But when I asked what Bannon and his movement would do to get them out, Cernovich sighed. “Yeah, that’s the issue,” he said. “I don’t know if anybody has the answer about that.”

For Bannon and his allies, purging extremist elements from the far-right movement is hard, because no matter how vocally they repudiate neo-Nazis and their brethren, those groups will hug back harder—especially if there’s a national platform for them to clamber on. “David Duke shows up for every media opportunity,” Bannon complained to Rose, referring to the former K.K.K. grand wizard. One person who met with Bannon recently described him as furious and preoccupied with the Nazi problem. “What the fuck do we do about the Nazis?” he asked at one point during their meeting, according to this person.

Complicating the issue are the rank-and-file Web-based Breitbart constituency that Bannon calls the “Pepes,” after the cartoon frog often used in memes promoting far-right ideology. It has not always been clear where the group’s mischief-making ends and anti-Semitism begins: the “Pepes” themselves gleefully Photoshop their foes into gas chambers, not because they actually believe in white supremacism, some say, but because they simply wanted to see the liberal Internet lose their minds. The Pepes’ outrageous stunts are responsibly in part for fueling the rise of Breitbart, and to an extent, Trumpism, but their refusal to stop tweaking progressives with their use of swastikas has now become a liability.

“Bannon sees the Pepes as kind of like trolls, and not like the Nazis like Richard Spencer and David Duke,” explained the person who spoke to Bannon. “Everybody’s kind of struggling with it. Like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s these people, they’re kind of trollish, they make a lot of jokes or whatever, maybe we wish they were a little bit nicer.’ But that’s different, categorically, than neo-Nazis at rallies throwing Nazi salutes and throwing up Nazi flags.”

Near the top of this heap of problems, however, is Bannon himself. After immortalizing Breitbart as a “platform for the alt-right” during the 2016 Republican National Convention—a slip of the tongue several of his colleagues wish he hadn’t made, in retrospect—Bannon inadvertently linked his site to Spencer’s white nationalist movement. The budding fascist had dubbed his own movement the “alt-right” back in 2010, using it to describe a movement dedicated to marginalizing Jews and minorities from white nations, establishing authoritarian governments, and rolling back equal rights for men and women. And Bannon’s apparent reticence to repudiate hate groups, like William F. Buckley did when he rejected the John Birch Society during the 1960s, only allowed them to grow.

”There are steps he could take to change the editorial side, things he could do to demonstrate, not just in words but in action . . . that he means what he says. That would be the start,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League. Bannon, for instance, could stop referring to “globalists”—a term fraught with historical anti-Semitic overtones—or write a major op-ed on Breitbart declaring open war against the white supremacists. But to Greenblatt and the rest of Bannon’s critics, that reluctance seems calculated. “He’s very smart. He knows what he’s doing,” he told me, citing several examples of Breitbart trafficking in winking anti-Semitism: putting Gary Cohn’s name between globe emojis; talking up international banking conspiracies; and using “America First,” a common phrase once uttered by anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh, as a slogan.

Bannon’s positions on race issues remain rather murky, other than that he loves using them as a wedge issue to box in Democrats. “I want them to talk about racism every day,” he recently told The American Prospect. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.” But fundamentally, virtually everyone I spoke to agreed that Bannon does not hate Jews in the way that a Nazi, or any other group that calls for white supremacy, would hate Jews. (Bannon’s ex-wife claimed in a sworn statement in 2007 that he had made anti-Semitic remarks in the past, an allegation that Bannon has vehemently denied.) His defenders will point out that several of his senior employees are Orthodox Jews, and that Bannon had gone out of his way to open a Breitbart bureau in Jerusalem. “He’s a philosemite, he’s a supporter of Jewish people in Israel,” said Klein, the president of the pro-Israel Zionist Organization of America, where Bannon is scheduled to speak during a gala in November. (At the moment, Klein suggested that he may be introducing Sheldon Adelson, one of the biggest pro-Israel donors in the country.) Klein, whose parents survived the Holocaust and who criticized Trump for his response to Charlottesville, told me if he had detected a whiff of anti-Semitism from Bannon, he would have nothing to do with him. “If he’s a fine man, and promotes the agenda that we at Z.O.A. believe in, I will have to just tell the truth,” he added.