“There is an organized anti-establishment movement on the right that includes the Great America Alliance, that includes people like Sarah Palin, that includes people like Mark Meadows,” Surabian said. Breitbart itself would play a part: on Monday morning, political editor Matt Boyle hyped up a group of far-right candidates calling themselves “The League of Extraordinary Candidates,” who all plan on challenging virtually every single Republican senator (except for Ted Cruz) running in 2018. Other groups told Boyle that they would join in, hinting at the beginning of a coordinated effort to support outsider candidates, curiously mirroring the way that Washington Republicans have done it for decades. “This is going to be a professionalized version of the Tea Party, with an even more populist layer on top of it,” Surabian told me.

For Cernovich, the medium is a large part of the message. “Let’s be completely honest, the Trump campaign’s social media was a joke,” said Cernovich, countering the accepted wisdom that Trump won the election with his incendiary Twitter account. It drove the news cycle, certainly, but “there wasn’t much grassroots activism, there wasn’t any real organization going on.”

“It’s a get-rich-quick scheme for consultants ... they don’t care as long as they can move on to the next one and still get paid.”

Conspiracy theorizing will not be part of Rev18’s business model, though Cernovich has not exactly left his past behind. “I think it’s great when people accuse me, almost always falsely, of promoting conspiracy theories, because that shows how effective I am at messaging and how effectively I can use social media,” he said, glossing over the potentially deadly, real-world impact of his Internet musings. Giesea’s approach was more cautious. “I think there have been mistakes made in the past by people, and what I can say to that is we’re just gonna keep upping our game and getting more professional, and getting more credible and getting more effective,” he said, admitting that he had been initially alarmed by Cernovich, but was now thrilled to collaborate with him. (“‘Am I gonna need to wash my hands afterwards?’” Giesea recalled thinking when he first met Cernovich.)

As the brainchild of three prominent Internet trolls, Rev18 plans to distinguish itself by ignoring the traditional super-PAC model—sending out mailers, running TV ads, paying for offices and Wi-Fi and friends-turned-consultants and Ubers and steak dinners—and focusing completely on digital. Posobiec rattled off a few ideas they had to reach voters: Periscope livestreams, incendiary hashtags, and crowd-funded memes—tapping their Pepe-friendly fans to create anti-Mitch McConnell images, for instance, and offering thousands of dollars as a prize. It also, incidentally, would cut down on overhead, and Posobiec told me they didn’t even have offices yet. “Who needs an office anymore?” he asked rhetorically.

Campaign finance is changing—but big money is not always the driver. In the recent past, “professional” fund-raising was a very specific job, executed by a very specific group of well-connected Republicans charged with wringing as much money as possible from their wealthy donors. For years, they bobbed and weaved through the Federal Election Commission’s legal limits, trawling for $2,700 donations for the campaigns wherever they could, and scraping millions more into political action committees. Citizens United opened up a world of possibilities (as Mitt Romney famously put it, “corporations are people”), allowing donors to dump millions of dollars into specific vehicles. Mike Murphy, who ran Jeb Bush’s behemoth super PAC, Right to Rise, in 2016, said that very occasionally, he would catch a whale. ”We had 8 or 9 million-dollar donors. I think we had a $10 million donor. And I do not think any of them went for Trump.”

Murphy said he could not name a single high-roller conservative donor who would commit that much money towards a Trumpian agenda, apart from Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire father-daughter duo bankrolling Breitbart. “There’s a whole industry of milking the Mercers, because it’s rare that the hardcore ideological Bannons in Trumpworld get high-dollar donors,” Murphy noted. “They’re exclusively the creature of low-dollar money which means they can raise it, but the cost of fund-raising’s very high, and that leads to a large amount of self-dealing.”

“What you’ll find in the Trumpworld is a lot of small-timers who got beat up because no other campaign would hire them, and then they showed up to Trumpland because it was either that or food stamps,” said Murphy. “And then bingo, lightning hit, and now they’re all with Napoleon.”

Cernovich, Posobiec, and Giesea declined to name names, but Posobiec agreed with the “self-dealing” part, and suggested that it was why all other Trump-supporting super PACs had failed. “It’s a get-rich-quick scheme for consultants, where they book a lot of TV and then take 20 percent of whatever they book, and then regardless of how the candidate wins, they don’t care as long as they can move on to the next one and still get paid,” he told me. “They do these, like, completely milquetoast ads that don’t move the needle and never go viral because no one cares about them.”

Cernovich had a blunter suggestion: apart from Surabian and Bannon, whom he thought would do “great work,” Trump super PACs, by and large, “separate dumb rich people and their money.”