narrow side street, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding dozens of others.

Beyond Heyer’s horrific death, the event was marred by countless other acts of white supremacist violence: a black man named DeAndre Harris was beaten nearly to death in a parking garage by a group of white men. (He was arrested on a felony charge of “unlawful wounding” while most of the people who attacked him initially remained free. The man who filed charges against Harris, Harold Ray Crews, described himself as a “Southern Nationalist.”) A man in a bulletproof vest fired a gun at the ground near a group of counterprotesters while shouting racial slurs (after initially pointing the gun directly at one of them, a guy holding a flamethrower). Unlike the police in Pikeville, who kept the two sides apart, the Charlottesville police were quite absent, standing aside until they decided to disperse both sides.

Commander Dillon of Vanguard said he hadn’t been in Charlottesville and denied that Fields was a member of his organization. He claimed Fields had been photographed with them due to “poor leadership and uncoordination” at the event. “This was a major disaster, with a life taken, this is reprehensible behavior that I personally would never tolerate in my ranks,” he wrote to me. Fields had been photographed in their uniform, holding one of their shields because, Dillon said, “Our dress code is public knowledge. A simple white polo shirt and brown slacks is all one would need to blend in. At past events other groups, including ours have worn the same attire to appear larger in number and not isolate ourselves via clothing. I do not know what this man’s intentions were but I can only assume they were nothing more than vile and disturbing.”

In a Vice documentary about Charlottesville, Chris Cantwell, another racist media personality who’d also been in Kentucky, unpacked a small arsenal onto his hotel bed.

“We’re not nonviolent,” he assured reporter Elle Reeve. “We’ll fucking kill these people if we have to.”

I realized that my preoccupation with the size of the racist right, the number of supporters, was not exactly relevant. The movement didn’t have to be big. It didn’t have to have mainstream support or the ear of the White House. All it took was one person with immovable beliefs and a willingness to do what his fellow travelers publicly insisted was unacceptable or unthinkable.

Even then, a new and particularly vile conspiracy theory was taking form: alt-right trolls and neo-Nazis, including Anglin himself, claimed that Heather Heyer died from a heart attack, not because she was run down by a car. They implied that she was out of shape and bleeding-heart liberals were trying to pin her death on the Charlottesville marchers to vilify them. A medical examiner’s report released two months later showed clearly that she died from blunt force trauma to the chest.

Not surprisingly, the man who filmed Fields driving his car into the crowd became implicated in another bizarre conspiracy web. Brennan Gilmore, a Virginia native, took part in the counterprotest; he is also a former State Department employee, which struck some people as very suspicious. Gilmore released the footage of the collision because, from his vantage point, he believed it was indisputably intentional, that Fields had rammed the crowd on purpose, careening down an empty street to do so. Gilmore gave several media interviews making that point, and then the predictable happened: Nazis and the online detectives and the online Nazi detectives started trying to figure out who he truly worked for.

“They wrote that I was a CIA operative, funded by (choose your own adventure) George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the IMF/World Bank, and/or a global Jewish mafia to orchestrate the Charlottesville attack in order to turn the general public against the alt-right,” he wrote in Politico. “I had staged the attack and then worked with MSNBC and other outlets controlled by the left to spread propaganda. They claimed my ultimate goal was to start a race war that would undermine and then overthrow Donald Trump on behalf of the ‘Deep State.’”

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, eleven people sued the Unite the Right organizers, including Heimbach, Spencer, and Jason Kessler. The League of the South was also named as a defendant, as were two KKK groups—the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the East Coast Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—and Vanguard America, putting all of the newly formed Nationalist Front in danger of being sued out of existence. When Kessler tried to hold a follow-up Unite the Right rally a year later, only about two dozen participants showed up, drowned out by thousands and thousands of people who flooded into Washington, DC, to oppose them.

A few months before the flopped Unite the Right 2, the Traditionalist Worker Party fell apart when Matt Parrott, who was also Heimbach’s father-in-law, found out that Heimbach was having an affair with his wife. In the melee that ensued, police said, Heimbach physically assaulted his own wife and Parrott. The Heimbachs divorced, and in September 2018, per the SPLC, Heimbach pleaded guilty to assaulting Parrott. Soon after entering his guilty plea, Heimbach began working as “community outreach director” for the National Socialist Movement.

As these white supremacist movements and their leaders flamed out, collapsing under the weight of sordid affairs and major lawsuits, other groups were gaining steam. A tiny paramilitary neo-Nazi cell called the Atomwaffen Division, first founded in 2015, started to show up more and more frequently in the news. It bore a disturbing similarity to the Order, which had murdered Jewish radio host Alan Berg; its materials called for acts of violence to destroy “the System,” and they were engaged in active weapons training. The group was linked to five murders across the United States, including the knifing death of Blaze Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student stabbed more than twenty times. Atomwaffen were believed to be recruiting through literature they distributed on college campuses.