WASHINGTON — White nationalists from around the country gathered Saturday in downtown Washington to bask in Donald Trump’s victory and celebrate what many proclaimed as a coming-out moment in their mission to turn back multiculturalism and eventually create a whites-only “ethno-state” in North America.

“There’s an energy in this city that I’ve never felt before,” said Gerald Martin, 64, a retired teacher from Dallas who was one of nearly 275 attendees of the annual conference put on by the National Policy Institute, whose president, Richard Spencer, coined the term alt-right and is a vocal proponent of what Spencer refers to as “white identity.”

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” said Martin triumphantly amid the water goblets and white tablecloths at the Ronald Reagan Building as he waited for Spencer to take the stage. “And we just napalmed the (expletive) out of Hillary Clinton and everyone who supports her.”

He and others welcomed media to the gathering and hailed what they called the “mainstreaming” of ideas that were only recently confined to the shadows of the Internet. But they met fierce resistance during their two-day gathering, with protesters disrupting an NPI dinner Friday and crowding the pavement outside the conference Saturday.

“NPI – Today’s KKK,” read one sign in the crowd of about 200 people that security guards kept from entering the Reagan Building as police blocked traffic. Half of the crowd chanted “We say no to racist hate!” The other half responded, “We don’t want a white state!” A few had red bandannas or black masks covering the lower halves of their faces.

“We have to resist the idea that fascism and a white supremacy organization can be normalized,” said Perry King, 61, a District of Columbia resident and psychotherapist. “We can’t let them be mainstream. That’s what happened with the Nazis. ”

Inside the conference room, attendees dismissed the protesters as “bullies” and claimed the momentum in a culture-war struggle for control of a nation that they believe, in Martin’s words, is “rapidly becoming a Third World country.”

Most in the overwhelmingly male gathering wore dark suits, many with the triangle lapel pin of a California-based European identity group. Dozens of them also wore what’s known as “fashy” (as in fascist) haircuts – a hipster look that features shaved sides with the hair on top swept across. A teenage girl wore a Make America Great Again cap. When Spencer asked for attendees younger than 40 to stand up, at least half in the room rose.

“The alt-right is a youth movement,” said Martin. “They’re really going for it, maybe because they’ve never had a victory like this. All they’ve ever heard is ‘white guilt’ and, lately, ‘white privilege.’ ”

Well over a dozen journalists – including several from non-U.S. publications – reported on an afternoon news conference, where Spencer announced a number of goals the institute will push for in the coming year. Chief among them: a 50-year ban on all immigration, although Spencer suggested some exceptions should be made for Europeans.

In the wake of Trump’s win, attendance more than doubled from last year’s Washington gathering of the group, which the Southern Poverty Law Center places in the vanguard of “academic racism.” The Institute’s core belief, according to the SPLC, “is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”

Attendees exalted at the recent pronouncements from Trump Tower, particularly the nomination of officials whose views they said aligned with their own: retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, national security adviser; former Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist and Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., as attorney general.

“Jeff Sessions being in charge of enforcing civil rights laws makes me want to sing,” said one participant, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“There’s been an awakening,” Spencer said in his opening remarks.