If Richard B. Spencer craved attention, he certainly received it in abundance in 2016.

Spencer, a white nationalist widely credited with coining the term “alt-right,” rocketed to perverse national stardom after delivering a November 19 speech in Washington DC before a likeminded audience of two hundred. At the end of the speech, Spencer proclaimed, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” as those in attendance raised their right arms in Nazi salutes. Video of the speech and the Nuremberg rally–style response it provoked went viral, airing repeatedly on social media, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN. The speech also received extensive coverage in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

For many, it was their introduction to Spencer’s marginal-but-toxic brand of politics, which he conceives of as a repudiation of mainstream conservatism. Convinced that leftists have seized control of the culture and are determined to wipe out “white racial identity” with “an undifferentiated global population, [a] raceless, genderless, identity-less, meaningless population consuming sugar, consuming drugs, while watching porn,” the head of the blandly named National Policy Institute seeks to carve out a whites-only homeland within the present-day United States.