NOT JUST ULTIMATELY, INITIALLY:

Of course, coming in from the cold can also bring financial rewards, and some in the movement have a more old-fashioned ambition: that their coziness with the new administration will result in government contracts, and friendly regulators who won't interfere with planned business ventures like a social media platform for people with high IQs.

For a movement that feeds on outsider energy, its members already enjoy surprising access to the inside of the incoming White House. Yiannopoulos' official title is technology editor of Breitbart, the website formerly run by top Trump adviser Steve Bannon, with whom both Yiannopoulos and internet troll Charles Johnson say they keep in touch. Yiannopoulos and Johnson also both say they know Trump's most influential megadonor, Rebekah Mercer. While I was spending time with another movement figure in California, he took a phone call from the son of Trump's incoming national security adviser. (A shared spokeswoman for Bannon and Mercer did not respond to requests for comment about their relationships with Johnson and Yiannopoulos.)

But the new young nationalists also have a problem: They need to re-brand, urgently. In the first theatrical arrival of the alt-right in Washington, days after Trump's election, Richard Spencer, the originator of the term "alt-right" and an open white nationalist, held a conference at the Ronald Reagan building, a couple of blocks from the White House. After dinner, once most of the national media had departed, Spencer rose to deliver a speech that crescendoed with him raising his glass in a kind of toast. As he held his arm up, he proclaimed, triumphantly, "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" In response, several attendees erupted in Nazi salutes, indelibly associating the alt-right with jackbooted white supremacy and provoking an instant schism in the movement. In a video produced from the conference, the Atlantic blurred out attendees' faces, as if the footage had been smuggled out of a criminal enterprise. Soon, the Associated Press and the New York Times issued memos that officially defined alt-righters as white nationalists.

Now, as its members move on Washington, an already fragmented movement is further split between those who embrace Spencer's racial politics and those who, for reasons of pragmatism or principle, reject the "alt-right" label for its associations. Said Paul Ray Ramsey, a blogger who flirts with white nationalism but found the Nazi associations a bridge too far, even for him: "You don't want to tie your brand to something that's ultimate evil."

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