One of Breitbart’s central ideas was that the left uses Hollywood as a sort of cudgel to assert its superiority over the right. Politics, Breitbart believed, is downstream from culture, and for Duke, that oft-repeated dictum became a rallying cry. “I got a wild hair up my ass,” Duke told me, “and I said, ‘I want to start taking pictures of our side and making our side look heroic.’”

In 2014, Duke found a test case in Charles Johnson, the 28-year-old conservative journalist with a reputation for online trollery. Johnson runs GotNews.com, a sensationalist website on which he has posted a number of false allegations, and WeSearchr, a crowdfunding platform that functions like a kind of vindictive Kickstarter for the right; rather than funding projects, users raise “bounties” on information that could be damaging to their ideological opponents. Looking him up on Facebook, Duke found his appearance lacking but figured he could use Johnson’s bright-red mop and thick, scruffy beard to his advantage. “I said, ‘You look like a muppet, and I want to make you look like a rock star,’” Duke recalled. “He said, ‘You can do that?’” Duke shot him outside the Los Angeles Gun Club, looking casually defiant in his Wayfarer-style sunglasses, metal rings, and gray T-shirt. “He really gets my essence,” said Johnson, who now allows only Duke to photograph him. Not long after that, Duke shot Johnson in more formal attire — on the same day Johnson, on GotNews, sought to out the anonymous University of Virginia student at the center of Rolling Stone’s now-discredited gang-rape story. (He identified the wrong woman.)

Through Johnson, who is now a close friend of Duke’s, Duke connected with several more subjects, including Cernovich, the right-wing social-media personality who helped spread the PizzaGate myth, which imagined a vast child-sex ring run by powerful Democrats out of a pizza restaurant in Washington. In December, Duke took his portrait at a protest in Los Angeles. Cernovich was sweating through his shirt when Duke found him, so he mopped him down and snapped a few shots, one of which Cernovich has used as his Twitter profile — head cropped within the frame and tilted at an angle, his slightly wet-looking hair brushed jauntily to the side and his squinting blue eyes matching his collared shirt. “My intention,” Duke said, “was to make him look like a strong, forceful personality.”

Duke had a similar idea in mind on a tranquil afternoon in February, as he photographed Anthime Gionet, the right-wing provocateur better known by his digital stage name, Baked Alaska. Wearing ripped black jeans and a camouflage T-shirt and cap, Gionet was situated before a seamless white background at a spacious studio with high, lofted ceilings in Culver City, Calif. He was squatting, froglike, and staring off into the distance. “Chin up,” said Duke, camera in hand, prostrate on the floor. “There you go,” he said, peering through the viewfinder and chuckling. “Be the frog, man, be the frog.” Duke clicked away.

Gionet, who is 29, was channeling Pepe the Frog, the cartoon amphibian appropriated as a symbol of the alt-right. Like Pepe himself, the Anchorage native was in need of an image reboot. During the election, Gionet found some fame orchestrating pro-Trump flash mobs (along with releasing a string of seemingly earnest rap videos with titles like “MAGA Anthem” and “We Love Our Cops”). But he had recently gotten himself into trouble over a series of coded anti-Semitic tweets. (“Jews control the News,” he wrote in one; in another he referenced the “JQ,” or “Jewish question.”) Duke didn’t care about that. As he saw it, Gionet was a victim of a politically correct culture. At the photo shoot, he handed Gionet a Barbie doll covered in fake blood and nailed to a cross of wooden blocks. “This is a symbol of me,” Gionet said approvingly. “I am the sacrificial lamb.”