It’s not every day that I get to talk to a former leader of the white supremacist movement, the head of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR). This past Dec. 9, I did.

On my radio show I often interview authors. One of my guests that morning was Tony McAleer, whose book is titled “The Cure for Hate: A Former White Supremacist’s Journey from Violent Extremism to Radical Compassion.”

One striking and disturbing aspect of McAleer’s story is the ordinariness of so much of it. He comes from a solidly middle-class family. His father was a doctor. As a youngster, he was “one of a dozen or so kids on the block, playing hide-and-seek or street hockey or football until the sun went down,” he writes. A neo-Nazi skinhead in the making? At the beginning there was no reason to suspect that.

“Embracing the white supremacist philosophy,” he explains, “was not the result of a single moment, but rather a slide toward normalization of the extreme...”

He moved from bullied to bully, from recipient of beatings at Catholic schools to street fighter to skinhead to intimidator, from white power music to white power. “Nobody becomes Adolf Hitler overnight,” he writes. “There is a learning curve, a progression, a desensitization ... Someone asked me once, ‘How did you lose your humanity?’ ‘I didn’t lose it,’ I replied. ‘I traded it for acceptance and approval until there was nothing left.’”

Hate groups gave McAleer a sense of power and belonging.

I’m Jewish. I wanted McAleer to explain why of all the groups his former cohorts despise, Jews occupy the epicenter of their hatred. He did.

“Our real hatred was reserved for Jews,” he writes. “We believed that Aryan man was an existential threat to a Jewish cabal that controlled the world through finance, entertainment, and education and worked in the shadows of the halls of power and government. Such was our threat to them that they would try to undermine us through whatever means they could: mass immigration, race mixing, homosexuality, drugs, and pornography. For the Aryan man to thrive and survive in this world the Jew, seen as a parasite, had to be removed.”

Embedded in this ideology is the belief that the Jews promote abortion as part of a conspiracy to kill off white babies. Indeed, white genocide, which constitutes a central tenet of white supremacy, engendered a weird plot twist in McAleer’s life story. After his girlfriend got pregnant, they decided to have the child because having a white child would help advance the survival of the white race. But in retrospect he says, “I left that delivery room a different person than I’d entered it.”

McAleer’s fatherhood helped him begin a long and complicated journey back to decency that as of today has him serving as the board chair of the nonprofit organization Life After Hate. But what about the aftermath of his and his co-conspirators’ handiwork?

One manifestation is how far right tropes have become accepted points of political discourse. That is part of the far right’s plan. “Mainstreaming,” McAleer explains, “Is a tactic of disguising extreme ideology in the camouflage of normalizing…(T)he strategy was simple: grow your hair out, don’t get tattoos, go to college, join the military, join the police, blend in. We needed to be more businesslike than barbarian if we wanted to ... gain more organized political power.”

The success and reach of the alt-right is frightening. Right wing memes are promiscuously circulated. Terrorism and refugees become synonymous for many. Rhetoric and actions that not long ago were totally beyond the pale are now considered unremarkable.

And let’s never forget Charlottesville. On Aug. 12, 2017, the Unite The Right rally of white nationalists and neo-Nazis featured Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and went after Jews. These anti-Semitic racists proudly displayed giant swastikas and wore clothing emblazoned with quotes from Adolph Hitler. They were screaming “Jews will not replace us.”

Protesters rallied against the neo-Nazis. A 20-year-old neo-Nazi, James Alex Fields Jr., with his car as his weapon of choice, murdered one of the protesters, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, and maliciously injured 19 others. President Trump’s reaction? He said, “There are fine people on both sides.” And the president’s supporters then and today yawn and excuse him, and some may secretly agree.

When I asked McAleer about Trump, he took a nuanced approach. Be careful, he cautioned, don’t lay all the blame on him. Trump gives voice to the haters and empowers and normalizes them and their politics. But that’s one part of the story. Some white nationalists equate being pro-Israel with being pro-Jewish and they distrust Trump for his embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

McAleer makes another point about the right-wing extremists who hear their voice in Trump. He told me that the haters “were here long before Trump” and “I guarantee you, they will exist long after Donald Trump is gone.”

McAleer does not underestimate the power of a president. He writes that “white nationalism is not a cohesive movement ... (some of) these groups ... are small and disorganized (but) all it takes is a powerful charismatic leader to turn this ragtag collective into a mass movement. We have observed this possibility at the national level.”

Trump’s incessant assault on America’s promise of equality and his condoning of the far right will be one of his lasting legacies. It is our job to make sure that his lasting legacy does not metastasize into an indelible one.

Bill Newman is a Northampton-based attorney and radio show host. His column appears the first Saturday of the month.