This excerpt is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
In late February 2020, residents of the small tourist town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, woke to learn that a mysterious right-wing group called VDARE had purchased a beautiful nineteenth-century castle overlooking their town. The castle meant everything to Berkeley Springs. Images of it appeared on town promotional materials, and the outsiders business and restaurants owners relied on for tourist revenue always noticed the gorgeous sandstone building as they drove past Berkeley Springs State Park on Route 522.
With fewer than a thousand residents, gossip reverberated quickly through Berkeley Springs, and Peter and Lydia Brimelow, the castle’s new proprietors, soon became its subject. The Brimelows had a great deal of money for Morgan County, West Virginia, as well as inscrutable benefactors and a fair share of infamy. My employer at the time, the Southern Poverty Law Center, labeled them “white nationalist[s],” and VDARE’s website wrote credulously about the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that mass shooters have used to justify their beliefs. There were other reasons for gossip, too, including the nearly four-decade age gap between Peter and Lydia.
My new book, Strange People on the Hill, covers a five-year period in Berkeley Springs — from the end of 2019 through the day after the 2024 election, when VDARE’s presence caused neighbors to turn on one another, taking sides across ideological divides. The following excerpt begins on the night of December 8, 2023, after my colleague Hannah Gais and I managed to gain entry to the castle for the first time. We did so by purchasing tickets to a local Christmas party. For years, I reported on the Brimelows, and they posted disparaging remarks about me and my family on their website. That night was the first — and last — time we met in person.
