From a distance I saw Alfred Battle, old, tall, and dapper, standing beside a stage in the white tent. Looked like the same brown suit he’d worn to grab Reggie Atlas’s payola. Two men in beige chinos and black golf shirts loitered behind Battle, both with pistols on their hips.
But what mugged my attention was the red, white, and blue banner hanging behind the stage. It was a grand vertical rectangle, long sides down, composed of three red uppercase letters in a heavy contemporary font, outlined in white and set on a blue background:
I thought of the newspaper column by the Union-Trib writer who wanted to know what the letters meant, and how the SNR regional office in San Diego wouldn’t tell him. I wondered how Alfred Battle had come to name the company his wife had bankrolled.
One of the golf shirts looked across at me. Once again, it irked me that I hadn’t seen the faces of my attackers while they were busy beating mine. In a fair world you would at least get to see who’s behind the punches. And the kicks and gun butts. Besides being a PI working on a job, I was also a man itching for revenge. I’d seen Connor Donald’s snarling-lion tattoo. Maybe that would have to be enough.
Framed by the towering banner behind him, hawk-faced Alfred Battle considered me from a distance.
I drifted into the red tent, joining the audience watching a big-screen TV. Images of Charlottesville raced across it, mobs of haters, mobs of protesters, most of them young, most somewhere between angry and furious. Flying fists, torches, shields. A cheer went up as a white mob and a black mob dashed against each other.
From behind the half-privacy of my sunglasses, I studied the men and women around me. Young and old. Some teens, too, and younger children. All were white and most were everyday-looking people who wouldn’t stand out.
But some would. Tattoos were big: Confederate battle flags, iron and Gothic crosses, even a few swastikas mixed in with the bald eagles, American flags, Don’t Tread on Me rattlesnakes, and pierced hearts. And plenty of bling: Confederate battle-flag headbands, skull-and-dagger key rings, a young couple wearing matching singlets with images of a screaming Richard Spencer front and back. Trump buttons, Trump trucker and cowboy hats.
A conference table had been set up and furnished with reading material, presided over by a preppie-looking young man, mid-twenties maybe, wearing a dark suit and an open-collared white button-down shirt. Behind him hung a green, black, and white banner, vaguely Nazi in design if not in color, with the letters KEK as its focal point.
A poster board stood on the table beside him, and he watched me with a curious, open expression as I took it in. The top of the poster was a meme I recognized, Pepe the Frog, combined with an exaggerated cartoon of Donald Trump. Beneath Pepe/Trump’s grinning face was an oversized sheet of paper, yellowed and wrinkled to look like parchment, with what looked like a poem or meditation of some kind, printed in an Egyptian-looking font.
“That’s the flag of Kekistan behind me,” he said. “And the froggy meme is Kek. Kek is an ancient Egyptian god with the head of a man. And below Kek is our Kekistani prayer.”
I read it.
Our Kek, who art in memetics
Hallowed be thy memes
The Trumpdom come
Thy will be done
In real life as it is on/pol/
Give us this day our daily dubs
And forgive those who bait against us
And lead us not into cuckoldry
But deliver us from shills
For thine is the memetic kingdom, and the shitposting,
And the winning, forever and ever
Praise KEK
“We got lots of play in the Charlottesville coverage,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is have some fun and make a serious point at the same time.”
“What serious point?” I asked.
“The United States of America needs chaos and darkness. Tear it all down and build it back again. Honor your ancestors. Don’t let our white children go extinct.”
“What’s the fun part?”
“Don’t you think he’s hilarious? Pepe the Frog mixed with Trump? There’s this whole video where Kek follows Hillary around before the election, then gets inside her and causes her nightmares and convulsions. Remember how old-looking she got toward Election Day? Then falling down, and that whole charade about her being exhausted? No way, citizen — that was Kek, working his magic.”
“So it’s a put-on to get attention for your cause. Sort of get people laughing?”
“Exactly. I’m not a racist, either. I’m a race realist. To quote my man Michael Enoch, ‘Diversity means you’re next, white people. Your heads are on the chopping block.’”
He gave me a canny look, trying to see how his story was going over.
“You’re a normie and that’s cool,” he said. “But here’s something to think about. Unless we take some dramatic action on all this immigration, our grandchildren will live in a country that hates them. As a result of America’s ongoing moronic military intervention around the world, we’re digging our children’s graves. You have kids?”
I shook my head.
“There’s a new website for single whites who happen to like other single whites. Man-woman, no gay crapola, no lesbos. It’s all straight white people, ready to breed. We have to replenish, that’s a fact. We need men like you. Check it out. I’ve got a daughter. And I will not bring her into a world where it’s okay for her to be fucked by darkies who give her drugs, who won’t work for a living because of biological limitations, and who’ll throw her in the garbage the minute they’re tired of her. Would you wish that on your daughter?”
“Well, when you put it that way, I would not.”
“Well, then, check out the site. Are you staying to hear Kyle Odysseus?”
“Should I?”
“He’s the future of this republic. And, hey — if you ever feel down or in need of a pick-me-up or just someone to talk to? Pray to KEK!”
I tipped my hat and moved along, eyeing the hate-lit set out on the table. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Mein Kampf, The International Jew, Vigilantes of Christendom: The History of the Phineas Priesthood, and assorted titles by Thomas Dixon, George Lincoln Rockwell, Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, Ludwig von Mises, H. P. Lovecraft.
On the “What You Should Be Reading” table I noted Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America; Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right; Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation; Black Lies Matter; and ¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole.
The blue tent was crowded with card tables set up as information centers for various California far-right organizations. I was surprised by how many there were.
“More than any other state,” said a young blond woman. She rose from her chair and shook my hand. She wore a sleeveless navy dress and a diamond, ruby, and sapphire bracelet.
“Laurel Davis.”
“Blake Hopper, Fallbrook.”
“Enjoying the Power Hour?”
“My first time. Lots to see.”
“Well,” she said, “some of these groups represented here aren’t much more than websites. But most of them do meet regularly, have dues and budgets and fund-raisers. Stated objectives and agenda. We’re the Institute for Historical Review of Newport Beach, and we don’t deny the Holocaust, but we do question the numbers. Serious historians have been questioning them for decades.”