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. 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.
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. “White Americans are getting fed up and they’re learning that they must either push back or be pushed down,” he wrote…
Heimbach’s 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’s best known white nationalist.
“I think Heimbach should be taken as seriously as David Duke,” says Ryan Lenz, the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 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.
“He’s the affable, youthful face of hate in America,” Lenz says, “and, in many ways, he’s the grand connector between all of these groups.”
Heimbach doesn’t hide his extremism. He has had his picture taken at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington holding a sign that reads “6 million? More like 271,301.” In another photo, in front of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s grave in Atlanta, he unfurled the first flag of the Confederacy. After terrorist attacks in Brussels in March, he tweeted, “Hey Brussels, how’s that multiculturalism working out for you?”
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.
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’t set off a homeland for themselves then the future of white America is in jeopardy?
…Marilyn Mayo has been tracking Heimbach’s doings for five years. The director of the Anti-Defamation League’s 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.
“We’ve been concerned about him because he goes beyond just talking,” she says. “He’s created groups. He’s building ties. He’s obviously someone who can write about topics intellectually, and he’s college educated. But he also wants to have very strong ties with hardcore groups like neo-Nazis and racist skinheads.”
Heimbach insists that his movement doesn’t 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.
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.
“Self-radicalized.”
That’s 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’t something he learned from his parents: Karl and Margaret Heimbach, who are school teachers and divorced when Matthew was in his early teens.
“His family does not share his beliefs in terms of race or religion,” Margaret Heimbach said in a brief phone interview. His father declined to comment.
The genesis of Heimbach’s worldview came from two books he read in high school, “Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” by Samuel Huntington, and Patrick Buchanan’s “The Death of the West.” And everything else, he says, he discovered online.
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’s principal, declined to discuss Heimbach.
But Christine Simmons, a former classmate, says he made other students feel very uncomfortable.
“He wouldn’t use the N-word or any slurs, but he would say this is a white community and those people don’t belong here,” Simmons says. “He was always very rude to anyone who wasn’t like him or didn’t think like him.”
At Montgomery College, Heimbach went out of his way to be offensive in a number of Joe Thompson’s history classes, his former teacher says. He once wore a shirt that said, “All I need to know about Islam I learned on 9-11,” and on his laptop he displayed a bumper sticker with a Confederate flag and the words, “If I had known all the trouble they would cause, I would have picked the cotton myself.”
Thompson says that Heimbach was smart, but sifted history to fit his needs. “When he debates history, he leaves out those inconvenient facts that hurt his argument.” What Thompson also thought he saw in Heimbach was someone who was looking for a father figure.
“It makes me sad. It seems to me like he’s wasted his life,” Thompson says. “I did see some goodness in him. But I also did see that he was infected with this hatred.”
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.
In 2012, as a student at Towson University north of Baltimore, he founded a white student union to “celebrate European heritage.” The university refused to sanction the group, but Heimbach and his small band of followers weren’t deterred. They would later post on their website that they were there to protect white students from “black predators” and that “White Southern men have long been called to defend their communities when law enforcement and the State seem unwilling to protect our people.”
He knows that provocation generates publicity and that publicity works, even if it comes with costs.
“I guarantee you that I’m going to recruit members out of this article no matter how badly you slant it,” he says. “Thousands of people will look us up online and maybe a dozen will join the party.”
But the costs do cut. His father has not met Heimbach’s son, and Heimbach can’t foresee a way for them to reconcile. His brother and sister haven’t spoken to him in years, he says. Last year, the Orthodox Christian church Heimbach joined in Indiana shunned him for his beliefs.
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 “behavior in training was disruptive of the workplace and incompatible with public service.”
