Last November, a week after Donald Trump was elected President, I spoke on the phone with a fifty-five-year-old divorced college
graduate—he declined to specify his alma mater—who had been working as a
construction manager in Sacramento, California. The man, who identified himself as James Zarth, said
that he was “Grand Klaliff,” or second in command, of the “California
realm” of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a subgroup of the
notorious white-supremacist group, which, according to a recent estimate from the Southern Poverty Law Center,
has five or six thousand members in the United States. Previously a
member of the White Aryan Resistance and various skinhead groups, Zarth
said that he joined the K.K.K. when Barack Obama first became President.
“I did a lot of soul-searching,” Zarth told me in November. “At first, I
thought it was a hate group. I’d been a skinhead for a long time, but I
figured out that a lot of them are just into drugs and violence—they’re
not helping their own race. The K.K.K. is one of the only
white-nationalist organizations that’s family-oriented and looking out
for white rights.”

Zarth
crudely articulated the many things that he and the K.K.K. hoped and
expected that Trump would do for white nationalists. I had been put in touch with him by James Spears, a “Great Titan” of the Loyal White Knights, who’d responded to a message that I sent to a general-inquiry address listed on the group’s Web site. (The site has since been removed.) I sent the e-mail after learning about a Trump “victory parade” that the
Knights were planning to hold the following month—the first parade
they’d had cause to hold in eight years, Zarth said—at a then
undisclosed location in Pelham, North Carolina. The planned parade had
been widely reported in the media, and I aimed to write about what went
down. But the night before it was set to take place, at a “pre-rally
gathering,” the leader of the California chapter stabbed another member
of the group;
he and another Loyal White Knight were arrested. The parade the next day
amounted to chants of “white power” yelled from a few dozen cars. “Even
the simple task of carrying out a highly publicized parade to celebrate
President-elect Trump’s victory turned into a farce,”
the S.P.L.C. wrote. It had been evident for a while that many white supremacists liked Trump—Evan Osnos had reported on this for The New Yorker in the summer of 2015—and
the failed rally didn’t seem to merit the attention that the K.K.K.
obviously craved. My editor suggested that the reporting I’d done could
come in handy down the road. We shelved the piece for the time being.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation with Zarth all week, ever
since white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them allegedly killed a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, with his car, injuring nearly twenty others. After Trump’s press conference
on Tuesday, in which the President of the United States equated the
mostly peaceful counter-protest with the Nazi-themed violence and
Klan-style rhetoric of “the other side,” I pulled out my audio recorder
and listened to Zarth’s words again.

“I noticed something was going wrong in America decades ago,” Zarth told
me. He mentioned the TV shows “Father Knows Best,” “Andy Griffith,” “The
Brady Bunch,” and “Little House on the Prairie.” “Usually, those shows
had a Christian moral,” he said. “But now that the Jews own the majority
of the media stations, they’re showing things that are against God’s
law, like race-mixing and homosexuality.” He pointed to America’s
diverse population as its primary source of violence and conflict. “We
advocate for living separately within America. We are a benevolent,
fraternal, Christian, white-civil-rights organization,” he claimed. “We
are for family and for God. We see our race and our heritage going away
and being harmed by intermixing with these mongrel races. It has to
stop.”

He added, “I think we now have a President with some of the same
ideals.” He insisted that the Loyal White Knights had been growing since
Trump’s victory. When I asked him for specifics, he replied, “I can’t
give out exact numbers—that’s why we’re called ‘the invisible empire.’
But I can tell you this: since Trump has been elected, people have been
calling us left and right wanting to join, from all walks of life.” The
claim was difficult to fact-check. In February, the S.P.L.C. published a report asserting that the number of
operating U.S. hate groups rose from eight hundred and ninety-two, in 2015, to nine hundred and
seventeen, in 2016. “The radical right was energized by the candidacy of
Donald Trump,” the report read.

Zarth, not surprisingly, listed illegal immigration, welfare reform, and
the loss of manufacturing jobs as issues that Trump was getting right,
and he said that he liked Trump’s politically incorrect talk. “He
doesn’t have a filter between his brain and mouth,” Zarth said. “It’s
hurt him a couple times. But I believe everything he’s said—including
being a Christian—is true. He’s not a politician. People voted him in
because they are tired of the same old establishment. We want a person
we can relate to.” When I asked how, exactly, he related to a
self-proclaimed billionaire from New York, Zarth responded, “He’s a
white Christian man.” Zarth seemed unfamiliar with Steve Bannon—“I think
he’ll make a good senior adviser” was all he could muster about him—and
he had no idea who Reince Priebus was. Some of his positions were
surprising; he expressed a concern for the environment, for instance,
and professed a belief in global warming. But slowing the destruction of
the earth was not, for Zarth or the K.K.K., an urgent issue.

He told me how Will Quigg, the leader of the Loyal White Knights, had
made headlines in March, 2016, when he said that he was endorsing Hillary Clinton.
Quigg tweeted after Trump’s victory that he’d been using “reverse
psychology.” “When you have a group with the stigma of the K.K.K. endorsing a candidate,” Zarth said, “of course the candidate is going to disavow,
because it’s going to make people think he’s a racist. That’s why we
stopped endorsing Trump. If these other white-nationalist organizations
and people were thinking straight, they would have never endorsed Trump,
either. They should have kept it to themselves.”

Zarth claimed to disapprove of hate crimes, including those that had
already occurred after Trump’s election. He spoke at length about the
supposed underreporting of black-on-white crime. When I asked him if
there were any recent instances of white-on-black violence that he
condemned, he thought for a moment, then mentioned Dylann Roof, the young white killer of nine black parishioners at a Charleston, South
Carolina church, in June, 2015. “When he went and shot and killed those
people in church, I did not agree with that,” Zarth said. “If he had
that in his mind, that he wanted to go out and kill some negroes—we do
not want people to go out and do that,” Zarth said. He added, “But if he
would have went down to a drug neighborhood and shot a whole bunch of
drug dealers and criminals, felons, I would not have felt as bad. But he
should not have went to a church and killed those people while they were
praying to their God, whatever God that may be.”

Just then, Zarth received a call on another phone, and his ringtone, a
few notes from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” played. I asked
him if he and the K.K.K. really had complete confidence in Trump. “He
could fall back and not do any of his campaign promises now that he’s in
there,” Zarth said. “He’s already softened up his stance on Muslims. But
I don’t think there’s a chance of him softening all the way.”

This week, I talked to Adam Domby, a professor of Southern history at
the College of Charleston, about what he thought had changed for white
supremacists since Trump’s election. “We need to acknowledge that these
beliefs have always been here and are not on the fringe,” he said. “Now
people are just being open about it. They have taken off their hoods and
are lighting their faces up for all to see with tiki torches. That’s a
feeling of empowerment beyond measurement. No longer are they
embarrassed or fearful of repercussions. In part, they see their views
as validated by the election.”

I called Zarth back, too, a day after the rally in Charlottesville. I
wanted to know if this is what Zarth had hoped for, if this violence was
a kind of fulfillment for him and the Klan. A woman who would not
identify herself answered the phone. At first, she claimed that she
didn’t know who Zarth was. Then she said that she simply didn’t know where he
was. When I pressed her about his feelings about the state of things,
referring to the violence in Charlottesville specifically and the matter
of race relations more generally, she said, “He’s happy.”