The formative years of Derek’s life are a grooming by his family to become the future leader of white nationalism in the United States. Derek creates white nationalism marketing tools for the popular website Stormfront, conducts a daily radio show, and lectures at white nationalism conferences on how to bring the ideology into the mainstream. Derek becomes one of the most famous white nationalists in the country. In Derek’s last interview, in 2013, “he disavowed his beliefs and apologized for everything he’d done” (1), then disappears. Eli Saslow finds Derek several years later attending graduate school under a new legal name and requests an interview. Derek initially rebukes Saslow, but in the summer of 2016 when Saslow tries again, Derek accepts his interview offer because he feels “implicated by current events, sometimes even culpable” (2). Saslow then spends hundreds of hours with Derek, his friends, and family members to understand his radical transformation from white nationalist wunderkind to progressive in vocal opposition to his former ideology.

At a 2008 meeting of Klansmen and neo-Nazis, the infamous white supremacist Duke states, “The future of our movement is to become fully mainstream” before introducing “the leading light” of such movement, 19-year-old Derek (6).