STAGE CRAFT:

I was born into a prominent white nationalist family -- David Duke is my godfather, and my dad started Stormfront, the first major white nationalist website -- and I was once considered the bright future of the movement. [...]

It surprises me now how often Mr. Trump and my 19-year-old self would have agreed on our platforms: tariffs to bring back factory jobs, increased policing of black communities, deporting illegal workers and the belief that American culture was threatened. I looked at my white friends and family who felt dispossessed, at the untapped political support for anyone -- even a kid like me -- who wasn't afraid to talk about threats to our people from outsiders, and I knew not only that white nationalism was right, but that it could win.

Several years ago, I began attending a liberal college where my presence prompted huge controversy. Through many talks with devoted and diverse people there -- people who chose to invite me into their dorms and conversations rather than ostracize me -- I began to realize the damage I had done. Ever since, I have been trying to make up for it.

For a while after I left the white nationalist movement, I thought my upbringing made me exaggerate the likelihood of a larger political reaction to demographic change. Then Mr. Trump gave his Mexican "rapists" speech and I spent the rest of the election wondering how much my movement had set the stage for his. Now I see the anger I was raised with rocking the nation. [...]

Mr. Trump's comments during the campaign echoed how I also tapped into less-than-explicit white nationalist ideology to reach relatively moderate white Americans. I went door-to-door in 2008 talking about how Hispanic immigration was overwhelming "American" culture, how black neighborhoods were hotbeds of crime, and how P.C. culture didn't let us talk about any of it. I won that small election with 60 percent of the vote.

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