‘We feel this incredible tension at all times’: what happened to small-town USA when extremists moved in

In 2020, residents of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, learned that a mysterious couple from New York had bought a historic local building known as “the castle”, which the newcomers planned to use as a headquarters and conference space for their non-profit organization. A bitter saga followed – one that the journalist Michael Edison Hayden writes about in his new book, Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town. The couple in question were Peter and Lydia Brimelow, whose online publication VDare was named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas. Critics have accused the anti-immigration publication of being the genteel face of a constellation of white nationalist groups and figures that Hayden refers to simply as “the movement”. (VDare and the Brimelows dispute that characterization; Brimelow has described himself as a “civic nationalist”.) Stephen Miller, the adviser to Donald Trump, is reportedly a fan of VDare’s writing. Some residents of Berkeley Springs were alarmed that their town might become publicly associated with the far right, and they invited Hayden, then a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), to come speak to them and report on what was happening. He befriended residents and documented what became a multiyear unraveling – of the town, where neighbor turned against neighbor; of VDare, whose existence came under increasing financial and legal pressure; and of the SPLC, where internal divisions about strategy and labor practices were boiling over. In the course of what became this book, Hayden also suffered a mental health crisis compounded by the strain of years of reporting on the far right. VDare’s arrival was flame to tinder in a town already navigating disagreements about the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter and Pride movements. Residents were divided over how, if at all, to react to the prospect of their town becoming an organizational nexus of the far right. Neighbors stop…