My Journey to the Center of the

The trolls came for Erin Schrode one Friday morning in June, four days before the Democratic primary in California’s 2nd Congressional District. Schrode, a 25-year-old civic activist and environmentalist from Marin County, was a long shot for the win, but still campaigning hard. The previous day, she’d responded to critics about her pro-Israel stance, which had recently been highlighted by the Jewish press. The public discussion was civil. But when she opened her inbox the next morning, she encountered something different.

“The first email came in at 7 a.m.,” Schrode told me. “It said, ‘Get out of my country, kike. Get to Israel where you belong. That or the oven. Take your pick.’”

Over the next few days, emails, voicemails and tweets, hundreds of them, then thousands, poured in from neo-Nazi trolls, none of whom used names but many of whom identified as Trump supporters, according to Schrode. They wondered how she could be a vegan, given all the “Negroe [sic] semen she swallows.” They talked about laughing as they “gang raped her and then bashed her bagel eating brains in.” It was, she told me, the first time she’d experienced anti-Semitism. “It shook me in a really profound, startling way,” Schrode said.

Soon, she was talking to FBI agents, who, she said, told her they’d never seen such venom directed at a political candidate. They found that her contact information had been posted on The Daily Stormer, the most popular white nationalist site in the country and the online barracks for an army of alt-right trolls. There, readers can access news filtered through a racist lens, alongside images of blacks being burned alive and doctored GIFs of Taylor Swift curbstomping people. And Schrode wasn’t the Stormer’s first target. In April, the publication had sicced its army on Julia Ioffe, a Huffington Post contributor, after she wrote a profile of Melania Trump for GQ. In addition to scores of anti-Semitic emails and images, Ioffe received calls purportedly from an overnight casket company and a homicide cleanup crew.

The Daily Stormer’s editor and publisher is a 32-year-old named Andrew Anglin. He claims to live in Ohio, although his true whereabouts are murky: He appears to be in Berlin or to have recently been there, according to his social media activity and the FBI's best knowledge. With his shaved head and a tattoo on his chest of the “Black Sun”—a pagan symbol Himmler tiled on the floor of his occult castle—Anglin belongs to the jackboot wing of the alt-right. It is very different in style, if not in substance, from Spencer’s elitist academics. Anglin openly describes himself as a neo-Nazi, or 1488er 1488ers The 14/88 movement is named for its devotion to a 14-word white supremacist slogan (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) and what the eighth letter of the alphabet represented when repeated (“Heil Hitler”). , He is preoccupied with the idea that Jews control the world, mainly through the global financial system, and designed The Daily Stormer as a “hardcore front for the conversion of masses of people into a pro-White, Antisemitic ideology.” In the year after Trump announced his candidacy, its traffic doubled, to about 2 million readers a month, according to web tracking data. “I represent the will of the mob,” Anglin told me in an email.

What sets Anglin apart from other neo-Nazis is that he strives to be entertaining. If he hadn’t damned himself to his race war, he might have landed a job as a blogger. He writes clearly, with a saucy, scorched-earth tone. When in gear, he can crank out around a dozen posts a day in two five-hour shifts. For several weeks, his website header featured Pokemon characters superimposed on a bucolic landscape with a beatific Hitler winking from the clouds. In September, Anglin told readers to print up fliers depicting Hitler in the form of the chubby yellow anime character Pikachu and hand them out to young boys at “Pokemon Go” “gyms,” real-world locations where people gather to play a Pokemon-based game. (There is no evidence this happened.) As puerile as the stunt sounds, Anglin had a theory behind it: If you could make people laugh, you got them to accept something that was previously too distasteful to consider. It is the Mein Kampf chapter on propaganda updated for culture-jamming millennials Gamergate This was a major turning point within trolldom and for the alt-right. Hardcore gamers, fed up with what they viewed as the intrusion of PC culture upon their domain, launched a mass attack against a female game developer and media critics, coordinated out of 4chan forums, which were crawling with white nationalists. For many trolls and alienated young men, Gamergate demonstrated that they had real-world power. For the alt-right, it was the biggest red-pilling moment—until Trump. .

Anglin’s journey to the alt-right took him through many of the alleys of self-radicalization that angry young men now travel on their way to white nationalism. He became a fan of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose show Trump has appeared on. According to Anglin’s writings, for a while he drove around the country, slept in his car and got popped for drug offenses. And he burrowed into the emerging 4chan community. Launched in 2003, 4chan was a free-for-all of mostly underemployed young white guys looking to have fun or cause trouble. Trolling—the act of provoking or harassing a person online—was born in 4chan forums. The reward was the “lulz”—the cackling that ensues when trolls crushed their perceived foes. Most of the victims were people of color, women and gay men.

For a few years, Anglin roamed through Southeast Asia, teaching English. On his personal blog, he expressed sympathy for impoverished Filipinos he came across in his travels. But after a while, unable to forge meaningful relationships with the locals, he grew depressed and found himself “drinking too much of a strong coconut wine.” He decided that the Filipinos were too “primitive” to connect with his “intellectualism.” “It was only among my own kind—those of the European race—that I would ever be able to share true kinship, as it is only they who share my blood, and can understand my soul,” he concluded. He launched a new site called totalfascism.com, where he wrote about wanting to throw non-white immigrants in concentration camps and put landmines along the Mexican border. He also had some foreboding words for the GOP. “As the Republican party moves towards embracing multiculturalism,” he wrote, “a void is being created within the mainstream of American politics, one which will be easily exploitable. Our position represents that of the vast majority of the folk, the working White man who is still the core of American society.”

In July 2013, Anglin launched The Daily Stormer. The purpose: Make hate fun. Lulz, Anglin wrote, were a “weapon of the race war.” He orchestrated Stormer campaigns against prominent media and political figures. He wrote guides for his shock troops on how to register anonymous emails, set up virtual private networks and spoof IP addresses. He provided imagery and slogans for them to email and retweet, and warned his trolls not to threaten anyone with violence, perhaps as a safeguard to protect himself from prosecution. In one 2015 campaign, he trolled students at the University of Missouri who were protesting the school’s handling of racist incidents on campus. Using the same Twitter hashtags as the protestors, Anglin injected fake news into the conversation. He said the KKK was burning crosses on the university lawn and had shot several people, offering a random photo of a black man in a hospital bed as evidence. This touched off a minor panic, and gullible reporters broadcast the subversion to the wider world. Lulz.

And in Trump, the troll army found an even greater purpose and a megaphone. Not only does the Republican nominee seem to share certain character traits with many alt-righters—he is deliberately offensive, he clearly enjoys trolling people on Twitter—he also circulates their rhetoric and imagery.

Some of the most controversial social media moments of the Trump campaign have a provenance that can be traced directly back to hardcore racists like Anglin. The process goes something like this: Anglin plies 4chan waters like a fascist tastemaker, surfacing memes for his core audience. From there, the memes disperse to a more “mainstream” conservative readership, often through transfer points such as Breitbart, a top destination for readers leaving The Daily Stormer. During the course of the election, Breitbart has styled itself as “the platform for the alt-right,” as Bannon boasted this summer. The site scaremongers about “migrant rape gangs” and black crime, and gives hate-memists free rein in the comments section. And traffic has soared. Its monthly visitors have increased from around 8 million in mid-2014 to around 18 million this July, according to comScore. Other conservative sites, even ones that prefer bowties, appear to have accepted that angry right-wing populism translates into clicks. Take The Daily Caller, which now runs its fair share of immigrant knife-attack stories and Jew-baiting George Soros exposes. The reader comments on the site are at times indistinguishable in tone and racist content from those on Breitbart.

Just as important to the propagation effort is social media, and a small number of alt-right Twitter celebrities have had a freakishly large impact. The most noteworthy was @Ricky_Vaughn 99, whom Richard Spencer described to me as the “ultimate shitlord.” Part of what made Vaughn an effective disseminator of alt-right terms and ideas is that he mixes his hate memes seamlessly with more standard conservative fare. This February, MIT published a study of the top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. Vaughn, who had around 62,000 followers at the time, came in at 107, one spot behind Senator Elizabeth Warren and ahead of NBC News, The Drudge Report, Stephen Colbert and Glenn Beck. “He has pulled off a truly an amazing thing,” said Keegan Hankes, a data intelligence expert at the SPLC. “He gets retweeted by so many different people and by people who clearly don’t know about his connections.” On October 5, Twitter banned Vaughn for unspecified reasons. Within hours, #FreeRicky became the top-trending Twitter topic in the country.

For alt-righters, there is perhaps no more satisfying reward than “meme-magic”—the internet-up process by which absurdist images or phrases get dismissed as offensive jokes only to bubble up into real expressions of a subculture. One example of this alchemy is “cuckservative.” The term derives from “cuckold” pornography, but among the alt-right, it is shorthand for a spineless “beta-male” conservative who sells out the interests of white Americans to the forces of globalism. This usage originated on a small racist forum and was amplified by The Right Stuff, home to the movement’s most popular podcasts The Right Stuff The second-largest alt-right website is run by someone who uses the pseudonym Mike Enoch. On a podcast after the first presidential debate, Enoch and others discussed wanting Trump to rape Clinton. . It was broadcast to a far wider audience during a large-scale troll attack against the National Review Online, in which Vaughn was a ringleader. “Cuck” has now so fully entered the political lexicon that even lefty political types use it jokingly on Twitter.

Another example is the ubiquitous Pepe, a cartoon frog that became a humorous image on 4chan and 8chan and then, thanks to pro-Trump trolls, mutated into a Nazi. According to Hankes, it was Anglin who elevated Nazi Pepe from 4chan and made him a presence on The Daily Stormer. The ecosystem did the rest. In October, Trump retweeted an image of himself with the face of Pepe standing behind a presidential lectern. Later, the Anti-Defamation League declared Pepe a hate symbol. 1488ers The 14/88 movement is named for its devotion to a 14-word white supremacist slogan (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) and what the eighth letter of the alphabet represented when repeated (“Heil Hitler”). Gamergate This was a major turning point within trolldom and for the alt-right. Hardcore gamers, fed up with what they viewed as the intrusion of PC culture upon their domain, launched a mass attack against a female game developer and media critics, coordinated out of 4chan forums, which were crawling with white nationalists. For many trolls and alienated young men, Gamergate demonstrated that they had real-world power. For the alt-right, it was the biggest red-pilling moment—until Trump. The Right Stuff The second-largest alt-right website is run by someone who uses the pseudonym Mike Enoch. On a podcast after the first presidential debate, Enoch and others discussed wanting Trump to rape Clinton.

In an email, Trump’s spokesperson, Hope Hicks, wrote, “Mr. Trump has repeatedly disavowed these groups and individuals, as well as their hateful rhetoric, which he strongly condemns, and will continue to do so.” In fact, Trump and his son Donald Jr. have retweeted neo-Nazi alt-righters, including Vaughn and someone named @WhiteGenocideTM, on multiple occasions. A Fortune investigation published in March revealed that numerous Trump campaign staffers followed white nationalist accounts.

The alt-right’s efforts to contaminate the zeitgeist have, by many measures, succeeded. “Everywhere now on normie sites I see our ideas and memes being pushed,” Anglin said. Since 2012, American white nationalist groups have seen their Twitter followers grow by more than 600 percent, according to a September report by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. An ADL task force found that between August 2015 and July 2016, 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets Echoes Alt-right trolls often wrap Jewish names within a triple parentheses. This meme was inspired by a podcast on The Right Stuff, which used a reverb sound effect to make Jewish names echo nefariously. At one point, an enterprising anti-Semite designed a Google Chrome extension that automatically "echoed" Jewish names as users browsed the internet. (Google removed the extension from its Chrome store for violating its hate speech policy.) , many of them from Trump supporters, generated an estimated 10 billion impressions. This torrent of hate, the ADL suggested, could “contribute to reinforcing and normalizing anti-Semitic language on a massive scale.”

Attacks like those on Ioffe and Schrode have become commonplace, particularly against members of the media. According to the ADL, at least 800 journalists, most of them Jewish, were targeted by anti-Semitic attacks in the 11-month period the task force examined. Twitter, in particular, has proved ill-equipped to prevent trolls from running amok on its platform. A banned troll can set up another anonymous account within minutes and keep on trolling. And the savviest ones know exactly how far Troll code To avoid the attention of internet companies when using racial slurs, trolls have developed a lexicon of sorts. They call black people “googles,” Jews “skypes,” Latinos “yahoos” and Asians “bings.” More recently, they have started to refer to Muslims as “skittles” after a tweet from Donald Trump Jr comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl of candy. they can go: No specific threats against specific people. Nothing that can be construed as “inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” the legal standard created by the U.S. Supreme Court. The FBI initiated a threat assessment of the incidents involving Ioffe and Schrode, but did not find sufficient evidence to open an investigation, according to FBI officials in San Francisco.

After the trolling attack on Ioffe, Wolf Blitzer asked Trump if he had a problem with his supporters issuing anti-Semitic death threats. “I don’t have a message to the fans,” said Trump.

“We interpret that as an endorsement,” Anglin said.

Echoes Alt-right trolls often wrap Jewish names within a triple parentheses. This meme was inspired by a podcast on The Right Stuff, which used a reverb sound effect to make Jewish names echo nefariously. At one point, an enterprising anti-Semite designed a Google Chrome extension that automatically "echoed" Jewish names as users browsed the internet. (Google removed the extension from its Chrome store for violating its hate speech policy.)

The sun was going down in Paoli when Heimbach and his comrades took me to their “compound,” the heart of the would-be ethnostate. As the red neo-Nazi van trundled down a country road, the comrades sucked on vape pens and explained that one of the alt-right’s long-term objectives is to build homogeneous “high-trust” societies. Parrott lamented the fact that his hometown had diversified so much since he was a kid. Later, I checked the census data and found that Paoli’s white population had dropped from 98.3 percent in 2000 to 97.7 percent in 2010. The total population during that period had held steady at about 3,700, which meant the demographic change that so horrified Parrot amounted to an increase of 22 non-white people over a decade. He was probably as close as he was ever going to get to his homogenous high-trust society.

The ethnostate was a property of almost two acres down an unpaved driveway off a small road, a couple Trump yard signs planted in the grass. They said they had purchased it about six weeks ago from a bank that repossessed it. Parrot was fixing up a dilapidated house that he planned to convert into offices and living quarters. For now, the comrades lived in two trailers, one of which had a flag with a Celtic cross, a common white nationalist symbol, hanging in the window. There were two men sitting outside the trailer, but when they saw me, they hastily went inside.

Heimbach and Parrott had seven party members living on the property and expect three more to arrive by the end of the year. They hope to build a recording studio on the property and expand their publishing efforts and clothing line. “If we’re holding back progress, then let us go,” Heimbach said. “Let us have self-determination. We’re not going to go bother you all, just let us go. Let my people go.”

His secessionism reflects a shift in the racist underworld. In the last 30 years, as demographics have changed, even ultra-right bedlamites have been forced to acknowledge the futility of white dominion. Their ambitions have retreated to segregated communities. “It’s just slightly more practical than trying to murder 60 million people,” said Mark Potok of the SPLC. Heimbach rhapsodized about Brexit, Catalonia, south Sudan, the Kurds and even Hezbollah as examples to emulate in some fashion. “It’s no longer going to be a subculture. It’s going to be a culture within a culture, a state within a state,” he’d told me.

We were sitting in one of the trailers, which had green sheets thrown over the few pieces of furniture, a picture of Orthodox Jesus on a shelf and white power magnets on the fridge. Heimbach’s 14-month-old son, Nicholas, named for the last Russian czar, toddled over to me, smiling. He grabbed my pen and I let him doodle on my notepad while Heimbach and I discussed mountaintop mining. (In a millennial spin on old-school neo-Nazism, the TWP supports environmental conservation, on the grounds that that greedy corporations often poison the water, air and economies of local white communities.)

Heimbach and Parrott are using a map of Trump strongholds to target areas where a white nationalist political party would play best.

Heimbach joined the white power movement six years ago. He founded the White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland as an undergraduate in 2012, and met his wife, Brooke, at one of Jared Taylor’s conferences. He shares many of the downwardly mobile problems of his generation, although his have been accentuated by his beliefs. He’d been fired from a job as a caseworker for the Indiana Department of Child Services. According to the SPLC, an answer he provided in a training exercise suggested violence against a client. (Heimbach said he had passed all training sessions, including one on diversity, and believed his firing was “political.”) Since he went full Nazi, his family has shunned him. He has no contact with his parents or siblings, and knows Nicholas might never meet his grandparents. I could see this upset him deeply. “I could have been a teacher if I’d just kept my mouth shut,” he said.

Heimbach and Parrott founded TWP in 2015. They see it as a more pragmatic vehicle for white nationalism, one that could transcend the infighting that has historically plagued the movement. In April, almost 20 groups came together to sign a pact in Georgia and chant, “Death to the Jews!” The alliance, which is called the Nationalist Front, now contains two dozen groups. Heimbach and Parrott wrote its constitution. No violence. No white supremacy. Every member organization has to be willing to work with others. The TWP successfully pushed to exclude Nazi imagery from the coalition’s branding. The TWP would act as the political arm: Anyone belonging to a National Front organization who ran for office would do so as a TWP candidate. The other National Front organizations would help with logistics and communications. At least that was the plan. It was hard to imagine skinheads on the hustings.

A month before the election, and exactly one year after retweeting Nazi Pepe, Trump delivered a thunderous speech in West Palm Beach in which he all but named the Jew. “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors,” he said. “This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system.”

Trump had gone well beyond playing footsie with the alt-right. “This man is 88% woke,” wrote a columnist on The Daily Stormer.

The hard tack toward outright white nationalism was no accident. It was set in motion in August, when Trump placed Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman, at the head of his campaign. Thanks to Bannon—who helped write the Palm Beach speech—the alt-right, incredibly, now had an ideological thruway to the campaign itself.

But as this gang of white nationalists slithered closer to actual political relevance, fissures began to appear in their movement. The discord was embodied in the cartoonish figure of Milo Yiannopoulos Yiannopoulos himself was also a troll. Twitter banned him permanently for encouraging racist online attacks against the actress Leslie Jones. , an ostentatiously gay British faux-journalist and Breitbart’s technology editor. Although most alt-righters dismissed him as a poseur and an opportunist, Yiannopoulos had played a major role in promoting the movement on Breitbart and steering new recruits its way. Then, he went too far: He failed to take its racism seriously. In a guide to alt-righters, published on Breitbart in March, Yiannopoulos described them as mostly pranksters who didn’t mean the revolting things they said. The response was swift and brutal. Mainstream observers blasted him for penning an apologia for a deeply racist movement. And alt-righters were angry at being portrayed as unserious. Anglin and others soon identified Yiannopoulos as a threat, a “kike infiltrator” trying to coopt or water down their cause. In September, Anglin put up a post outlining “The Final Solution to the Milo Problem,” in which he urged readers to crash Yiannopoulos’ speaking engagements and put him in “a state of constant fear.” The next day, a Yiannopoulos event at Florida Atlantic University was canceled because of a threat the FBI deemed credible, according to a university spokesperson.

Yiannopoulos had exposed a rift between the Spencer and Anglin wings of the alt-right. Both are dedicated white nationalists, but they differ on how to achieve their goals. Anglin is a purist. Spencer is willing to work with people outside the movement’s core. For instance, there is the so-called “alt-lite”—more casually bigoted mischief-makers, who might bandy about the N-word but are more likely to be upset about PC culture than, say, the Jews. A broader circle still—you could call it the “alt-white”—encompasses a large number of Trump voters. Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia who studies populist movements, described these people as “not necessarily racist or consciously racist. They just think they have a right to things they used to have and they don’t realize that was in a racialized and fairly racist structure.” Trump has consistently performed better among Republican voters who feel whites are losing out. According to several recent studies, including one by Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner, the more resentment a voter bears toward minority groups, especially blacks, immigrants and Muslims, the more likely he is to support Trump. Economic status and attitudes were far less important factors, according to Klinkner. An Iowa poll conducted by Public Policy Polling in December 2015 found that nearly half of Trump supporters believed the Japanese internment camps in WWII were a good idea. A national analysis of Trump supporters by The New York Times found that 20 percent disagreed with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Spencer wants to meld both the alt-lite and alt-white into a viable political force. “What we should do is basically ride [Yiannopoulos’] coattails,” Spencer said. “If I wanted to create a movement that was 1488 white nationalist, I would have done that. But I didn’t because I recognized that is a total nonstarter. No one outside a hardcore coterie would identify with it. The whole point about alt-right is it’s open. Different people can identify with it. I thought that was strategically wise.”

But Spencer’s strategy has its limits. In mid-September, a surreptitious message was sent to Spencer inviting him to a breakfast meeting at the Heritage Foundation, an oaky conservative think tank. According to congressional sources and emails obtained by the Huffington Post, an invitation had been extended to a handful of Republican congressmen, including Representatives Warren Davidson, Mark Meadows, Gregg Harper, Trent Kelly, Rod Blum, and Scott Garrett; Senator Mike Lee; as well as Ken Cuccinelli, the president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a Tea Party-friendly PAC, and Indiana State Senator Jim Banks. The occasion was a visit from Tom Colbert, the senior chairman of a Mississippi bank and a major Heritage donor, who was in town with his state’s Republican governor. Colbert wanted to sit down with some of the elected federal officials he supports, according to Lee’s communications director. The leadership of Heritage would be at the meeting, including its president Jim DeMint and Mike Needham, the head of its lobbying arm.

For Spencer to gain entry to such a room of right-wing powerbrokers would be a coup for the alt-right and a validation of his cocktail circuit methods, not to mention a hopeful sign that he shared “elective affinities” with certain GOP leaders. It was not to be. The meeting took place, but without Spencer. Someone recognized his name and decided that letting a notorious white nationalist in the building for donuts with Republican congressmen might be unwise, especially in the middle of a presidential election. When I asked Spencer about this later, he was coy. “If such a meeting occurred, I wasn’t there. That said, these meetings are going to have to take place in the future. The alt-right and Trumpian populism are a major force that the GOP simply can’t ignore.”

Wesley Denton, a spokesman for Heritage, told me that Spencer had not been invited to the meeting by Heritage and did not attend. “This was a policy discussion for members of Congress and conservative leaders,” Denton said, adding that “we have a longstanding policy that we do not comment on private donors.” Colbert didn’t respond to requests to comment. Among the politicians, only two responded. A spokesperson for Garrett said he didn’t go to the meeting. Lee, who has refused to endorse Trump and pushed the campaign to denounce the alt-right, didn’t attend either, according to his communications director.

No matter how refined his speech or dress, Spencer's calling card is racism. The alt-righters all had that problem. “This is going to be the peak of their existence,” argued Daryle Lamont Jenkins, the executive director of One People's Project, an anti-racist organization that monitors right-wing groups.

And yet even in the best-case scenario—if the alt-right's leaders slink back into obscurity after the election—the movement has unleashed an ugly and volatile force into American politics. It has proved that a small group of trolls can poison discourse with violent, racist rhetoric and help to elevate a candidate who entertains ideas like registering all Muslim Americans in a database. It has built the iconography, language and infrastructure for a millennial version of an old hate. And together, the alt-right and Trump have created a potential space for a nationalist white voting bloc. It’s not so hard to imagine a European-style ethno-nationalist movement emerging from Trumpism, one that isn’t dependent on hardcore alt-righters but taps into the alt-lite and alt-white demos.

After Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, moderate Republicans famously issued a detailed plan for the future that recommended extensive minority outreach. But the course the GOP actually chose in 2016 hewed a lot closer to a white paper Spencer wrote in 2011 about a “majority strategy” advanced by racist intellectuals. The strategy urged Republicans to forgo their fruitless minority outreach and instead unite a majority of white voters by focusing on immigration restriction. The GOP, Spencer wrote, needed to accept its role as the “white people’s party whether Republican leadership likes it or not.”