How many white nationalists live in the United States? It’s a question I’ve been trying to answer on and off for years. In particular, I’ve tried to quantify the group’s web-based wing—the slippery, meme-slinging trolls who call themselves the alt-right. I’ve worked a lot of angles: totaling the populations of subreddits, counting up the unique visitors to various websites, comparing the number of times Twitter users invoked alt-right hashtags to the times they had more wholesome things to tweet about. (For the record, #dogs beat out #cuck and #whitegenocide every time.) I have squinted at blurry aerial photos of far-right rallies, trying to separate protestor from counterprotester.

None of this produced satisfying answers.

But as we approach the anniversary of the far-right protest that introduced this group to the national conversation, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to the death of anti-racist counterprotester Heather Heyer, it’s again become a question worth asking. This weekend, Washington, DC, will host a second Unite the Right rally, this one nominally in protest of the alleged abuses suffered by far-right activists in Charlottesville. The organizers can call it whatever they like, but in reality this anniversary rally is one thing only: a public exhibition of the state of the movement.

It’s important that we gain a sense of this group’s scale. So much of the alt-right movement takes place online, where a handful of aggressive netizens can have the impact of an army. The alt-right has been been consistently successful in drumming up media attention for its online activity, so when they venture off the web to protests like the Unite the Right rally, it’s easy to project online might onto whatever crowd gathers. But numerically, those offline crowds have been small, and when it comes to voting and purposeful activism—the kind of activities that transform a group of heinous trolls into a political movement, capable of inserting their ideology into laws and elected officials—real-life size matters.

And so I began to count.

Alt-Right Ambiguity

When trying to quantify the members of a movement, the first question is: Who counts? Where the alt-right is concerned, there is no easy answer. So I sat down with a piece of paper and tried to diagram it out. The alt-right includes white supremacists, white nationalists (basically, white supremacists who think white people deserve their own country), neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, neo-reactionaries (who are anti-democracy), neo-fascists, nativists, men’s rights activists and anti-feminists, fundamentalist Christians, nativists and Islamophobes, homophobes, Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites…the list goes on. But identifying with the alt-right doesn’t necessarily mean you identify with any of those groups, and vice versa. And within the alt-right, there are micro-communities like the alt-lite (who love trolling and hate being called racist). So my diagram—which was starting to look like a Final Fantasy bracket from hell—wasn’t very useful.

I needed a new way to capture what made the alt-right the alt-right, and it couldn’t be these fuzzy ideologies. “These are the same ideas the extremist right has been kicking around for the last 150 years or so,” says Phyllis Gerstenfeld, who teaches courses on online hate crimes and criminology at Cal State Stanislaus. “It’s the methodology that’s changed.” A few decades ago, extremists had to rely on IRL word of mouth to spread their ideas, and some incumbent extremist groups (like militias or the KKK) often still do. Maybe I could get some sense of the alt-right’s scale from measuring their twist on the far-right recruitment strategy: digital savvy.

But the dynamics of the internet make traffic data, tweet impressions, and subscriber counts meaningless. The alt-right has been on the receiving end of a years-long signal boost, even as the media—myself included—struggle to figure out how to cover the activities of these groups without amplifying their message. Yet traffic metrics don’t differentiate between the die-hards, the joiners, the hate-readers, and lurkers like me. Tweets might be coming from bots, or a single human helming dozens of accounts, or a small coordinated group of humans who may or may not be tweeting in earnest. And in our polarized digital culture, all hashtag campaigns are destined to be co-opted by the opposite side, for mockery purposes.

Some researchers overcome these opaque numbers by turning to an unlikely group: anti-fascists, whose databases are brimming with names they’ve hacked or tricked out of white nationalists But that’s hardly a representative (or neutral and unbiased) sample. Back in the day, KKK-style self-reported memberships allowed researchers to roughly track these groups as they would with a voting roll, but today those lists are as outmoded as David Duke. These days, groups form loosely organized local chapters, or stick to private servers: much harder to track, and much harder to quantify. According to Gerstenfeld, your best chance of a solid estimate would be to take a random survey of a representative sample of people and hope they answer your questions honestly. Which is basically setting yourself up to get trolled.

Your best chance at a meaningful sense of scale is at rallies. Meaningful, but not conclusive: Real life gatherings tend to draw out more paramilitary types than meme lords, and because these rallies often turn into riots, crowd estimates are hard to come by. Still, the point of protest is to show your numbers to the world, a kind of head count of those you can count on to support a movement in the open air. In Charlottesville, the best estimates put rally participant numbers between 500 and 600 people. For context, that’s five times as big as any far-right rally in the last decade, but is still only a tiny fraction of what you’d expect from their (inflated) digital footprint.

It’s also two hundred times smaller than 2017’s March for Science, and a thousand times smaller than 2017’s Women’s March. All signs point to an even lower turnout for Unite the Right in DC.

Perhaps Bigger, But Not Bolder

So what’s going on here? Well, there’s little indication that Charlottesville helped recruitment at all. Two major groups involved in the original rally no longer exist: the organizers, Vanguard America, and the Traditionalist Workers Party, which collapsed after some spectacularly silly internal battles. Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, says that surviving groups like Identity Evropa and Patriot Front may have increased their numbers when the others collapse, but that’s overflow, not growth.

And that’s big, according to Hankes, because those still left are not down with the rally. Many posts about DC’s Unite the Right rally call it a “lawsuit trap.” Remember, there was a civil rights suit brought against the organizers of Unite the Right, and the has judge issued an opinion that the organizers had conspired to violate the civil rights of Charlottesville citizens, a conspiracy that could legally be tied to the death of Heather Heyer. “If I were the folks thinking about participating, I could be quite worried that my participation could link me to violent activity that violates civil rights,” says Richard Schragger, who specializes in Constitutional and local government law at the University of Virginia School of Law. “Even if you’re exercising your First Amendment rights, you’re responsible for the outcomes.”

The DC Unite the Right rally is shaping up to be a public announcement of a new, more cautious alt-right zeitgeist. It’s fuchsia and teal website looks like an ‘80s video game. The organizer, Jason Kessler—who, according to Hanke, is now something of a pariah—has banned the swastikas and the other symbols of white supremacy that so many objected to at the last rally. Kessler is trying to massage the movement into something (somewhat) more palatable, similar to the surviving organizations Identity Evropa and Patriot Front. Identity Evropa claims to protect cultural heritage, Patriot Front claims their prejudice is patriotism, and Kessler claims to be a civil rights advocate for white people.

All of which are lies that tell the truth: the open racism we all saw at Charlottesville is being slowly pushed underground.

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