In the recent Democratic primary in Missouri’s first congressional district, which includes all of St Louis and much of northern St Louis County, including Ferguson, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)–funded incumbent Wesley Bell bucked national trends. Whereas AIPAC support has become an albatross for many candidates running in Democratic primaries, Bell easily defeated former congresswoman and Israel critic Cori Bush.

Although the money AIPAC funneled into the primary indicates Middle East politics played an outsize role in the struggle to control a black-majority Missouri district, deeply rooted local concerns seemed weightier. This is not surprising: the political careers of both Bell and Bush began in 2014 with the protests that engulfed Ferguson in response to the police murder of Michael Brown. Bush supporters, thus, not only brought attention to Bell’s ties to AIPAC, but also to his Deputy Chief of Staff Jordan Blase’s controversial past as a Veiled Prophet debutante. As a local activist said on Instagram, after spotting an album of photos on Blase’s Facebook page dedicated to the annual Veiled Prophet Ball, Blase and her family “have been attending their white supremacist ball for decades.”

What in the hell is a “Veiled Prophet,” you might ask? And why is Blase’s history with it controversial (though not controversial enough to tilt the race in favor of Bush)? For answers to these questions and many more about the history of St Louis elite society, we turn to Devin Thomas O’Shea’s fascinating new book, The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St Louis.