IN EARLY MAY , the California secretary of state published a list of delegates chosen by Donald Trump’s campaign for the state’s upcoming Republican presidential primary. The slate featured a few big names, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. But the most striking inclusion was buried midway through the list: William Johnson, delegate for the 34th district and one of the country’s most prominent white nationalists.

A corporate lawyer who grows persimmons and raises chickens on 67 acres in a Los Angeles suburb, Johnson leads the American Freedom Party, a group that “exists to represent the political interests of White Americans” and aims to preserve “the customs and heritage of the European American people.” An afp candidate has never been elected to public office, and the party possesses at most a few thousand members, but it is “arguably the most important white nationalist group in the country,” says Mark Potok, a senior fellow for the Southern Poverty Law Center (splc), which tracks hate groups.

I first came across Johnson in early spring, months after afp had started robocalling voters on behalf of Trump. Some calls were pretty anodyne. Others were more overt: “The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are afraid to be called ‘racist,’” Johnson says in one robocall pushed to residential landlines in Minnesota and Vermont. “Donald Trump is not a racist, but Donald Trump is not afraid.”