{"id":93171,"date":"2016-04-12T10:45:57","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T18:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=93171"},"modified":"2016-04-12T10:48:19","modified_gmt":"2016-04-12T18:48:19","slug":"wp-this-white-nationalist-who-shoved-a-trump-protester-may-be-the-next-david-duke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=93171","title":{"rendered":"WP: This white nationalist who shoved a Trump protester may be the next David Duke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Washington Post<\/a>: The day after the rally, Matthew Heimbach, a 25-year-old white nationalist who grew up in an affluent Maryland community and now lives in rural Indiana, acknowledged online that he was the one in the video pushing the woman. The object of his fury, Kashiya Nwanguma, 21, a public health major at the University of Louisville, has joined two others in suing Trump in Jefferson County Circuit Court for inciting a riot. The suit also accuses Heimbach of assaulting Nwanguma.<\/p>\n

In his post online, Heimbach described her as a member of the Black Lives Matter movement who had been disrupting the event for the better part of an hour. \u201cWhite Americans are getting fed up and they\u2019re learning that they must either push back or be pushed down,\u201d he wrote…<\/p>\n

Heimbach\u2019s supporters cheered his actions, praising him for standing up to the protesters. But for those who have been tracking his rise, the video raised new worries about Heimbach. Some compare him to David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and the country\u2019s best known white nationalist.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Heimbach should be taken as seriously as David Duke,\u201d says Ryan Lenz, the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center\u2019s Hatewatch blog. He describes Heimbach as a media-savvy millennial who has forged relationships with Stormfront, the League of the South, the Aryan Terror Brigade, the National Socialist Movement and other white racist organizations.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s the affable, youthful face of hate in America,\u201d Lenz says, \u201cand, in many ways, he\u2019s the grand connector between all of these groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heimbach doesn\u2019t hide his extremism. He has had his picture taken at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington holding a sign that reads \u201c6 million? More like 271,301.\u201d In another photo, in front of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s grave in Atlanta, he unfurled the first flag of the Confederacy. After terrorist attacks in Brussels in March, he tweeted, \u201cHey Brussels, how\u2019s that multiculturalism working out for you?\u201d<\/p>\n

His racial worldview has cost him jobs and led to his excommunication from his Orthodox Christian church. It has created a rift between him and his parents and confounded those who knew him in Maryland: his classmates at Poolesville High School, his teachers and many of his fellow students at Montgomery College and Towson University, where he graduated with a history degree in 2013.<\/p>\n

Why, they ask, would someone as smart and educated as Heimbach choose to assert that the Holocaust never happened, that lynchings in the South were mostly deserved, that apartheid in South Africa was not as bad as people have suggested and that if white Americans don\u2019t set off a homeland for themselves then the future of white America is in jeopardy?<\/p>\n

…Marilyn Mayo has been tracking Heimbach\u2019s doings for five years. The director of the Anti-Defamation League\u2019s center on extremism, Mayo keeps a watchful eye on individuals and organizations that support racist and anti-Semitic ideologies. Heimbach elicits more worry than most, she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been concerned about him because he goes beyond just talking,\u201d she says. \u201cHe\u2019s created groups. He\u2019s building ties. He\u2019s obviously someone who can write about topics intellectually, and he\u2019s college educated. But he also wants to have very strong ties with hardcore groups like neo-Nazis and racist skinheads.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heimbach insists that his movement doesn\u2019t promote violence. For him, inclusion on lists of avowed racists and extremists is more a badge of honor than a sign that he has crossed any line.<\/p>\n

His party is still nascent. There are maybe few hundred followers and a dozen or so chapters nationwide. But it will grow, Heimbach says, because whites are being ignored in favor of minorities. And no one has pointed that out more clearly to the rest of the nation, he says, than Donald Trump, who has emerged as the leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, in part, by promising to build a wall to keep Mexicans out and to bar Muslims from entering the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cSelf-radicalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how Heimbach describes his racial awakening. Growing up in Poolesville, Md., a once rural, increasingly diverse community with a median household income of $150,000 a year, Heimbach had no personal encounters that led to his racist ideology. It certainly wasn\u2019t something he learned from his parents: Karl and Margaret Heimbach, who are school teachers and divorced when Matthew was in his early teens.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis family does not share his beliefs in terms of race or religion,\u201d Margaret Heimbach said in a brief phone interview. His father declined to comment.<\/p>\n

The gen\u00adesis of Heimbach\u2019s worldview came from two books he read in high school, \u201cWho are We? The Challenges to America\u2019s National Identity,\u201d by Samuel Huntington, and Patrick Buchanan\u2019s \u201cThe Death of the West.\u201d And everything else, he says, he discovered online.<\/p>\n

At Poolesville High, Heimbach tried to start a white student union at the school after a similar group was formed for African American students. He says more than 100 students signed his petition. Deena Levine, the school\u2019s principal, declined to discuss Heimbach.<\/p>\n

But Christine Simmons, a former classmate, says he made other students feel very uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wouldn\u2019t use the N-word or any slurs, but he would say this is a white community and those people don\u2019t belong here,\u201d Simmons says. \u201cHe was always very rude to anyone who wasn\u2019t like him or didn\u2019t think like him.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Montgomery College, Heimbach went out of his way to be offensive in a number of Joe Thompson\u2019s history classes, his former teacher says. He once wore a shirt that said, \u201cAll I need to know about Islam I learned on 9-11,\u201d and on his laptop he displayed a bumper sticker with a Confederate flag and the words, \u201cIf I had known all the trouble they would cause, I would have picked the cotton myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thompson says that Heimbach was smart, but sifted history to fit his needs. \u201cWhen he debates history, he leaves out those inconvenient facts that hurt his argument.\u201d What Thompson also thought he saw in Heimbach was someone who was looking for a father figure.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes me sad. It seems to me like he\u2019s wasted his life,\u201d Thompson says. \u201cI did see some goodness in him. But I also did see that he was infected with this hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heimbach acknowledges that some of his tactics at Montgomery College were over the top. He says, for instance, that his understanding of Islam and respect for the religion has grown. But he has always employed attention-grabbing stunts.<\/p>\n

In 2012, as a student at Towson University north of Baltimore, he founded a white student union to \u201ccelebrate European heritage.\u201d The university refused to sanction the group, but Heimbach and his small band of followers weren\u2019t deterred. They would later post on their website that they were there to protect white students from \u201cblack predators\u201d and that \u201cWhite Southern men have long been called to defend their communities when law enforcement and the State seem unwilling to protect our people.\u201d<\/p>\n

He knows that provocation generates publicity and that publicity works, even if it comes with costs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI guarantee you that I\u2019m going to recruit members out of this article no matter how badly you slant it,\u201d he says. \u201cThousands of people will look us up online and maybe a dozen will join the party.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the costs do cut. His father has not met Heimbach\u2019s son, and Heimbach can\u2019t foresee a way for them to reconcile. His brother and sister haven\u2019t spoken to him in years, he says. Last year, the Orthodox Christian church Heimbach joined in Indiana shunned him for his beliefs.<\/p>\n

His work life, too, has been affected. Earlier this year, Heimbach was training to be a family case manager for the Indiana Department of Child Services until, he says, his bosses learned about his views. The department said in a statement that Heimbach was dismissed because his \u201cbehavior in training was disruptive of the workplace and incompatible with public service.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington Post: The day after the rally, Matthew Heimbach, a 25-year-old white nationalist who grew up in an affluent Maryland community and now lives in rural Indiana, acknowledged online that he was the one in the video pushing the woman. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791,42743,29615],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-matthew-heimbach","category-nationalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93171"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93177,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93171\/revisions\/93177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=93171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=93171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}