The suspicion that populist revolutionaries might not mean everything they say has surrounded Trump’s campaign from the beginning. Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux

A strange, fascinating story broke last week, one that contains the darkness of the Trump campaign and that has, like the Trump campaign at times, the cadence of a joke. A thirty-two-year-old man named Colin Lokey confessed to Bloomberg that, until days earlier, he had been one of the unknown authors of Zero Hedge, a blog that combines analysis of the financial markets, emphasizing the essential corruption of Wall Street, with what CNNMoney once called “a deeply conspiratorial, anti-establishment and pessimistic view of the world.” Each post on Zero Hedge is written under the pseudonym Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s character from “Fight Club,” a workingman’s nihilist. Lokey revealed to Bloomberg last week that Durden was actually three men: two wealthy financial analysts, Daniel Ivandjiiski and Tim Backshall, and Lokey, a recent M.B.A. from East Tennessee State University—their hired hand.

By his own account, Lokey was writing as many as fifteen posts a day, among them most of the political pieces. The gig had a certain formula, he told Bloomberg: “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” For Zero Hedge, Syria was a special obsession, a sign of the essential strength of authoritarian regimes and the weakness of democracies. (“Putin Is Winning the Final Chess Match with Obama,” one Zero Hedge article claimed last fall.) The pace of the propaganda was too much for Lokey; last month, he checked himself into a hospital, believing he was on the verge of a panic attack. The populism seemed false to him. “Two guys who live a lifestyle you can only dream of are pretending to speak for you,” he wrote. The “unmasking” that Bloomberg promised in its headline was really two, one inside the other. Remove the Tyler Durden mask and there were Backshall and Ivandjiiski, two successful bankers pushing populism. Remove the mask again and there was Lokey, pretending to be them. “This isn’t a revolution,” Lokey wrote. “It’s a joke.”

The suspicion that populist revolutionaries might not mean everything they say has surrounded Trump’s campaign from the beginning. His personal ambition to be President has seemed almost painfully obvious, but about the populist nature of his candidacy there has been more room for doubt. The wall at the border, the religious tests for immigrants: Could he really mean that? Last week, Paul Manafort, one of Trump’s chief advisers, tried to reassure Republican National Committee members that the candidate has been simply “playing a part” for the primaries. Then Trump doubled down on some of his most outrageous positions. The wink between Trump and his supporters has been so sustained that it’s hard to tell which parts of his populism each side understands as theatre, and which parts are for real.

You could ask some of the same questions about the alt-right, the loosely assembled far-right movement that exists largely online, and that overlaps with both the Trump campaign and with the politics of Zero Hedge. Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who came up with the term “alt-right,” described the movement in December as “an ideology around identity, European identity.” But the alt-right has often seemed more diffuse than that, more of a catch-all for the least presentable elements of the online right: white nationalists, neo-reactionaries, the male-victimhood clique of GamerGate. Late last year, BuzzFeed proclaimed that the movement, with a boost from the Trump campaign, “has hit it big,” and ever since anxious alarms have been issuing from the conservative mainstream. The Times columnist Ross Douthat worked to distinguish the reactionary tradition from the open racism of the alt-right. National Review denounced the “racism and moral rot” that characterized the movement. Commentary described the alt-right as a gathering force, and warned of a “coming conservative dark age.”

And yet, as an ideology, it can be hard to take the alt-right seriously. When Spencer named the movement, he was the managing editor of Taki’s Magazine, whose founder and namesake, Taki Theodoracopulos, is a monarchist man-about-Gstaad and the society columnist for the London Spectator. Its own propagandists often say they are joking. The right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, of Breitbart, himself a leading fellow-traveller, claimed that some “young rebels” are drawn to the alt-right not for deeply political reasons but “because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms.” The alt-right exists mostly online, and so it is shrouded in pseudonyms.

The strains that run through the alt-right—that wrap together the vicious misogyny and plaintive victimhood of GamerGate with Prussia-venerating neo-reactionaries—are in their essence not matters of substance but of style. They share with the Trump movement a haughty success theatre that complicates their populism: the alt-right’s defense of the white working class, Yiannopoulos insisted, is not an instance of self-preservation but of “noblesse oblige.” The two also share the instinct for provocation. “If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything—an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster—don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest fucking thing in the world,” the blogger Mencius Moldbug wrote to Yiannopoulos.

The alt-right often seems to be testing the strength of the speech taboos that revolve around conventional politics—of what can be said, and how directly. Can you insist that science supports racial differences in intelligence? Can you threaten rape? Can you Photoshop an image of a Jewish reporter who has written critically about the Trumps so that she appears to be in a concentration camp? How far can you go? It is easy to notice the flood of Nazi imagery that has been tweeted from anonymous accounts at reporters, and harder to determine how many people are sending these images. Even the most careful reporting into the less crude edges of the movement usually has to resort to calling the alt-right’s influential voices by their message-board monikers (CisWhiteMaelstrom, JCM267) rather than by their real names.

One way to understand the alt-right is not as a movement but as a collective experiment in identity, in the same way that many people use anonymity on the Internet to test more extreme versions of themselves. Moldbug, when he stepped out from behind his pseudonym, turned out to be a Silicon Valley computer programmer who had started as a commenter in the factional circles of libertarian message boards. CisWhiteMaelstrom, who convened the pro-Trump hordes that swallowed the politics sections of Reddit, turned out to be a law student in his early twenties who was looking forward to a job in which he could make the most money possible. These are familiar conservative types, in the same way that the alt-right pioneers John Derbyshire and Taki Theodoracopulos are familiar conservative intellectuals, who first came to prominence at National Review. And as pointed as Zero Hedge’s Russophilia is, it was the Virginia co-chair of the Ted Cruz campaign who flew to Syria last week to assure Bashar al-Assad that President Cruz would be on his side. The tone of Trumpism and of the alt-right conceals a more familiar politics. Partisans of the alt-right are often described as “shock troops” of the Trump phenomenon, in the same way that Trump voters are understood to be outsiders invading the Republican Party. But my suspicion is that these descriptions get them wrong, by imagining that they are a new group of people rather than the same old group during their off hours, trying out a different form of play.

Just before the New Hampshire primary, with Trump far ahead in the polls, establishment Republicans in the Granite State kept insisting to reporters that they could not name a single Trump voter. But when the exit polls came out, the Trump voters turned out to have come from the social center, not from the fringe. Trump’s support was not isolated in any subgroup of Republicans—it spanned them all. The income of Trump voters turned out to be essentially indistinguishable from those who supported Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton. Trump rallies, in light of these demographic details, no longer look so much like the invasion of a foreign army. They look more like the Republican base, moved by conventional grievances, trying out a different way of expressing them. Is the revolution a joke, as Colin Lokey, despairing, insisted it was? Yes, in a way. But, then, jokes are complicated.