It’s a sizzling July afternoon in Decatur, an endearingly plain city surrounded by endless rows of neat crops in the heart of Illinois farm country, and I am, as instructed, waiting at the public library. At our exact appointed time, Marc Girdler stomps in wearing a black New World Order shirt, tinted ’70s sunglasses, and a baseball cap dotted with pineapples on top of a bounty of flowing red hair.

Girdler is a Decatur activist who heads a self-described mutual-aid-group-slash-cult called Carnalia, and he’s going to tell me how he got in a scrap with a local billionaire. First, without any greeting, he asks a conspiratorial question: “Can we take a ride?”

So I’m spirited away into the passenger seat of a battered, sauna-esque SUV. Girdler’s accomplice Gav (just Gav) drives. Girdler sits in the back with Rico and Meeko, two tiny, yelpy dogs. He hands me a thick stack of paper: “We have a dossier.” It’s years of results from public record requests relating to Howard Buffett’s dealings with the Decatur City Council.