The Huffington Post‘s Luke O’Brien has a doozy of a story today about “Ricky Vaughn,” an anonymous right wing troll and Donald Trump supporter who was eventually banned from Twitter, although O’Brien writes that he popped up under a new moniker, called, naturally, RapinBill. Clever.

Vaughn, O’Brien writes, “had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the ‘alt-right’ white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails.” Dude was bad news: MIT’s Media Lab called him one of the top 150 social influencers on the 2016 presidential election, ahead of NBC, and he was regularly retweeted by mainstream conservatives.

Until today, few people knew Vaughn’s actual identity. But, as O’Brien discovered after Paul Nehlen—the wildly racist white nationalist congressional candidate from Wisconsin—dropped Vaughn’s real name online after some good old fashioned alt-right in-fighting, Ricky Vaughn is actually Douglass Mackey. And Douglass Mackey is a 28-year-old graduate of the hyper liberal Middlebury College who looks like he could be middle management at a Wells Fargo branch.

Other than his alt-right activism, Mackey’s life isn’t especially notable. He’s from a small town in Vermont, his dad is a lobbyist for the communications industry, he ran track for a year in college, and, after graduating from Middlebury with a degree in economics, he moved to New York, where he got a job at a consulting firm. His right-wing political awakening, O’Brien writes:

…began, as it did for many members of the alt-right around his age, with Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. Paul’s conspiratorial libertarianism and racist ideas were attractive to many young white men with hard-right leanings. For some, though, Paul wasn’t radical enough. He was merely a gateway.

As Ricky Vaughn has explained in various podcasts and interviews for white nationalist platforms, after about three years of toying with libertarian ideas, he started growing more extreme. First, he became a critic of feminism. Then he went full racist “after the Trayvon Martin thing” in 2012 (when George Zimmerman fatally shot Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in Florida). “Why were they trying to make this racial narrative?” Ricky Vaughn told white nationalist Richard Spencer in a podcast. He elaborated in a separate interview on the website for Spencer’s Radix Journal:

“At that time I realized what a con job the media was playing on all of us, and how the mainstream race propaganda was all bullshit. So from there I began to explore the different facets of cultural Marxism. The Jewish role in subversion, homosexuality, et cetera.”

What is it with rich kids from private schools becoming Pepe lovers? Mackey reminds me of Lucian Wintrich, a MAGA troll who managed to con his way into the White House Press Corps. Wintrich, who grew up in a wealthy Pittsburgh family, who was so triggered from getting shit for using the n-word on his college radio show—at, of all places, Bard—that he turned alt-right. I mean, I agree that some progressives are self-righteous virtue-signalers who’ll call you a misogynist for forgetting to put down the toilet seat once, but it’s pretty pathetic to let that turn you into Milo Lite. Maybe Jordan Peterson is right: These boys do need to clean their rooms and get their shit straight.

Katie Herzog is a former staff writer at The Stranger.