Read the first installment of “How the alt-right became racist” here.

While future neo-Nazi Richard Spencer was struggling with white nationalism in the world of political journalism, most of the people who would later comprise the alt-right’s online shock-troops were involved in a different venture. They were fighting hard to make former Texas congressman Ron Paul the Republican presidential nominee, first in 2008 and again in 2012. It’s more than uncanny how many current alt-right leaders backed the former Texas congressman in his quixotic bids to stop GOP mainstream candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Pretty much all of the top personalities at the Right Stuff, a neo-Nazi troll mecca, started off as conventional libertarians and Ron Paul supporters, according to the site’s creator, an anonymous man who goes by the name “Mike Enoch.”

“We were all libertarians back in the day. I mean, everybody knows this,” he said on an alt-right podcast last month. After Paul’s second campaign failed, he completely disengaged from politics, he added.

Ron Paul was also the favorite of Jared Taylor and the readers of his white nationalist website American Renaissance.

That feeling of admiration was apparently mutual. In the 1990s, Paul repeatedly promoted Taylor in his famously racist newsletters as part of a “paleo-libertarian” strategy designed to attract racist white people. (Paul subsequently denied writing them, however.) Later on, American Renaissance wrote a featured article stating that “the race-realist section of the blogosphere is one of the most enthusiastic sources of support for Mr. Paul” and praised his “good instincts on race,” despite the fact that the author believed that Paul was no longer interested in catering to overt racists, as he formerly had.

Paul had non-racist supporters as well who would later become alt-right figures. (The self-described neo-Nazi types refer to them as “alt-lite.”)

Libertarian radio host Alex Jones of InfoWars, a man famous for his belief in “lizard people” and his elaborate 9/11 conspiracy theories, dislikes being identified with the alt-right. But he is an important figure in the movement’s history, and a key link from Ron Paul to Donald Trump.

Today Jones is known today as an ardent Trump supporter but his affection for Ron Paul and his son, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, was even greater during their respective presidential campaigns. In 2016, Jones and his team supported the younger Paul for the GOP nomination until the very end of Rand Paul’s short-lived bid.

Shortly after Trump declared his candidacy, Jones’s top lieutenant created his own anti-Trump conspiracy theory in which he declared the former television star to be a “stooge” for Democrats, designed to make the GOP lose to Hillary Clinton. Later, in January of 2016 shortly before the Iowa caucuses, a distraught Jones pleaded with Paul about any possible strategy to save his campaign.

“I’d really like to see you as president,” Jones said. “How do we get you elected president?”

In the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, Ron Paul was also by far the preferred presidential candidate of the racist “Politically Incorrect” board known as /pol/ on 4chan. Throughout both of his unsuccessful runs, the forum served as a critical organizing portal and talent incubator for Paul’s youthful, tech-savvy supporters to pull off fundraising and digital feats that many political observers incorrectly attributed to Paul’s official campaign staff.