Billie wondered aloud how to tell their friends and family about Mike E. “What do you do?” she said. “Send a letter to your cousins—‘Haven’t spoken to you in twenty years, hope you’re doing well, and, oh, P.S., our son’s a Nazi now’?” She worried that people would wonder what she and Mike, Sr., had done wrong as parents. “Everyone wants it to be simple, to know who to blame,” one of Mike E.’s relatives told me later. “But lots of kids have parents who get divorced when they’re young. Lots of white kids have difficult personalities. They don’t all become Nazis.”
A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise.
