In the 1990s, my home state of Idaho gained a national reputation for being a hotbed of neo-Nazism. The driver of an SUV outfitted with iron-cross and swastika decals who tried to run my father’s car off the road was a neo-Nazi; the boy in my art class who painted those symbols onto a mural was the son of neo-Nazis. In the capital, Boise, the black history museum was periodically defaced with racist graffiti. When the city established an Anne Frank memorial in the early 2000s, it received the same treatment. White supremacists and their sympathizers were, for a time, a significant enough constituency that Idaho’s Republican politicians courted them during campaign seasons by expounding on Ruby Ridge and muttering darkly about black helicopters.

North of Boise, guarded by a crew of armed skinheads, was the Aryan Nations compound—a site the group’s leader, Richard Butler, called “the international headquarters of the White race.” Founded in the 1970s, the Aryan Nations grew out of Christian Identity theology, which held that only white people were descended from Adam and Eve. Throughout the 1990s, the group hosted annual white supremacist conferences; white power music festivals; and, most famously, flashy marches through the nearest town, Coeur d’Alene. Aryan Nations members were repeatedly linked to an assortment of domestic terrorist acts, including the bombing of the Coeur d’Alene courthouse, a triple homicide in Arkansas, and a shooting spree at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles.

While the Aryan Nations were particularly prominent in Idaho, plenty of groups and individuals outside the state’s borders shared similar beliefs. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of racist skinhead groups in the United States peaked during the late 1980s and early ’90s, a time when their members committed at least 35 murders. The ’90s also saw Timothy McVeigh lay waste to an Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168; the debut of the forum Stormfront, the first large-scale online network for white supremacists; and attempts by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to run for governor and U.S. Senate in Louisiana, receiving nearly 44 percent of the vote in the primary for the latter. It was, the SPLC reported, “a decade virtually unprecedented in the history of the American radical right.”

Journalist David Neiwert’s book Alt-America attempts to account for this period of far-right activity, which the media has largely failed to connect with more recent public displays of white nationalist sentiment. In August 2017, when members of white supremacist groups gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, a man drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. To many commentators, this incident and Trump’s reaction to it—he saw “blame on both sides”—was proof that something in America had fundamentally shifted: With a president who refused to condemn even outright displays of hate, right-wing extremism was coming into the open. Photographs from that weekend of “enraged men carrying tiki torches and shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans” signaled, the art critic Maurice Berger wrote in The New York Times, that white supremacy in America had “entered a new era.”

Yet Alt-America grimly reminds us that neo-Nazis, skinheads, Klansmen, Holocaust deniers, and various other stripes of white supremacist have held marches and rallies in America for many years, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. The violent demonstration in Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer were all the more horrifying precisely because they belong to a long history of far-right extremism. Tracing the ebbs and flows of this extremism in the United States over the last 20 years, Neiwert—who is also from Idaho—argues that white nationalist activity in the age of Trump is simply the latest flare-up of what he calls “Alt-America,” or the segment of the American population that has fed on conspiracy theories, racist misinformation, and deep distrust of federal institutions for decades.