HILLBILLY DIARY:

While many Americans watched in horror as the racist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville erupted into violence, some mourned their absence. "It's like I didn't get to go to the prom," as David Pringle put it to me.

We stood in the Appalachian woods, outside the longtime headquarters of what was once America's most dangerous neo-Nazi formation, the National Alliance, founded by the late William Luther Pierce, author of an infamous novel of racist futurism called The Turner Diaries. Pringle had big plans to restore the group to its former stature. That included being more visible at events like Charlottesville.

"A big conversation we had amongst ourselves here beforehand was, are we going to open carry?" Pringle said. "And if we were, what was our threshold going to be before we did something with it?"

It was fall of 2017 and I was in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, for what that would seem the antithesis of noxious white nationalism: I was researching the idea of quiet, and specifically how it manifests itself in the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area where cell signals, WiFi, and other electronic noise are tightly monitored and restricted. I'd found that this quiet had attracted a number of groups over the decades, starting with astronomers who established the nation's first federal radio astronomy observatory in the nearby town of Green Bank in 1956. At the beginning of my three-year quest to understand this place, it did not occur to me that a community based in quiet could be anything but idyllic. But I was soon finding more nefarious actors drawn by the quiet, too.

Leaders in the community had told me to not worry about the National Alliance--they're harmless, they said, don't focus on them. I could see their point in not wanting to give attention to a hate group. But I also felt I couldn't ignore the flame of racism that had burned ever since Pierce acquired his 346-acre mountainside compound in 1984 and turned it into the base for his hate media empire, selling books, magazines, and "hatecore" music, all with some $1 million in annual sales. The analyst J. M. Berger of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at the Hague had recently warned that The Turner Diaries was likely to gain new traction amid a "highly charged social climate" in which "mainstream politicians ratify white racial fear and white nationalist beliefs predicated on worries about terrorism and immigration." If Pierce had thrived in the Quiet Zone, what was to stop his organization from mounting a comeback?

To wit, Pringle said he was planning an alt-right festival for the coming April, on Hitler's birthday. He was also recruiting new members by distributing outreach pamphlets around the country, which he called "cadre development."

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