I began reporting on the various malcontents of the American far right back in 2011, when nationalism and white supremacy were still on the fringes of the political landscape and the Tea Party, almost quaint in retrospect, was the face of white anger. During those early years, I spent countless weekends at Klan BBQs, neo-Nazi rallies, and lackluster conventions where attendance rarely exceeded a couple dozen people. The white supremacist scene was as tiny as it was delusional. In the spring of 2011, I spent a rain-soaked evening under a tented gazebo in a suburban backyard in New Jersey, discussing electoral prospects with Jeff Schoep, the commander of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), the largest neo-Nazi group in the United States. He believed that whites in America were coming around to his way of thinking, to identifying first and foremost as white. He explained that white voters could even get over the NSM’s fondness for swastikas and its affiliation with the KKK as long as the message and messenger were compelling enough. At the time I thought the rainwater had seeped into his brain.

Five years later, as candidate Donald Trump declined to denounce former Klansman David Duke and the Roman salutes of Richard Spencer’s crew, I realized that Schoep had been right all along. White voters in America were prepared to forgive even the most egregious appeals to white supremacy so long as a compelling candidate played on their racial grievances. Trump proved that, and so did Roy Moore, the race-baiting, gun-toting alleged child molester who, despite losing Alabama’s special election for the Senate, still captured a healthy majority of the white vote.

It was with an overwhelming sense of schadenfreude that the far right in America stepped into 2017. They had been vindicated. Matthew Heimbach and his Traditionalist Workers Party trolled heartbroken libtards on the streets of Washington, D.C., on inauguration day. They lunched with Republican operators who said that Heimbach—an avowed National Socialist—would help the GOP solidify the disaffected white vote. Spencer, jubilant and yet to be punched by an antifa protester, was considering a run for Congress—because why not? Stranger things had just happened and these were heady times. The forces of the racist right felt they could throw whatever they wanted on the wall, and it would stick.

During a January lunch with Spencer in the D.C. suburbs, he explained to me how the far right was the laboratory of Trump’s GOP. He (in his humble opinion) was the intellectual lodestar for the whole thing—the wellspring from which the gospel of modern nationalism would flow, washing over the newly red-pilled masses and percolating through the orange follicles of the impressionable demagogue about to move into the White House.

It didn’t quite pan out as Spencer had hoped, but that hardly mattered. Even as the nativist far right publicly broke with Trump over his missile barrage of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, his gutting of the federal budget’s assistance to Appalachia, and a host of other smaller slights, they used their newfound notoriety to stage high-profile rallies—relatively speaking, of course, since not many people showed up on average—designed for maximum public impact. Spencer came out the other side of a viral punching a changed person, embraced by the boots in the movement for taking a fist to the face. He rebranded himself as a man of action who during speeches would throw away his oppressive tweed jacket and demonstratively roll up his sleeves.