The MAGA universe is a big tent of incels and NASCAR fans and frat boys with rich daddies who “like beer.” Dear Leader’s bleats and Jesse Watters's insult comedy fluffs them up – but they’re not all paying close attention.

Then, there are the others – men with convictions and post-graduate degrees, who read European fascist texts and applaud each other’s ravings about the revival of a race of white men whose virility and mental force has been diluted by mixing with the lower orders and attenuated by feminism.

Most Americans, and probably many MAGA voters, have never heard of them as they go about amusing each other, advocating for eugenics, and translating dead fascist writers (IYKYK).

But they are the plutonium pit of the MAGA bomb. Racism and domination of the naturally inferior sex is not a casual pastime for them, it’s their raison d’etre.

Some of the most powerful men in America are tuned in to them. They are the brain trust, the moral – if you want to twist that word – nerve center of the Trump 2.0 movement.

Donald Trump famously amplified one of them, a Canadian millennial who tweets under the name @CaptiveDreamer7, which is a reference to a memoir by a fascist Frenchman during World War II who joined the Waffen SS, during last fall’s debate with Kamala Harris.

Trump shouting “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” is a badge of honor that still makes this man who amplified that lie to the attention of the candidate’s debate briefers giddy with joy. He was still ecstatic during the Veep debate a month later, when moderators put the question about the lie to JD Vance, erupting into all-caps joy: “Springfield in the FIRST FUCKING QUESTION. MY FUCKING PRESIDENT!!”

Offline, @CaptiveDreamer7 is a low-brow Bartleby the Scrivener in a Canadian Christian university’s purchasing department. Online, like Clark Kent transmogrified to Superman, he spews white nationalist trash into the powerful American right-wing mainstream.

A pair of intrepid journalists at the Daily Dotouted him this week. Over here at the Freakshow, we’ve been following Geoff Martin, the man behind @CaptiveDreamer7, for some time in connection with a long project that required me and a researcher to dive into fascist Twitter. (FYI, yes, I crave a shower after just 15 minutes in their spew.)

Here’s a sample of what you will find in Dreamer’s disgusting oeuvre: In June 2024, Dreamer tweeted and has since deleted: “I believe in Hitler. In National Socialism, in Total N***** Death. They win [sic] about how I talk but that’s because I’m Aryan, I’m confident, and I’m not a fucking Mexican F***** like they are.”

With habits of self-expression like that, it’s no surprise Dreamer burned through dozens of Twitter accounts in the pre-Musk years. He was repeatedly booted off the site until Musk stepped in. Welcomed back on the platform, he promptly got on a Twitter space with fellow travelers and sighed: “Total Aryan victory. Total victory of the white man. We’re back. The white man is back. Total victory of the Anglo. Musk is not a Boer. He’s an Anglo like you and me. Total victory.”

Dreamer lives in a larger online network of fashy white nationalist social media anons who also sport PhDs or other post-grad credentials. Many have been outed against their will, like @CremieuxRecueil, a pseudonym linked to race-scientist academic Jordan Lasker. Along with America’s fashy brain trust, Dreamer has academic cred, having, according to his tweets, studied philology and philosophy. He has written that he was driven out of academia by “leftists” who forced him to read feminism. “The Thucydides to NS [National Socialism] pipeline” is what he’s called his journey.

His intellectualism flatters the Trumpy policy drones and maybe some of the “I like beer” crowd in D.C. “You have the comic trolls like [Nick] Fuentes, people recognize there is no seriousness to them,” says researcher Will Stancil, who has tangled with Dreamer on X/Twitter before. “They are treating it like a real intellectual movement, this ridiculous hallucinatory Nazi stuff, and these ideas are clearly driving policy at the White House level. If you are familiar with these ideas, you can see they are leaking out all over.”

So back to the Great White North: How does an intellectual millennial Canadian* go all Nazi?

One thing we do know is if you poke at just about anyone on the MAGA fringe, you will find a wackadoodle religious upbringing. The parents and grandparents of Martin (AKA Dreamer) were members of the Worldwide Church of God, whose founder, Herbert Armstrong, was a mid-century radio preacher. Armstrong taught that white Anglo-Saxons are among the ten lost tribes of Israel and are the real Jews (maybe, one of my Israeli sources who interacted with them told me, because the word “Brit” in Hebrew means covenant).

The notion that white humans are the true ”chosen people” of the Bible was/is also a tenet of the Ku Klux Klan.

Former members of the Armstrong sect have described harsh child-rearing methods Armstrong advocated, listed in this guidebook by Armstrong’s son. They include beating toddlers in order to fend off nascent criminal impulses and ensure respect for authority.

After Armstrong’s death, the sect reportedly modified its views and renamed itself Grace Communion Church. Martin’s father is now president of Canada’s largest Christian university, where young Geoff – thanks, Dad! – has a job in the purchasing department.

Dreamer/Martin’s avatar is a picture of pedophile David Koresh in a MAGA hat. The Daily Dot reports Dreamer/Martin has advocated for lowering the legal age of marriage for girls to 14. David Koresh had a harem of wives as young as ten. Dreamer/Martin is apparently married – he has tweeted praise of a wife who thinks his Nazi bookshelves are “cute.” He may have spawned: He has tweeted pictures of a chubby (white) baby’s hand reaching for books about Hitler, to the delight of his followers, with one snapshot getting more than 2,000 likes.

It is no exaggeration to say that this man’s repulsive ideas intrigue, excite, and – if I may resort to our Dear Leader’s vermin metaphor – infest the minds of many extremely powerful men in America right now.

Dreamer/Martin has positioned himself as a white nationalist intellectual who offers strategies to mainstream his and his friends’ brand of fascism. In one recorded Twitter space in 2022, Martin chatted with Nick Fuentes (the odious white nationalist who has actually dined with Trump) and others. Someone mentioned “TND,” which is a code for “total n***** death,” as racist listeners in the space would know. Martin inquires whether the movement can “appeal to a middle America and portray your message in a way that is palatable to them?”

Dreamer has 71,000 Xitter followers in his radicalization pipeline, including major Trump administration figures and MAGA stars like Vice President JD Vance, Chris Rufo, Marc Andreesen, Curtis Yarvin, DOD deputy press secretary Kingley Wilson, and acting Washington, D.C. federal prosecutor Ed Martin. Elon Musk engages with and amplifies him. Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (and out-and-proud eugenicist) Darren Beattie has featured Martin's tweets under his many different usernames in his Revolver News, a site promoted by both Trump and Donald Trump Jr. Beattie appears to have consciously followed Martin/Dreamer across various X/Twitter bans. Late rightwing Justice Antonin Scalia’s grandson and namesake, who now works at Peter Thiel’s data and surveillance defense giant Palantir, is also a Dreamer follower.

If there is a segment of MAGA world that still finds Nazis repulsive, maybe the outing of Geoff Martin as an influencer to Musk and Vance will wake them up. But when even the Holocaust-remembering ADL and major media organizations call Musk’s Nazi salute just a gesture, I’m not holding my breath.

* Martin claims U.S. citizenship through his mother.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from Courier's American Freakshow newsletter