In a video posted on Facebook on March 27 by Kyle Chapman, the camera pans across what can only be described as a DIY armory: Baseball helmet, ski goggles, shin guards, face mask, wooden shield, flag pole. “The benefit of the baseball helmet is that you have holes where the ears are,” Chapman tells his viewers. “This allows you to hear what’s going on around you.” The helmet is emblazoned with a decal reading molon labe (“come and take them”), the Second Amendment rallying cry borrowed from ancient Sparta. Chapman also recommends going to Home Depot, where one can find a wooden table top for just $25 to fashion into a homemade buckler.

Chapman made the video in response to a barrage of inquiries into his riot gear, which was on full display when he fought anti-fascist protesters (sometimes collectively referred to as Antifa) at the University of California, Berkeley, in early March. Before then, he had been a relative unknown. A 41-year-old commercial diver living in the Bay Area, Chapman told the New Republic that he “doesn’t really care for social media or the internet.” But on March 4, a video of Chapman breaking a wooden sign post over the head of an Antifa activist went viral, quickly launching him to fame as the subject of a new alt-right meme: “Based Stickman.”

“Based” is slang for not caring what other people think of you. “Stickman” is, well, a man with a stick. While it’s difficult to track down the moniker’s exact origin, it seems to have started, along with other nicknames like the “Alt-Knight,” in the place where many alt-right memes are born: 4chan’s “politically incorrect” board /pol/.

The video was taken at a “March 4 Trump” rally near UC Berkeley. Chapman wore a gas mask, helmet, and shin guards. He carried a shield decorated with an American flag and a “V” in one hand and a long stick in the other. (The spread he showed off this week on Facebook is new—the police confiscated the equipment he wore at the event.) Since then, the video of Chapman has been remixed and set to Imogen Heap and Hulk Hogan’s theme song. Images of Based Stickman have been photoshopped into a number of familiar settings, including the movies Captain America and 300, the new Zelda game, Game of Thrones, and the Civil War (with Based Stickman on the side of Confederate army, of course). “He truly is our hero,” one poster wrote on 4chan.

Chapman was not the only person to engage in violence during the march. An estimated 70 people showed up to support Trump, while almost three times as many counter-protesters organized to oppose them. According to a police report, people on either side were “armed with weapons, shields, pepper spray, portable radios, smoke canisters, etc., wearing protective padding and helmets, and in at least one confirmed case, ballistic armor.” Videos show that the event intermittently broke out into outright melees, featuring an abundance of punches, pepper spray, blood, and, of course, Chapman’s infamous stick-beating.