Evan McLaren insists he's not a Nazi. He isn't a Klansman, either, he says.

What he is, McLaren said, is a white American of European descent who believes he increasingly is becoming a foreigner in his own land.

It is a feeling the Lower Allen Township man shares with his deeply controversial mentor, alt-right leader Richard Spencer.

As executive director of Spencer's Virginia-based National Policy Institute, McLaren is shoulder-deep in the ideology and conflict that resulted in the violent protests over plans to remove Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's monument in Charlottesville, Va.

McLaren was in the thick of that tumult. He got maced by opposing protesters for his trouble, he said, and was cited by Virginia State Police for unlawful assembly.

It is clear from a wide-ranging interview with McLaren that he believes he is in the vanguard of an effort to protect white Americans and separate them from what he and his allies regard as the polluting effects of liberalism and multiculturalism.

"We're not Nazis. We're not Confederates. We're not KKK members," the 33-year-old said. "We're dedicated to the preservation of white heritage and identity. We're talking about European culture and identity."

Greg Rothman, a state representative and chairman of the Cumberland County Republican Committee, saw McLaren in a different light.

"I thought he was goofy," Rothman said, stressing that his own contact with McLaren was minimal.

McLaren, a 2017 graduate of The Dickinson School of Law, briefly was treasurer of the county Young Republicans, but said he left early this year. He also was a law clerk with the Cumberland County District Attorney's Office last year, and served as a judicial extern for a federal judge in the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Kaytee Moyer, chairwoman of the Cumberland Young Republicans, said McLaren only attended a few of the fledgling group's events. She wasn't aware of his ideological views, she said.

McLaren was her group's treasurer "in name only" because at the time he held the post the Young Republicans didn't even have a bank account, Moyer said.

She referred a reporter to a statement issued by Rick Loughery, chairman of the Pennsylvania Young Republicans, who decried the "hatred spewed in Charlottesville."

"We must call evil by its name," Loughery wrote. "White supremacists, neo-nazis, the KKK and other fringe groups that espouse this type of bigotry are not welcome in the Republican Party...Anyone who promotes this ideology of hate...is a despicable human being."

McLaren insists he is a nonviolent, rational and deep-thinking advocate of white separatism, although he prefers the term "identitarianism."

The Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed that term to be a euphemism for racism and hate. It has labeled Spencer "a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old, a kind of professional racist in khakis." The center considers the National Policy Institute to be a hate group.

Yet McLaren said the confrontation in Charlottesville helped to prove his organization's point that those speaking up for white interests are being marginalized. He blamed the police for the violence there.

The police "protected nobody," he said. "They allowed the counter-demonstrators to simply attack us...They definitely contemplated violence. They wanted it to occur. They ignored that we had a permit to assemble."

"This was the opposite of what we wanted to happen."

Protesters on both sides have criticized the police for not acting quickly to prevent the violence in Charlottesville. The town's police chief, Al Thomas Jr., insisted during a press conference that his officers did try to keep the opponents apart on what he called that "tragic, tragic weekend."

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe also praised the police, and said he will conduct a review of what happened at Charlottesville, including the police response. McAuliffe blamed the violence on the white nationalists.

Authorities said the Aug. 11 and 12 rally in Charlottesville was the largest gathering of white nationalists in decades. Alt-right demonstrators carried lit torches through the University of Virginia campus that Friday night. The next day, hundreds of people swapped punches, threw bottles and sprayed mace.

More than 30 people were injured. Police said 19 were hurt and one counter-protester was killed when a 20-year-old Ohio man deliberately drove into a crowd. The driver is facing a murder charge.

McLaren claimed that in the wake of the turmoil in Charlottesville his allies have been deliberately mischaracterized by the media as arm-raising, swastika-loving Stormtroopers. "No one connected with us was throwing controversial salutes," he said.

President Donald Trump's much-criticized comment that both sides should bear blame for the Charlottesville debacle was "balanced," McLaren said.

For his group, the Charlottesville demonstration was not about refighting the Civil War, he said. There may even be legitimate reasons for removing some Southern monuments to that conflict, he conceded.

"The South lost the war," he said, adding, however, that "the Lee statue is an item of our heritage."

That heritage includes Judah P. Benjamin, a Jew who served as the Confederacy's attorney general and secretary of war. When a reporter pointed that out, McLaren insisted "the monument controversy is not vital to me. The issue matters to me because I'm white."

Jews, he said, don't fit into his definition of "white." Instead, Jews "are a distinct people and they are not what we mean when we say 'European'," he said. "We would have to have some sort of understanding with them."

According to Spencer, McLaren and their adherents, the races shouldn't mix, but should have their own separate nations. McLaren did not rule out the possibility that his group's philosophy would lead to the division of the United States into racially-based enclaves.

Spencer described that vision during an interview with National Public Radio last year. "What I would ultimately want is this ideal of a safe place effectively for Europeans," he said. "This is a big empire that would accept all Europeans. It would be a place for Germans. It would be a place for Slavs. It would be a place for Celts. It would be a place for white Americans, and so on."

This week, Penn State University President Eric Barron said Spencer was not welcome to speak at an event this fall at the University Park campus. The university was the fifth in recent weeks to ban Spencer from appearing on its campus.

McLaren said he came to Spencer's worldview incrementally, spurred in part by what he regards as the folly of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. He flirted with the Libertarian Party, he said, and even though he is a now registered Republican doesn't regard that as a good fit, either.

"Am I estranged from the party? Absolutely," he said. "They work very hard to shut people like me out." He said Republicans "ultimately lack the courage and the fortitude" to take him on in head-to-head debate.

Rothman said McLaren should plan on being a perpetual outsider. "I don't believe there is a role or any place in the Republican Party for racists or white supremacists or Nazis," Rothman said.

McLaren said he and his allies "are pursuing a cultural effort and not a directly political effort" to forward their plans. He doesn't see a religious basis for that thrust, either. He isn't a Christian, McLaren said, but "we have members who are Christians."

What his movement seeks most at the moment is a platform and a voice, McLaren said.

"We don't have to keep advancing multiculturalism like it is religious dogma," McLaren said. "It is giving rise to a lot of tension...It leads to decline in civic trust and cooperation."

Unless his group's concerns are addressed, "we are going to end up living in a society that is increasingly foreign to us and is hostile to us," he said.

Rothman said McLaren's viewpoint is what's foreign.

"My philosophy about those groups is: Ignore them. Expose what they are saying and the rest of the world will say, 'That's absurd,' "he said.

Staff writer Charles Thompson contributed to this report.