Buckley and his wife, Melissa, sleep in the living room, next to the bathroom that has no door and a kitchen with only a dorm fridge. Leaving the door open, he paces back into the apartment, one of three carved out of a single-family home, where his two kids sleep on a frameless mattress in the only bedroom.
“I worry that he’s going to be disappointed,” Buckley says, scanning the road, seeing nothing out his front door but the back of a Family Dollar store and a line of overflowing donated-clothing bins. He says he learned hate, and violence, during a tumultuous childhood in Cleveland and to despise, and kill, Muslims during his years in the Army. The onetime imperial nighthawk of the Georgia White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan left the hate group in late 2016. A KKK symbol is tattooed below Buckley’s navel.
