I was nearly expelled from high school my senior year, just before graduation. Only my grades, acceptance to a relatively prestigious college, and privileged position as the son of one of the pillars of the local economy prevented it. I was a weird kid: artsy, fay, obsessed with conspiracies, science fiction, Ayn Rand, and the occult. Out of a weird mash of the X-Files, the Turner Diaries and anti-government paranoia, Frank Herbert novels, Ubermensch libertarianism, Aleister Crowley, Indiana Jones, and over-the-counter dissociatives, my best friends and I had brewed a goofy aesthetic, a political moonshine not all that different from today’s so-called alt-right.

We were seniors in 1999, the year of the Columbine massacre. For most of the couple of years preceding, we’d been cobbling together a masterpiece of experimental filmmaking—actually, a semi-related skein of filthy, profane sketch gags centered on the peripatetic wanderings of a character (I use the term loosely) named “Headless,” defined chiefly by the fact that he wore, or was, a full-head rubber Tor Johnson mask. We filmed in our backyards and the woods behind them, in parking lots and alleys, in our bedrooms, and, most ill-advisedly, in the hotel where we stayed on our AP Government trip to Washington, D.C. Then one of us left the VHS master copy sitting on a table in the Laurel Highlands Senior High School cafeteria.

The movie inevitably made its way to our principal. There were plenty of bits to get a decent and unimaginative man riled up—rituals cribbed from Anton LeVay, drug use both simulated and actual, violence, and plenty of fake blood. But I have to believe that the worst moment for that poor administrator and for our poor parents was when they watched another friend of ours, a nice girl from a devoutly Christian family—Lord knows how we cajoled her into participating—crawl between my legs to perform simulated fellatio on a TV remote control. I suspect we meant all this as some kind of commentary on the media. The camera panned up to my contorted face. “Oh yeah, baby,” I growled, “Suck it. Heil Hitler, my dick is your Fuhrer.”

I was already out, the only openly gay kid at my school. I was—I am—a Jew.

A minor gang of similarly offensive dinguses is now in the news, having maneuvered Mom’s Honda into the wake of the Trump tractor-trailer with the vague hope of being sucked along in its yuge, yuge slipstream. Lefty and liberal Twitter, not to mention all of your Jewish friends and mine on Facebook, have gone nuts, perhaps understandably: it’s the incipient Fourth Reich, and erstwhile Breitbart publisher and current Trump Svengali Steve Bannon is its Goebbels, or at least its Leni Riefenstahl. The legacy press has meanwhile reacted with its usual muddled incoherence, dismayed but fascinated, insisting that the imaginary code of incomprehensible and contradictory journalistic ethics requires balance, spokesmen for both sides, and a fair hearing for these vulgar, racist little dweebs.

