* You can dabble in racism, hang out on racist websites, read fascist literature, and later come back to the normal world, but when you use your real name in the movement you have passed the point of no return. You can quit, but you can’t leave. No one will forget what you’ve done. The movement takes away your friends and gives you new ones, but they don’t really like you, and they’ll turn on you the moment you become a liability, or “cringe,” an embarrassment. After the movement ruins you, it will laugh at you. You deserve it. You were never really good enough, but the movement had fun while it lasted, You, of course, did not.
At the center of the movement is a group of old men. The old men provide the money — but there is never enough money to do much of anything, and the old men are always pushing the young men to find a new source. When the wealthy inventor Walter Kistler developed an interest in race science in his later years, one of his aides told me a significant part of his job was to stand between Kistler and the grifters who wanted to extract money from him. “He was like a childlike genius — brilliant, but naïve, easily manipulable,” the aide said. “We were basically all policemen… because Walter’s checkbook would be in his pocket and whoever walked in, he said, ‘Okay, here is a check.’ ”
The old men offer validation. They have overlapping clubs and conferences, and when a young man gets an invitation, it’s a sign he has promise. One of those old men was Bill Regnery…
* Richard Spencer calls these old men vampires. “They see something that is alive, and they want to go suck its blood. And then the second they don’t think it’s alive, or it’s objectively dead, they want to move on to something else,” Spencer said. Regnery was Spencer’s chief vampire, and backed him for a decade. When Regnery died in the summer of 2021, Spencer did not go to the funeral.
The old men cultivate young men to be public faces for the movement. They give them just enough praise to get them hooked and working for more.
* [Matt Parrott] mentioned he was antisocial. He’d testified he was an introvert, an accidental revelation of some vulnerability. Afterward, he’d said, “It’s really hard to not be yourself after several hours of that kind of drilling. The real you boils out.”
I tested the waters with one of my favorite questions: Are you left – handed? Parrott said he was. [Matt] Heimbach was left – handed, too, which I’d noticed while looking closely at a photo of him in the middle of a brawl — he had a puffy red left hand. I asked Parrott, in a tone of shamelessly fake casualness, what he thought of the ubiquity of the word “autist” in white nationalism.
It was like whispering the secret password in a fairy tale — the whole side of a mountain opened up. He said he’d been diagnosed with Asperger’s in the nineties, and that Heimbach had, too.
* The movement will get you punched, sued, jailed, divorced, bankrupted. But it will never let you go. Matt Heimbach had a round face with thick black hair and eyebrows, and he was always grinning, but underneath it was a seething anger. “My biggest advice to people in the movement is like, Don’t fucking leave , because there’s no point,” Heimbach said. “If you’re already in, your life is fucked.” It will leave you with no one to confide in but the journalists who’ve exposed what you’ve done.
Heimbach had been blackpilled, trapped in a nihilistic hopelessness that the only thing to look forward to was to watch the world burn. I reminded him that quitting the movement might provide some benefits that he hadn’t considered. When white nationalists kill people, they tend to kill each other. I said quitting would reduce his risk of being one of those killed.
* Heimbach was fired from McDonald’s after management discovered he’d been a professional racist. He read me his termination letter and said, “They never forgive you. They never forgive you…. There’s no expiration date for how long your life will be ruined.” His voice had more edge than usual. “You get to a certain point where everything is just like that Springsteen song, ‘Glory Days.’ You just sit around like, Man, remember 2015?
* [Evan McLaren] spent a decade in white nationalism before coming to the realization he’d been a fool. In 2022, he posted a statement online, saying, “My revulsion for conservatism and the political right wing is total. I reject and disavow my past actions, views, and associations.” He apologized for what he’d done and said he didn’t expect to be forgiven. In conversations with me, he was unsparing: the movement was toxic and destructive and ruined people’s lives. He’d met many people he thought would have serious psychological problems even if they weren’t involved in it.
* “Sometimes when you hate something so much, you’re so motivated that you’ll make these connections, and they might be correct almost despite your motivations,” Richard Spencer told me. He was talking about a rival white nationalist [Greg Johnson] he thought was a vicious gossip. They’d feuded for years. But his rival had once accused him of auditioning to be on the Kremlin’s payroll, and years later Spencer admitted that, in retrospect, that catty bitch was on to something.
* It was March 2022, and I’d called him about the divide among white nationalists over which side to support in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I wanted the lay of the land, but Spencer kept talking about himself.
I’d first spoken to him by phone in 2016, when he was one of the few willing to be associated with the alt – right by name and on the record. Spencer said he was a narcissist, but this made talking to him easier, because he felt no shame and so he didn’t conceal his motivations. But it also meant he often failed to notice telling details about other people and why they did what they did, because his attention was elsewhere, on himself. He’d continued to answer my questions in all the years since, as the fortunes of the alt – right rose and fell, and so did his. There were times he’d gotten so lost in his own monologue that if I interjected an “uh – huh” to show I was listening, he sounded startled, as if he had forgotten someone was on the other side of the call.
* Russia found the far – right activists useful in the United States and Europe. It cultivated relationships with them both online and in real life. Russian trolls had used fake social media accounts and fake news sites to inflame racial tensions and stage protests. The state – controlled TV network RT had interviewed as “experts” a variety of extremists, including Spencer himself. Maria Butina had become intimately close with conservative activists, particularly in the National Rifle Association, before she was convicted in 2018 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of Russia. Russia had invited fringe political parties to Crimea to build legitimacy for its annexation.
* Spencer was in a mood to reflect on his marriage in a way he hadn’t been before. “All these things that I overlooked — you look back now and it’s like, Holy shit, she was trying to do something .” He admitted he’d adopted some of Kouprianova’s views as his own. But he thought he was too smart to get played by the Kremlin. “I feel like I am an unrecruitable asset, in the sense that if someone suggests something to me, that makes me almost more skeptical. I march to the beat of my own drum,” he said. “Isn’t it much more easy to work with dumb people who are easily suggestible?”
Spencer and Kouprianova met on Facebook in 2009 and married the next year. He thought she was very smart, but that he was smarter. Most people who’ve met both told me they thought it was the other way around.
* Each told me they suspected the other was suffering from a personality disorder. They’d surreptitiously recorded each other during fights. Kouprianova had accused Spencer of physical and emotional abuse. They fought over child support. Kouprianova’s first lawyer withdrew from the case, in part, the lawyer wrote, because of “your desire for vengeance and taking down the Spencer family.” Some of Spencer’s lawyers dropped him, too.
* “He came across as a shy and nerdy grad student,” she said. “The way he comes across in his John Travolta suits — this really cheesy, sometimes scary, but very extroverted person in the last couple years — that would have been such a turnoff for me.” He knew all these obscure black – and – white Soviet films, and at the time, she thought it was cool he liked what she liked. But looking back, she said, it was all a manipulation, just narcissistic love bombing. He was flooding the zone with these references to impress her, and to drown any second thoughts she might have with affection and attention.
She didn’t see this coming, she said, this obsession with race and eugenics. When they met, Spencer was a libertarian. He’d had a Jewish mentor and dated an Asian – American woman. He told her the political book that had influenced him the most was by Justin Raimondo, a gay antiwar activist. She’d explained it the same way to the Huffington Post : “I didn’t understand the nuances of American politics. I knew he was conservative, but…”
* Spencer did not have the self – control to match his ambition, Kouprianova thought. When she compared his personality to historic political figures, they were more motivated, more organized, more Machiavellian than he was.
* Spencer made an ideal spokesman. He didn’t look like a guy who had nothing in his life to be proud of so he was proud of being white. In crowds, he could project confidence and self – control. That facade faded over time and under pressure. In a smaller group, he could be awkward and self – conscious, and fail to read the room. He once walked into an interview in a hotel room and asked my producer for a cigarette, as if he could smoke in a hotel, and as if he could smoke in the interview like it was the 1950s. He told me he can’t stand it when people don’t like him.
* “I’ve always been very lonely,” Spencer said. As a child, he’d never felt like he was part of the world around him; he couldn’t connect with other kids. Maybe they could sense even back then that he felt superior to them. But Spencer was not good at anything — not math, not English, not sports. He was awkward, goofy. In middle school, his teachers told his parents he wouldn’t be able to go to college, he said, “because I was almost retarded because of my dyslexia.”
In therapy for dyslexia, he’d listened to Mozart and recorded himself repeating words, and then played them back over and over again. He thought it rewired his brain. By the end of high school, he’d caught up to the other kids in math and sports, and he did well on the SAT. But it was not enough. He didn’t get into Princeton.
It stung, even if he knew it was embarrassing to be stung by it. Spencer asked me once why the journalists who wrote about him were so desperate to figure out his origin story. I told him it was probably because the popular image of a racist was a broken – down old man in an Alabama trailer park, but he was upper middle class, and most elite journalists were upper middle class, and so they were confused why someone like them would do what he’d done. He paused for a second, then said it was because he didn’t get into Princeton.
* The first time Matt Heimbach met Spencer was at a hotel room party after a conference. As some guys were leaving on a booze run, Spencer requested bourbon or whiskey — Heimbach didn’t remember what exactly, just that it was fancy. They brought back Mad Dog 2020 and were partying in the room when Spencer returned. “He just looks disgusted and asks, ‘Did you get me my whiskey?’ ” They told him to drink a beer like a real man. “He started to throw a hissy fit. One of the guys was like, ‘Richard, go in the hallway.’ Like ten seconds later, we just hear ka – thump and we run outside…. Richard has been lifted off his feet and is being slammed into the wall by a drunken college white nationalist going, ‘You drink’ — thump — ‘what we give you’ — thump — ‘Richard!’ — thump .” Heimbach remembered Spencer squealing, “Put me down!” He seemed to cherish the memory.
* Spencer was in search of a donor. He’d always wanted a donor. He wanted to run a think tank and publish essays and research on the superiority of white people and the West, and he wanted someone to pay for it who was not his mother. Regnery had founded the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank, a few years earlier as a vehicle for a friend who’d since died. Spencer thought it was an empty shell. After exchanging emails, Spencer flew to Florida and made his pitch. In January 2011, Regnery made Spencer head of NPI and a sister organization, Washington Summit Publishers.
Regnery had a lot of money, but he didn’t want to dump much of it into NPI. Instead, he urged Spencer to find some other external source of funding.
* Spencer brought Kouprianova. She knew her husband wasn’t there to celebrate Murray. He’d talked about other old men, she said, and the possibility they would leave him large donations in their wills. [Walter] Kistler was a prime example: “This guy is in his nineties, so God knows about his state of mind at this stage.” They did see Murray briefly, but she thought he snubbed her husband.
Even so, they had a great time, partying with “all these Seattle society hags,” Spencer said. He felt momentum, like things were coming together. “I was flying high…. I was like, We’re gonna have a billionaire, we’re gonna have a billionaire …”
* Spencer had a contract with Kistler. Eventually, Spencer was offered a $50,000 kill fee. He took it. He bragged to his wife that he’d played hardball and won.
* Greg Johnson, who ran the white nationalist website Counter – Currents, noticed an element of the drama that most of the mainstream media coverage barely touched. “The Russian angle, I think, leads to the most plausible hypothesis for why this conference was shut down: NPI and Radix are Russian propaganda organs; Dugin, the chief speaker, is an ideologue of Russian chauvinism and an apologist for Stalin…. Jobbik, which was also associated with the conference, is pro – Russian, which is rather tricky in a country invaded twice by Russia in the last century,” Johnson wrote. He didn’t like Spencer’s new direction: “He has basically abandoned ethnonationalism and turned into an apologist for Dugin and reactionary Russian chauvinism.”
* Spencer had created the Alternative Right website in 2010, and ran it with a couple of writers for a while. Then he got mad at the writers and killed the site. He wanted to focus on his pretentious journal, Radix , and be the next Nietzsche. But the term “alt – right” was catchy, one white nationalist wrote, because it signaled distance from mainstream conservatism without endorsing national socialism or white nationalism.
* When Spencer finally realized the alt – right wave was swelling, he tried to surf it. Because he was willing to use his real name when few others would, he became the face of it by default.
* Kouprianova thought Spencer enjoyed the negative attention, because it was any attention, and that he wanted to be feared, because it made him feel alpha. She thought he had no sense of self without a reaction from others. People called her Spencer’s beard, and she was in a way — not to make him look straight, but to make him look like he had it together. She felt forced into a role of “Russian Suzie homemaker,” which she resented, because she’d lived abroad and spoke three languages. He told her, You make me look normal.
* Spencer was a draw. He shapeshifted to fit the desires of the people around him. From back in Montana, Kouprianova had watched her husband morph into this flashy, cheesy “alpha” persona. When people called him chubby on the internet, he went on a diet and ate only one meal a day. When they started calling him gay, she said, “all of a sudden these groupies appear, proving to the outside world he’s not.”
* Spencer and Froelich were spotted leaving the afterparty together at Charlottesville 1.0. Gossip spread quickly, and Identity Evropa investigated her. Both she and Spencer denied they’d done anything other than talk. Kouprianova was pregnant with Spencer’s second child — it was not a good look.
Froelich heard another guy, who went by Eli Mosley, was interested in her. “Eli has claimed me,” she texted Spencer. “Did he inform you of his decision? Or full white sharia?” Spencer asked. She said, “I guess white sharia.” Within a few weeks, Mosley was doxxed. His real name was Elliot Kline. He was pudgy, with a reddish beard and his hair cut like Spencer’s, and he liked to say he looked like a potato. Froelich offered him a place to stay for a bit. He never left.
He didn’t have a normal job, and she made the money working at a restaurant. But the texts show they liked the idea of being a power couple.
* Through the summer, Spencer felt euphoric. He was at the height of his power within the alt – right. He bragged to Froelich that people worshiped him like a God, and she watched the teenagers in awe of him at the nazi parties. He told her he was the L. Ron Hubbard of the alt – right, that he was building a new religion.
“You can’t go back,” Spencer told me later. “I just wish I could have asked myself, Do you like these guys? Richard, I know how you feel about ugly people …”
Back in Montana, Kouprianova looked at the photos posted online of the crowd Spencer was hanging around. The elderly men in tweed were gone, and now there were these younger, rougher – looking guys. Every six months there’d be someone new who served as his right – hand man, and now it was Elliot Kline. Kline was named Identity Evropa’s public representative for Charlottesville 2.0, but he also served as Spencer’s representative for its planning. Kline texted Spencer, “This is going to be a violent summer.”
Kline had a reputation as a clout chaser and a name – dropper. In private, he saw Spencer as a useful tool. Kline thought he was smarter and better. He told Froelich he needed to work out more to prepare for Rahowa, or “racial holy war,” she later said under oath. He was building a militia for Spencer, and he would lead them into victory, and then depose him. Once a white ethnostate was established, Spencer would be the first against the wall, Froelich said in a deposition. When a lawyer asked her to state explicitly what that meant, she explained, “That he would put Richard Spencer against a wall and shoot him dead.”
Spencer thought those guys loved him because he was great, not because they wanted to establish a base of power before stomping on his face to seize the crown.
* “The movement is magnetized to shit,” Spencer said. “Any form of shit it sees, it wants to go die on that hill…. It’s just like, Oh look — more shit! Let’s go involve ourselves. Let’s at least endorse it. It’s just so insane.” The alt – right was a shit magnet because some people were attracted to it not despite the stigma around it, but because of it. It was bad, and it made people angry, especially their parents. Spencer had imagined himself as the next Nietzsche, but instead he was the next Marilyn Manson.
After Froelich invited Spencer to the AltRight Discord server, he texted her, “Wow, the forum is insane.” He asked if someone could create an elite room with no shitposting, and she replied, “You are Richard Spencer. All you need to do is demand it and say who you want in and it is yours.” He declined: “It’s better to have intermediaries, like you, then for me to simply demand stuff.”
* [Christopher Cantwell] was also the most emotionally volatile person I have ever met — man or woman, adult or baby. In a few days he would tell me, “I find myself in tears more often than a man my age probably should.” So as a man of “reason,” he framed his emotions, like anger, as a rational response to the news. His voice got higher, and he spoke faster, even as he insisted he was genetically predisposed to appreciating the cold, hard facts of capitalism. He wasn’t going to Charlottesville to debate UVA students about public policy. He was going to create a massive spectacle to provoke an emotional response — to make his enemies afraid, and to make young white guys think he looked cool.
* In the park, Robert “Azzmador” Ray was filming the scene for the Daily Stormer. Azzmador had a gray wizard beard, a thin braid down his back, and a criminal record that began with a 1990 arrest in Dallas for illegally selling an interracial porno tape called Three Way Cum.
* Parrott did not eat right and did not exercise, and most of the time he tried to forget he had a physical body. If there were people eager to punch a nazi in the face, he was a soft target. But Parrott waded through the brawl unpunched. People who wanted to fight were high on adrenaline, and their eyes were searching for other fighters.
* There were about half a dozen guys, among them Elliot Kline, Nathan Damigo, Jason Kessler, and Richard Spencer. They asked one another, What should we do? What should we say? Spencer stood to address his men. They’d been drinking, and when Spencer began ranting, someone in the room was secretly taping.
“We are coming back here like a hundred fucking times! I am so mad! I am so fucking mad at these people! They don’t do this to fucking me! We are going to fucking ritualistically humiliate them! I am coming back here every fucking weekend if I have to! Like this is never over. I win! They fucking lose! That’s how the world fucking works. Little fucking kikes — they get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octoroons — I fucking — my ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit! I RULE THE FUCKING WORLD! Those pieces of fucking shit get ruled by people like me. They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them. That’s how the fucking world works. We are going to destroy this fucking town!”
There was no pretense of irony, or that this was one big cosmic joke, or that he simply wanted open debate among reasonable people. Spencer sounded sweaty and crazy. A couple guys clapped lightly, and one offered a soft “yeah.” But right there, in that room, Spencer lost the movement.
Evan McLaren, who was then Spencer’s loyal right – hand man, could feel the other guys turn on their icon. McLaren felt a shift in himself, too — maybe it had not been a good idea to make peace with Spencer’s narcissism. So many people had been implicated in so much damage, dozens were bloody and three were dead, but all Spencer cared about was his wounded pride.
Long after he’d quit the movement, and apologized, and moved across the Atlantic Ocean, McLaren smiled as he quoted the rant from memory: “They don’t do this to me .” Spencer’s greatest flaw, in its purest expression, at the climax of the disaster it had created. It had been like watching a villain’s final monologue in a play.
* Unite the Right’s attendees had been so proud to show their faces in public, but activists methodically identified them one by one and published their names on social media. They became pariahs in their towns or colleges or even in their families, and they were fired from their jobs. They were kicked off their own social media accounts, so they couldn’t defend themselves or reach new supporters.
* I learned a lot about Cantwell just by standing in his apartment, saying nothing, as the crew set up our interview. His home was hostile to the human psyche. Every corner was stacked with some kind of object for self – improvement — weights, protein powder, supplements, niche kitchen appliances. He’d printed out signs on computer paper in big bold text that read, “STOP SAYING FUCK,” and he’d taped them under his television, by his bathroom mirror, on his fridge. The windows were covered with blackout curtains. He was slamming Sugar Free Red Bulls and taking huge rips from a vape. When I asked how he slept at night, he leaned his head back, his voice tight as he held the smoke in his lungs, and said, “It’s a struggle.”
The night he’d gotten home from Virginia, he said he noticed a big bottle of whiskey on a shelf, and he took it down and drank it till he blacked out. All he remembered was the hangover the next day. After that lapse, he was trying to control his alcoholism.
* Matt Heimbach and Matt Parrott found themselves in a love triangle. Heimbach was having an affair with Parrott’s third wife, Jessica. The Parrotts had just had their first child, a girl. Heimbach was married to Parrott’s stepdaughter, Brooke, and they had two small boys. This meant that Heimbach was having an affair with a woman who was both his best friend’s wife and his wife’s stepmom. At the time, Heimbach and Brooke were living in a trailer on Parrott’s property in Indiana.
The affair ended, but in early March, according to a police report, Jessica and Brooke decided to test Heimbach’s commitment to ending the relationship. Was it really over? They made a plan: Jessica would try to seduce Heimbach, and Brooke and Parrott would film through a window outside. In one sense, it worked: Heimbach responded to Jessica’s romantic overtures. But as Jessica and Heimbach began to get physical, Brooke got upset and ran away, and Parrott fell through the box he was standing on. Then Parrott ran around the home and confronted Heimbach. He ordered his best friend to leave his property, jabbing Heimbach in the chest with his finger. Heimbach put Parrott in a headlock and choked him out.
When Parrott came to, Jessica was standing over him. He ran into the house, and Heimbach entered. Parrott demanded Heimbach leave, and when he didn’t, Parrott threw a chair at Heimbach. Heimbach choked him out again. When Parrott got himself together, he grabbed his four – month – old daughter, ran to Walmart, Walmart, and called the cops. When police arrived, they heard Heimbach yelling at Brooke to tell the cops everything was fine and ask them to leave. She refused, and Heimbach kicked a wall and grabbed Brooke’s cheeks and pushed her on the bed. Cops entered and arrested Heimbach. Heimbach was already on probation for pushing a Black woman at a Trump rally in 2016. A judge sentenced him to thirty – eight days in jail for violating his probation, and a few months later, Heimbach pled guilty to battery for attacking Parrott.
* The divorce took eighteen months. Kouprianova said it cost her $40,000 in legal fees. Spencer was held in contempt of court for failing to pay $60,000 to the court – appointed investigator who determined the best custody arrangement. Multiple third parties involved in the case said they thought both Spencer and Kouprianova were acting irrationally. Kouprianova had originally decided to move to Winnipeg to be near her parents, but in April 2019, changed her mind and decided to stay in Whitefish. She and Spencer both still live in the same mountain town of 8,500 people.
* Parrott was living in Indiana, in the same town where he grew up, with his three kids and his fourth wife. It was ten years since he’d met Matt Heimbach, who was now living far away with his own two children. A few weeks earlier they’d gotten on the phone to gossip about the movement, and Heimbach reflected, “We really did get mixed up with the most despicable evil stupid motherfuckers in America.” Parrott agreed, but it was worse: “We did, bro. We followed those guys into battle.”
Heimbach had found another job, though he knew that eventually someone would recognize him and he’d be fired again. He’d accepted that the decisions he’d made at nineteen meant he might be stuck in this cycle for the rest of his life. It required some finesse in his personal life, he said. “I have to begin every first date with ‘By the way, you should know…’ Do you know how not sexy that is? To be like, ‘You should read my Wikipedia page before our second date’?”
* In 2022, Richard Spencer told me he was no longer a white nationalist. “I care about civilization more than race,” he said. He hadn’t quit trying to be a public figure, tweeting his commentary on politics and old far – right rivals. The most attention he’d gotten in years came with the revelation that he’d listed his political affiliation as “moderate” in his profile on Bumble, a dating app whose best – known rule is that women speak first.
Spencer would take only limited accountability for his starring role in the “Summer of Hate.” He’d said during the Charlottesville trial that he’d been “slumming it” by hanging out with the alt – right. He’d later told me that in 2016 and 2017, he was the most racist he’d ever been, and that he’d felt pressure to be the most far – right guy in the room.
But at his core, he was who he was. Spencer told me he liked Christian nationalism, because he thought associating the religion with the mania of QAnon would help destroy it. “I hate Christianity, okay?” Spencer said. “I hate Jesus Christ. I would have fucking oppressed that hell out of — I know that I come from Roman blood, the kind of people who would fucking crucify him, who would go in and knock down your stupid fucking temple — that’s who I fucking am , Elle,” he said. “In case there’s any ambiguity about the type of person I am, that is the type of person I am.”
Spencer still wanted to be the guy, but he was thinking bigger than politics. He’d turned his energy to building a cult of Apollo. He thought his new religion would eventually take down Christianity, and with it, its slave morality, as Nietzsche called it, which held that humility and obedience were good and power and wealth were bad. Spencer’s Apollonian cult would value strength, beauty, and intellect.
“Everyone’s like, Oh, we need more democracy, or We need more rights — it’s like, what are you fucking talking about?” he said. “We’ve had more democracy and liberalism and all this Christian Semitic stuff — we have more of that than we’ve ever had. How many Abrahamics are there on the planet at the moment, five billion?… We’ve tried the shit, sister.” He wanted humanity to make a covenant with a better god, like Zeus. But of the race stuff, Spencer said, “You have to move past it.”
