On Mike Cernovich’s blog, he developed a theory of white-male identity politics. Illustration by Matt Dorfman

In late August, Hillary Clinton announced that she would soon give a speech, in Reno, Nevada, linking Donald J. Trump to what has become known as the alt-right—a loose online affiliation of white nationalists, neo-monarchists, masculinists, conspiracists, belligerent nihilists, and social-media trolls. The alt-right has no consistent ideology; it is a label, like “snob” or “hipster,” that is often disavowed by people who exemplify it. The term typically applies to conservatives and reactionaries who are active on the Internet and too anti-establishment to feel at home in the Republican Party. Bizarrely, this category includes the Republican nominee for President. It also includes extremist commentators, long belittled or ignored by the media, whom mainstream pundits are now starting to take seriously.

The afternoon before Clinton’s speech, Mike Cernovich, a thick-chested white man in his late thirties, sitting on a veranda in Southern California, opened the live-streaming app Periscope on his iPad and filmed a video called “How to fight back against Sick Hillary and the #ClintonNewsNetwork.” By “Clinton News Network,” he meant CNN and other corporate media outlets. The word “sick” described Clinton morally and physically: Cernovich was among the first to insinuate publicly that Clinton had a grave neurological condition, and that the media was covering it up. By “fight back,” he meant, basically, tweeting. Internet activism is sometimes derided as “slacktivism”—a fair characterization when an online campaign tries to, say, cure AIDS or end child labor. When the goal is to seed social media with misinformation, though, online organizing can be shockingly effective.

“Tomorrow, everybody’s going to be Googling the alt-right,” Cernovich said. He has an adenoidal tenor and a lisp, but when he is indignant he can be an impassioned orator. “The narrative is being written, and you’d better get off your fucking asses and write your own.” His feed filled with real-time comments. (@beelman_matt: “PC is for PUSSIES”; @ciswhitemale: “Mike is a bosss.”)

Cernovich wore a plaid shirt, partially unbuttoned to display his chest hair. Visible behind him were a swimming pool, trimmed boxwoods, and a mountain glowing in the afternoon sun. (@CanadaUncuck: “nice pool.”) Cernovich often blogs about fitness, and he publishes self-help books for men. He also writes about how to build a personal brand online; his maxims include “Conflict is attention” and “Attention is influence.” Although he doesn’t appear on Fox News or syndicated radio shows, he is an expert at using social media to drive alt-right ideas into the heart of American political discourse.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do tomorrow,” he said. “We have to think of a good hashtag, and we have to have all of our memes lined up.” He suggested talking points for his followers to deploy, such as “If the alt-right is racist, is Israel racist, too?” Cernovich prefers to call himself an “American nationalist,” but he often uses “we” when discussing the alt-right movement. “We can control the narrative on Twitter,” he continued. “Mainstream media we’ve lost.” He said he hoped that Clinton’s Reno speech would elicit “a full-scale media attack on me,” adding, “I want this to become an international trending topic.”

Clinton did not mention Cernovich, but she attacked Alex Jones, the paranoiac Texas radio host, and Breitbart.com, the Pravda of the alt-right. She listed some recent Breitbart headlines, including “Would You Rather Have Feminism or Cancer?,” which were written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the fame-seeking troll. Cernovich calls Yiannopoulos “one of the only guys, other than me, who’s doing social media right.” Before the current election, Cernovich and Yiannopoulos were known primarily as Internet misogynists. Cernovich was drawn to political commentary after recognizing a kindred spirit in Donald Trump.

Yiannopoulos, writing on Breitbart the next day, called Clinton’s speech “a drive-by shooting with a water pistol fired from a mobility scooter.” Alex Jones recorded a video in which he stood in his back yard, wiping sweat from his brow, as he muttered about the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. “People say, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve hit the big time—Hillary Clinton talked about you,’ ” he scoffed. “Give me a break. Hillary Clinton’s average YouTubes, on her own channel, have, like, five thousand views. Our average one has hundreds of thousands.” His video was viewed more times than the official upload of Clinton’s speech.

Cernovich covered the Reno speech on Periscope. “Is she gonna fall?” he said, watching live footage of Clinton approaching the stage. “She’s grabbing the handrail!” He tweeted, “Sick Hillary grabs handrail as walking up steps. #AltRightMeans.” The hashtag was already trending on Twitter, as the alt-right’s supporters and opponents competed to define the movement. Political spin battles are waged online every minute, and it can be difficult to gauge who is winning. Media consumers don’t believe everything they read, and, because of personalization algorithms, no two social-media feeds look the same. The next day, the mainstream consensus was that the two sides had fought to a draw.

Cernovich thought that Clinton’s speech “was the stupidest thing she could have done.” He added, “Her social-media advisers are twenty-four-year-old basic bitches who feel triggered by us, and so they asked their boss to yell at us and make us go away. Well, we’re not going away. They just made us stronger.”

Cernovich lives fifty miles south of Los Angeles, in a deep-red congressional district. On the Internet, he represents himself as a “Pulitzer-worthy journalist” who runs Cernovich Media, a “global worldwide brand.” When we first spoke, on the phone, I asked him whether he worked from home or in an office full of employees. Chuckling, he said, “It’s definitely just me, dude.”

I visited him in mid-September. He had recently moved to a cul-de-sac where every house has stucco walls, a ceramic tile roof, and bland xeriscaping. He met me outside, wearing a rumpled gingham shirt and jeans. A day-old Orange County Register lay at his feet. He looked fleshier than he did in his videos, and his eye contact was less steady with me than it is on camera. Next door, a sticker on a garbage bin advertised WorldNetDaily, a Web site known for promoting birtherism. Cernovich hadn’t met the neighbors yet. “They’d probably geek out if I told them my name,” he said. “Then I’d have to say hi every time I see them, and maybe they’d want to be friends—nah, not worth it.”

Cernovich trained as a lawyer. In 2003, he was accused of raping a woman he knew; the charge was later dropped, but a judge ordered him to do community service for misdemeanor battery. (His record has since been expunged.) On his first blog, which he started in 2004, he offered a libertarian critique of prosecutorial overreach, emphasizing free speech and false rape allegations. He launched his current blog, Danger and Play, in 2011, after his first wife filed for divorce.

His second wife, Shauna, who is twenty-nine, and pregnant with their first child, was in the kitchen. She is as warm as her husband is taciturn. “I’m so embarrassed!” she said, apologizing for an imaginary mess. The house was clean and compact; the small, paved back yard had a single lawn chair. The lush veranda in the Periscope videos belonged to Shauna’s parents, who live a few blocks away.