BURNS, Tennessee — Jared Taylor used to hold his conference in hotels, but now he has to depend on the government for space — because privately-owned hotels can, and have, prevented his group from meeting.

Now, each year, the white nationalist leader hosts his American Renaissance conference here inside Montgomery Bell State Park, a secluded space where, on Friday night, about 300 white nationalist activists gathered. Happy hour started right after Taylor’s opening remarks on Friday evening.

I introduced myself to Taylor as he tried to adjust the fluorescent lights in the beige conference room that would play host to the weekend’s lectures. He had invited me to cover the conference and when I approached, he invited me to sit at a table near the front so we could talk.

We were unable to get a word in edgewise as soon as we sat down. First, a tall college-age man approached Taylor and asked shyly if he would autograph one of his books. Taylor did. He asked Taylor if he would translate into Japanese the 14 words, a white supremacist slogan that is a cornerstone of the movement. (Taylor grew up partly in Japan, the son of missionary parents.) Taylor demurred.

A second man came up, bearing a gift for Taylor: a round ceramic plate, about the size of a saucer, with markings on it. He made Taylor guess what it was. Part of a pulley system, maybe? No, the gift was a tribal Ethiopian lip plate, which the man had picked up on his travels. Taylor, who has written that Africa is an “utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy,” accepted it with enthusiasm.

Most years, the American Renaissance conference is an obscure event in an obscure park, attended by a handful of the same fringe figures and elsewise only sparking the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That was before Donald Trump.

“I would like to invite you to cover an event in Tennessee next month that will help explain part of the voter enthusiasm for Donald Trump,” Taylor had opened his email to me. “I know you have been following his campaign, with a particular interest in the so-called ‘extremists’ who support him.”

This year, white nationalists can barely contain their excitement over the presumptive Republican nominee, and the AmRen conference reflected the moment. “Even if Trump loses, he’s already shown that immigration and economic nationalism and the whole concept of ‘America first’ works electorally,” Peter Brimelow, the founder of Vdare.com, said in his speech to the conference. “There are some elections where losing candidates blaze a trail for the future.” Brimelow asked how many in the audience had been to a Trump rally; about a quarter raised their hands, mostly young people.

Taylor and others like him represent at this point the old guard of the more think-tanky side of white nationalism. Their movement has started to meld with the younger generation of white nationalists, who by and large consider themselves these days to be alt-right, a mostly online movement I wrote about in December. The alt-right, with its roots in internet ideologies like the Dark Enlightenment combined with good old-fashioned white nationalism, had taken off. “2015 has been huge,” Richard Spencer, the National Policy Institute chair and another luminary in the quasi-intellectual wing of the white nationalist movement, told me at the time.

Months later, their preferred candidate has locked up the Republican nomination without backing down (yet) on the hard-right immigration stances that attracted them to him in the first place, and their feeling of vindication is stronger than ever. There remains an ingrained defensiveness; many people at the conference were using a “nom de guerre,” and reporters were asked to sign a document promising not to take photos of people without their permission, as a condition for entry.

Still, the young alt-righters are reveling in the moment. Many were meeting in person for the first time, and there was a celebratory vibe, particularly on Saturday night for the conference’s banquet. The alt-right guys largely have the same look; a “fashy” haircut, cropped on the sides and longer on top, à la Macklemore. Spencer sports one and seems to have started the trend. One young alt-righter, Karl (not his real name), a twentysomething Texas man active in the Twitter community, seemed like a nice enough guy, friendly and polite. He said his favorite people to troll were Republican strategist Rick Wilson, a frequent target of alt-right trolls, and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. (When I later found what I’m pretty sure is his Twitter account, I found a wall of hatred directed toward “faggots” and Jews.)

“We’re on the winning side for the first time in my experience.”

Karl said that while the alt-right has mostly been going after conservatives online, there may be a shift to targeting liberals as the process continues. The alt-right still loves to target “cuckservatives,” but there’s a sense of having won the battle on the right; their candidate has the nomination and is turning his firepower on Hillary Clinton.

It’s impossible to say, though, whether white nationalists have formed a significant portion of Trump’s support. And while this crowd are largely pro-Trump (Make America Great Again hats were in evidence), it’s unclear to what extent Trump is aware of them. Spencer, for one, believes he is.

“There are really concentric circles in our movement,” Spencer said. “There’s a hard core of people who are coming to this conference. There’s a wider layer of people who are following us regularly, listening to our podcast, reading everything. There’s another layer beyond that that are reading tweets that are being influenced by mainstream media reports.” Spencer estimated the “hard core” at thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people — but estimated that this hard core was influencing hundreds of thousands, even millions of people.

“We’re on the winning side for the first time in my experience,” Spencer said. “I’m so used to being an avant garde bohemian intellectual where I have no connection with politics, politicians are ignorant of our ideas or opposed to them.”

“I think Donald Trump unquestionably is aware of us,” Spencer said. “He’s on Twitter, he’s definitely aware of us.”

The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.

In his opening talk, he had asked the audience how many were attending for the first time; many raised their hands.

Trump has been held to account somewhat for his white supremacist supporters; on CNN a few months ago he was asked about the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and declined to disavow Duke. (He later did.) But the stories keep popping up again and again; one of the most recent examples is William Johnson, a California lawyer and American Freedom Party leader who was selected as a delegate for Trump in California and later was removed/resigned from Trump’s slate amid an uproar.

Johnson was at the conference this past weekend, which he has regularly attended over the years.

“I was naive,” Johnson said. “I thought, Gee, I could participate in the electoral process just like everybody else. I thought I could participate and be productive and be a good example for the community and help promote my candidate but that was not the case.”

Johnson said the experience hadn’t affected his enthusiasm for Trump, and said he expected more white nationalists to get involved in Republican politics.

“I do see them becoming involved in Republican politics because the Republican Party is now Trump’s party,” Johnson said.

In an interview, Taylor attributed the moment to both Trump and what he called the excesses of the left. Trump, Taylor said, “just has certain instincts, and some of his instincts are entirely healthy.” He is the first candidate candidate in a while to “say anything at all that resonates with a white advocate.”

Taylor said attendance was high this year, “the kind of turnout we’ve had when we used to meet in more convenient places.” In his opening talk, he had asked the audience how many were attending for the first time; many raised their hands.

It was then that Taylor warned his audience that there were friendly and unfriendly journalists in attendance. He told attendees that the unfriendly media would try to portray the conference as hateful and ignorant, and that their job was to prevent us from being able to do that.

Be nice, Taylor basically told his audience, because they’re watching.

His conference’s final presentation on Saturday — a brisk PowerPoint on the history of the alt-right — was given by Paul Ramsey, a fifty-something Oklahoman who makes YouTube videos popular among this set and who goes by RamzPaul.

Ramsey mentioned me several times by name. He put onscreen an article about Rush Limbaugh inadvertently praising the alt-right; he attributed it to me and to BuzzFeed News. (The Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff wrote the piece, and her picture and byline were shown onscreen.) He showed my December piece on the alt-right. He pointed me out and encouraged the audience to give me a round of applause for publicizing the movement.

The whole sequence reminded me of Trump’s coy routine toward his targets (“I won’t say who it was — OK, it was so-and-so”).

After Ramsey finished, the group began to file out, most headed for a nearby afterparty at a bungalow in the woods. A skinny young guy in an ill-fitting suit with close-cropped blond hair approached me and two other journalists. He asked me if I was who I am, and whether I was recording him. I answered him. He started talking vaguely. I asked him what he was trying to tell me.

“There’s more of us in New York than you think,” he said.

“We’re crashing the plane with no survivors,” he said. (This is a line delivered by Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, a connection I didn’t make at the time.)

I perceived this as a threat. Now, I’m not as sure. It struck me later that this could also have been the IRL version of the game the alt-right people play on the internet day in and day out — hurling slurs and threats, then chuckling at the normies and cucks who don’t get the irony.

The alt-right likes to flatter themselves that they are simply an ultra-ironic, boundary-smashing, fun-loving group of “shitlords” who might send a few Jews some mean tweets about gas chambers, then roll their eyes at all these cucks alleging anti-semitism. But it’s one thing to slap a Hitler mustache onto a rare Pepe — it’s another to seek out someone in person, even if you’re just quoting a movie.

The emboldenment, though, is happening as a bloody general election battle begins. What happens after November is unclear, especially if Trump loses and the movement risks going back to being just as fringe as it was before.

“That is the challenge,” Spencer said. “I think Trump is gonna win. But there’s a chance he could lose. Even if Trump wins, he could disappoint us. So the question is, we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket, we want to make this beyond Trump.”

Johnson, the short-lived Trump delegate, echoed Spencer.

“Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party so it is no longer a conservative movement — which in many respects is also globalist — and so he is now creating a nationalist feeling within the Republican Party. The epic battle from here on out is going to be between globalism and nationalism,” he said. “And nationalism will win out.”

Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com on May 26, 2016.

Inside A White Nationalist Conference Energized By Trump’s Rise was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

WASHINGTON — Old-guard racists like David Duke aren’t the only white nationalists to have been encouraged by Donald Trump’s candidacy this year: His bid has also provided a tremendous boost to a newer movement calling itself the “alt right.”

Up until now, the alt right labored mostly in obscurity, its internal fights and debates hidden from anyone who wasn’t directly looking for them. But all that’s starting to change, and it’s only getting stronger.

“This is really a phenomenon that’s been happening over the last year,” said Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute. “2015 has been huge.”

The movement probably doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before. The alt right is loosely connected, and mostly online. The white nationalists of the alt right share more in common with European far-right movements than American ones. This is a movement that draws upon relatively obscure political theories like neoreaction or the “Dark Enlightenment,” which reject the premises on which modernity is built, like democracy and egalitarianism. But it’s not all so high-minded as that. Take a glance at the #altright hashtag on Twitter or at The Right Stuff, an online hub of the movement, and you’ll find a penchant for aggressive rhetoric and outright racial and anti-Semitic slurs, often delivered in the arch, ironic tones common to modern internet discourse. Trump is a hero on the alt right and the subject of many adoring memes and tweets.

In short, it’s white supremacy perfectly tailored for our times: 4chan-esque racist rhetoric combined with a tinge of Silicon Valley–flavored philosophizing, all riding on the coattails of the Trump boom.

Spencer himself can claim credit for coining the term “alt right”; in 2010, he founded AlternativeRight.com, which is now RadixJournal. But he says the term has gotten a second life in the past year due to a confluence of external factors. “I think it has a lot to do with Trump,” he said. “I think the refugee crisis is also an inspiration. I just think things have gotten so real.”

Jared Taylor, the American Renaissance founder who along with Spencer is considered one of the chiefs of the intellectual wing of white nationalism, also acknowledged Trump’s influence, but said, “It doesn’t have to do only with Trump,” citing Black Lives Matter and “the current rowdiness on college campuses” as other inspirations.

“I think it goes by a lot of different names,” Taylor said. “I consider it a dissident right as well.”

Spencer believes the alt right is “deeply connected” with his work. “I would say that what I’m doing is we’re really trying to build a philosophy, an ideology around identity, European identity,” he said, “and I would say that the alt right is a kind of the take-no-prisoners Twitter troopers of that.”

The alt right’s targets don’t include just liberals, blacks, Jews, women, Latinos, and Muslims, who are all classified a priori as objects of suspicion. (Though this has not gone unnoticed: “It’s definitely something we’re aware of and tracking,” said Marilyn Mayo, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “There are more white supremacists who are defining themselves as part of the alt right.”)

The alt right’s real objective, if one can be identified, is to challenge and dismantle mainstream conservatism.

It’s in part responsible for the spread of the “cuckservative” slur that gained currency over the summer and likely originated in forums on sites like My Posting Career and The Right Stuff, and has come to define a far-right contempt for conservatives they view as weak or sellouts — often those who oppose Trump.

So far, they haven’t garnered much attention from mainstream conservative figures, though they’ve begun to intersect a bit with national political commentary.

“You are on fire tonight, Alt Right!” conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeted in August at an account called @_AltRight_ whose current avatar is a photo of Front National scion Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. Coulter’s rant about Jews over the summer was met with approval by Spencer. Her public persona has become more and more tied to a kind of white identity politics; Coulter’s book Adios America! may have had some influence on Donald Trump’s hard right turn on immigration, and her Twitter feed has lately seemed of a piece with alt right ideas about America being a white nation (“All trying to imitate Trump on immigration, but it’s not just security!!! Its CULTURE!!!! See Miami, Houston, Nashville etc etc”) and secretive Jewish influence (“I love how the media assumes all Americans know Yiddish.”)

Asked about the alt right and Trump, Coulter told BuzzFeed News in an email: “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but Trump’s support is quite a bit larger than any one small slice of the electorate, much less a small slice of the right-wing electorate. how about covering the surprisingly large support for trump in the black community? THAT’S a story.” Coulter told BuzzFeed News later that she wasn’t familiar with the movement and is “not a member of any group that calls itself the ‘alt right,’ and don’t know anyone who calls himself ‘alt-right.’”

(Upon receiving explanation of what the alt right is, including a link to a description in a Daily Beast piece, Coulter wrote the following: “Oh a ‘white power’ movement. okay, I see where this is going. if there are people out there who support trump because they are for ‘white power’ (daily beast) that says nothing about me or donald trump, any more than it says something about bernie sanders that some of his supporters were undoubtedly fans of stalin’s show trails, the soviet invasion of hungary and the assassination of raoul wallenberg. Hillary endorsed #blacklivesmatter, but I will allow that the majority of hillary’s supporters probably don’t support the murder of police. lots of her supporters absolutely do — and cop-killers have murdered a lot more ppl this year than any ‘white power’ types have. I retweeted that tweet because it’s funny.”)

Rush Limbaugh praised the alt right on his show earlier this month, though he didn’t appear to know what it was; a caller called in and described a vague version of it, saying, “There’s a group of younger people called ‘the alt right.’ And it started in the last few years in Europe because of the Muslim invasion.” Still, it put the term on the air for Limbaugh’s millions of listeners to hear.

Despite these glimmers of something approaching recognition, the alt right remains proudly outside of the mainstream. For Richard Spencer, the alt right is a rejection of the intellectual conservatism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

“We don’t have a starting point with William F. Buckley, we don’t have the same starting point as Richard Lowry and Jonah Goldberg and National Review,” Spencer said. The alt right is “radically different from George W. Bush, the conservative movement, etc. It really was a notion of an alternative.”

The alt right’s current moment in the sun has actually been a long time coming. The movement is undergirded by some of the ideas espoused by Dark Enlightenment or neoreactionary thinkers like the English philosopher Nick Land and the the American computer programmer Curtis Yarvin (aka “Mencius Moldbug”). Land and Yarvin have for years espoused a rejection of democracy and a return to traditional authoritarian structures. But the Dark Enlightenment thinkers are the definition of inaccessible; both Land and Yarvin’s writings are eye-glazingly verbose. A representative Land sentence, from his manifesto on the Dark Enlightenment: “The war on political incorrectness creates data-empowered, web-coordinated, paranoid and poly-conspiratorial werewolves, superbly positioned to take advantage of liberal democracy’s impending rendezvous with ruinous reality, and to then play their part in the unleashing of unpleasantnesses that are scarcely imaginable (except by disturbing historical analogy).”

The alt right’s genius is in dispensing with the self-marginalizing pseudo-intellectual stuff and getting straight to the point, and not in the creaky hit-you-over-the-head fashion of, say, Stormfront, but the slangy and freewheeling argot of the internet in 2015. The Right Stuff has a page devoted to the lexicon of the alt right, a collection of terms that pop up frequently on Twitter once you know what to look for. “Fash,” for example, for fascist. “Merchant” for Jews. “Dindu nuffins” for “an obviously guilty black man.” Where neoreactionary thinkers refer to “the Cathedral” as shorthand for the politically correct elite establishment, The Right Stuff is more pointed in calling it “the Synagogue.” Rare Pepes, the frog meme native to 4chan, are common. The Right Stuff forums are rife with memes targeting, for example, Jeb Bush as a weakling (a recent Bush-related thread is titled “Suicide Watch Headquarters”) and portraying Trump as a hero (see “Memes of Der Trumpenfuhrer”). The culture clearly draws on 4chan — the /pol/ board is another hub.

This can all make it difficult to discern who’s a real racist and who’s a troll doing it to be edgy, as Ken White, the lawyer and blogger at Popehat and a keen observer of politics on the internet, pointed out. The Popehat Twitter feed, co-run by White, has described alt right as “white supremacy for people with soft hands.”

“It’s really hard to tease out the genuine white nationalists from the trolls,” White told BuzzFeed News, but, “at a certain point, the distinction isn’t meaningful. If you spend all day saying white nationalist things online but you claim you’re doing it ironically, it’s not clear to me what the difference really is.”

“They’re a lot more internet savvy, a lot more immersed in internet culture as well as mainstream culture, and they’re relatively good at using those tools to get their message out,” White said.

One of the central figures on the alt right internet is Paul Ramsey, a 52-year-old in Oklahoma who makes YouTube videos as RamzPaul. He agreed to an interview with BuzzFeed News on one condition: that he would record it.

I agreed to his terms, and interviewed him over the phone about the alt right movement and his role in it. Right after we got off the phone, Ramsey started tweeting about me and the interview. Immediately, a stream of anti-Semitic tweets came my way, without a word of this story having yet been written or published: “Oy vey! Look at that nose! I can’t imagine this ending well,” read one. “She looks like she echos,” read another, using a slang term on the alt right for being Jewish (see: The Right Stuff’s glossary). “She @RosieGray interviewed me once my .1% Jewish DNA results were published. We MOTs stick together,” Ramsey himself tweeted. Ramsey tweeted about my being “nice” and exhorted his followers to be nice to me in turn, but he also tweeted about how he planned to post the recording online so his followers could assess it — a not-so-subtle invitation to troll me.

Ramsey characterized the alt right as being neither mainstream conservatism nor neo-Nazism. As an example of the differences between the alt-right and neo-Nazis, he stated that the 14/88 crowd (14 for the “14 words” white supremacist slogan and 88 as shorthand for “Heil Hitler”) don’t like Trump because his daughter is Jewish (Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism), whereas the alt right doesn’t care about this and generally support Trump for his policies. Ramsey objects to the word “supremacist,” saying he’s a nationalist and doesn’t hate other people or think he’s better than them. He repeatedly invoked the example of Israel as a template of the kind of nationalism he seeks for the United States. In keeping with the alt right’s affinity for European identity movements, Ramsey often visits Europe and said he has recently been in Romania and Hungary, though he said he isn’t affiliated with any specific groups there.

I pressed him on the ideological specifics of the alt right. For example, does he believe that the Holocaust happened?

“I believe it should be able to be discussed, let me put it that way,” Ramsey said. “And that’s because — and it depends what you mean by the Holocaust. Do you mean that 6 million figure? You know that 6 million figure has been used many times before World War II, did you know that?”

Ramsey framed the alt right is part of a nationalist struggle against globalism — “Do we want to have a global entity or self-determination?” But on the topic of how his ideal United States, a country of people of white European heritage, could be achieved despite the fact that the country is currently racially diverse — a topic that inevitably leads to questions about the use of violence — Ramsey was vague. “These things are kind of organic in that when people are free, they tend to organically make communities,” he said, citing Trump’s immigration policy as the kind of move that constitutes an important first step.

He’s not the only one for whom the actual political project is a little hard to pin down.

“If I had to take a political position, I’d say that I’m pro-secession,” said Jack Donovan, a writer associated with the alt right who is known for his writings about masculinity. “America is too big. The U.S. government is bloated and there is too much money in the game. I think smaller is better, and I’d like to see America break up along its natural dividing lines.”

“Personally, I am focused on building tribal networks of interdependent people who share my values, culture, and heritage — using immigrant communities as an example. I can’t control what hand-puppet legislators do or say, but I can control my own social world,” Donovan said.

Michael Anissimov, another writer associated with the neoreactionary movement, recently proposed a solution in an ebook manifesto titled The Idaho Project. It’s about his plan to move to a rural area in Idaho and invite other people to live with him whom he “personally gets along with.”

“This book proposes an alternative point of view called enclavism, the idea that we should create our own desired societies by coalescing in low-population, defensible regions of the United States like Idaho,” the book’s blurb on Amazon states.

Nebulous future secession plans aside, the real juice for the alt right is in today’s political moment. Donald Trump has been the Republican front-runner for over five months, and shows few signs of slowing down. For Spencer, this is a vindicating moment.

“He’s bigger than the conservative movement, he’s bigger than the GOP establishment, and he’s proven that you don’t have to play their game,” Spencer said. “And I think that’s inspiring and liberating for a lot of alt righters.”

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Originally published at www.buzzfeed.com on Dec. 27, 2015.

How 2015 Fueled The Rise Of The Freewheeling, White Nationalist Alt Right Movement was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.