In an upscale suburb outside Washington DC, Jared Taylor runs the American Renaissance website. The site specializes in what many consider “hate.” It devoted to the legitimate interest of whites as a racial group.

Ryan Lenz is a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that studies hate groups in the United States. The SPLC has tracked American Renaissance for years.

“It is a website, it is a journal, and they have this idea that African Americans are a quote, retrograde species of humanity. It's an ugly ideology they espouse,” said Lenz.

Taylor began American Renaissance as a newsletter in 1990. It later morphed into a website. The internet gives this small operation a big reach. “It has been a complete transformation. As a print publication we never had more than 4,000-5,000 readers, but online, we get 400,000 individual computers coming to our site every month, so it has expanded our reach tremendously.”

White Nationalist groups like American Renaissance and the newer Alt-Right movement rely on the internet to spread their message. They use articles, videos and podcasts posted online and spread through social media. 

Lenz said, “It's also a place where people can adopt and radicalize themselves without having to come out of the shadows of anonymity.”

You won't find swastikas or Ku Klux Klan hoods on the American Renaissance website. It's wrapped in a buttoned down veneer of respectability, all designed to draw people in. Taylor says it's working. “You don't find the Ku Klux Klan making great headway on college campuses, leading the podcast or video cast movement. It's people more like me.”

“Nazis don't come anymore with an arm-band and a swastika, they come with a suit and a tie,” said Lenz.

The SPLC says Internet extremism has been on the rise for the last two years. According to Taylor, the election of Donald Trump as US President has breathed new life into his movement. Trump's plans for a border wall and an immigration crackdown have been widely supported by hate groups. “When Donald Trump proposes these policies, he gets support from people who think in national terms and those who think in racial terms.”

Taylor rejects the term “hate group” and refers to himself as a “racial realist.” He says he doesn't support violence but acknowledges that violence is always a possibility as more young white men find sites like American Renaissance. “They are furious and some of them have a kind of a desire almost for vengeance. They've been told they are bad all this time, they want to get back at those people.”

In the United States, sites like American Renaissance are protected by free speech laws. Stopping them means pushing back against their message. Lenz wants to ensure that “at every turn you call them out for what they are: Which is wrong and racist.”