The Nationalist Front is a new confederation of neo-Nazi, KKK, and Alt Right groups that is trying to capitalize on a Trump presidency. Made up of some of the more obvious sectors of the white nationalist movement like the National Socialist Movement, the groups who, until recently, was well known for emblazoning a swastika over the America flag. The Traditionalist Workers Party, the political wing of Matthew Heimbach’s Traditionalist Youth Network, is one of the most well-known groups in the new confederation, and they have been successful at pulling both from the Alt Right community and the more traditional rural white supremacist organizations like the White Knights. Matthew Heimbach and TWP recently presented at the Right Stuff planned Atlanta Forum, which was coordinated as a Southern Nationalist event by the people behind the Rebel Yell podcast.
TWP and those in the Nationalist Front are known for their street actions, and now that Trump is threatening to lower federal scrutiny on white supremacist organizations in favor of targeting Muslims, they now think that they can make a show of strength in the South. They recently announced a rally for April 29th in Pikeville, Kentucky, a town with scarcely over 6,000 people. This is historically the kind of area where they hope to recruit from, but only if they are able to reframe the narrative on their own terms and come without opposition. They are messaging the event as taking a “stand for white working families,” part of the fascist populism that TWP is known for, arguing that they stand for the white working class against leftist immigration, free trade, and internationalism.
This action by TWP is not going unchallenged as a counter rally has already being organized and it is going to need the support of antifascists around the country. That rally meets at Pikeville Park on Main Street, and we are linking to the Facebook event below.
Just a few days ago, we ran a story about the Traditionalist Workers Party linking up with Patriot and skinhead groups to hold a community event in Charlottesville, Indiana. The event was booked to be held at the city’s Lion’s Club lodge, which looked to be an inside/outside event for the facility. Several Lion’s Club members voiced their outrage about the event, and anti-racists and anti-fascists in the Indiana area, and from around the country, went to work to counter the scheduled event and contact the Lion’s Club International.
The Lion’s Club acted quickly after being notified, putting out a public statement noting that they did not know the nature of the event and that they were canceling it.
The event which you referenced, was not a Lions Event. The Charlottesville Lions Club was given misinformation regarding the event, when someone asked to rent their building.
Once we were all made aware, Charlottesville Lions realized they did not have a contract for this event, and actually the building was double booked.
It is my understanding that the venue has been changed.
Lions Clubs do not condone these types of meetings. They are in direct violation of our Code of Ethics.
Thank you for your concern.
Sue Topf
The local chapter of the Lion’s Club also put out a statement saying that they were not involved with the event. This is a positive move for a community organization like the Lion’s Club, which took a strong anti-racist stand much more quickly than many community organizations do.
Brien James, the organizer of the event, had to issue a public statement to supporters that they event has lost its venue and is being changed to a private one. This information is no longer public, and you have to message James specifically to get the information. This will all but cancel the event as communication will be difficult and the location will likely end up being difficult to distribute widely. Since it is likely a private residence, there is a smaller likelihood that large numbers will even want to attend.
James found our original article and foolishly commented on it, attempting to distort allegations of the event’s racialist nature.
Come on out if you want. We have nothing to hide. The event is open to the public. There will be people of all races and faiths attending. The 3%ers, SDL, and SOO are all multi-ethnic groups. One of the bike clubs invited is a black bike club. If you are genuinely curious as to what is going on you are welcome to send a representative. If you are just hell bent on looking for trouble you can find that too.
As we reported in the original article, James’ racist organizing and views are well known, as are the organizations involved in the event. No matter what type of posturing he attempts here, anti-fascists are aware of his true intentions.
The canceling of this event is from the direct work of anti-fascists who reached out quickly and organized both an on-the-ground response and those who called in to pressure the Lion’s Club. This is a great show of unity as Alt Right groups reach out to Patriot militias and traditional Nazi organizations, all emboldened by the Donald Trump campaign.
The Traditionalist Youth Network and Traditionalist Workers Party are starting to see just how much of a loss their failed event was in Sacramento. Trad Worker, and their leader Matthew Heimbach, had hoped that the publicity of the event would put them in a sympathetic light after having been so roundly shut down by Antifa.
During Trad Youth’s organizational conference in Tennessee, the hotel that was hosting them eventually asked them to leave after realizing who was hosting the meeting. They were told that it was for fear of disruption, either from the Nazi participants or from the wave of anti-fascists that might shut it down.
Jeff Schoep, NSM
They cemented their neo-Nazi reputation by having Jeff Schoep, the leader of the National Socialist Movement, as well as Rick Tyler, a white nationalist running on a racist platform for the third congressional district of Tennessee. They also invited William Flowers from the League of the South, an organization that often tries to present itself as just a moderate Southern heritage group. Matthew Johnson of the Barnes Review was also in attendance, known for his Holocaust Denial and virulent anti-Semitism.
Paddy Tarleton
Trad Youth’s own Paddy Tarleton, who recently humiliated himself when he was tricked into given inside information about Trad Youth events to Antifa organizers, did one of his racist parody songs entitled “Joining BLM.”
After their main event they headed to the Confederate memorial in Cleveland, Tennessee. They are doing their best to unite their own fascism with reactionary Southern feelings about the Confederacy, and they have had success from drawing from Southern racialist organizations.
Trad Youth, and their political wing the Traditionalist Workers Party, is doing its best to maintain connections to the more suit-and-tie Alt Right crowd while also appealing to the gutter violence of the KKK and Nazi skinhead groups. This is helping to further marginalize them and to create counter movements to shut them down regularly. They have little crossover into mainstream right-wing circles, and this makes them a toxic organization that even those on the radical right repudiate. If the counter-organizing continues to maintain its intensity, then Trad Youth will continue to be rejected by venues and the communities they call home.
The world of the pseudo-intellectual far right used to be relatively isolated. There was a small network of blogs and then a few that peaked above the others, namely Alternative Right, American Renaissance, Occidental Observer, Counter-Currents Publishing, and a few others. Alternative Right morphed over to the National Policy Institute and the Radix Journal, where they continued their use of meta-politics to introduce white nationalism and used podcasts as a primary means of media communication. In only the last five years this network of online “Alt Right” spaces has expanded exponentially, starting largely with Human Biological Diversity blogs that continued “race and IQ” arguments. They began creating a generalized subculture of trolls, social media warriors, and those who have taken the jargon and influences of the more academic Alt Right and brought them down to the level of the average racist.
Today, podcasts and videos are commonplace for Alt Right commentators who are trying to jump into the fast Internet media cycle, and attempting to create a fascist version of what we see on the left. Through this, the Daily Shoah and the Right Stuff radio network have become incredibly popular for their crass racist audio tracks, and places like Radix have continued to pump out their interview focused episodes with fascist “celebrities of the week.” While all of these have maintained an increasing popularity as Donald Trump mainstreams white nationalism, all of their work combined still pales when compared to a relative newcomer in the fascist Internet scene.
Red Ice Creations, which jumps between Sweden and the U.S., has created a media infrastructure that is more formal and has more socio-political crossover points than you see in other racist media. They have taken up the mantle started by people like Richard Spencer, now doing a regular feed of audio and video programs.
Henrik Palmgren
We first heard about Red Ice Creations, which includes their radio and video shows, over a year ago when many of the louder voices on the right, like Richard Spencer and Jack Donovan, began getting interviewed on their radio show. At first, it seemed like programming primarily focused on strange conspiracy theories and alternative scientific notions, and perhaps these voices were just a part of their strangeness. As they went on, their founders, Henrik Palmgren and Lana Lokteff, became open about their racial politics, being clear on any show that has a racialist subject or guest that they are there to “defend their race” and demonizing African descended people, immigrants and refugees, and all “leftist” ideas.
Lana Lokteff
The design of their website is purposefully meant to look like places like Infowars, the conspiracy racket from resident nutjob Alex Jonesnutjob Alex Jones. These places have a generally slick presentation and act as somewhat of a crossover point between the far right and broader conservatives. This connection continues as they repost articles from Infowars and the affiliated Prison Planet regularly. Their news choices fit into an interesting space for the Alt Right as of recently, which is to try and create artificial holes in narratives about the reality of racism. An example is their recently posted article listing 100 “hate crime hoaxes,” which is intending to first undermine the recent history of bigotry related violence and, second, reframe the narrative so that it appears as European-descended people are under attack because they are not “allowed” to organize in their own racial interest. It may seem obvious that they are playing with facts and ignoring very simple bits of analysis to make these connections, yet it is these blind spots that are critical if there are going to create an “analysis” that justifies their white nationalism
Their two primary programs are the podcasts Red Ice Radio hosted by Henrik and Radio 3Fourteen hosted by Lana. Here they focus on guests for interviews, which are quickly becoming the “who’s who” of the broad white nationalist and racist communities. Guests like Richard Spencer, American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, David Duke, Mike Enoch and Seventh Son from the Daily Shoah, various people from the Manosphere and Men’s Rights community, and just about everyone who remains relevant from this growing Alt Right scene.
Because of their connection to Sweden, they have picked up very heavily on one of the hallmarks of the racialist movement in Scandinavia: Islamophobia. Between hearing from anti-Islamic activists to posting articles about Swedish political parties being “infiltrated by Islamists,” they have used Muslim European immigration as a fault line since they see it as having the same social crossover point in Europe that anti-Latino immigrant racism has in the United States.
What could be considered even more of a focus would be pagan guests, always leaning to the far right. Lana herself has spoken about her fondness for the pagan side of the Alt Right, how it avoids the cultural and restrictive trappings of Christianity, and how it can help to define their race.
Stephen Flowers Speaking About Indo-European Religon
It is this paganism that has created one of its crossover points to the non-racialist circles, though it becomes clear that even those unaffiliated with the Alt Right previously are more than willing to flirt with its racial nationalism. An example of this would be the recent interview with Stephen E. Flowers, who is known inside of heathen circles for writing some of the more respected books on the runes. He caused a controversy inside of the Troth, the largest Universalist heathen organization, for also being a member of the Left Hand Path Temple of Set. Though his interview really does focus on the topics of ancient Indo-European religions, he uses “blood and soil” rhetoric to discuss this and helps to validate the racialist voice of Henrik.
Their radio programs go back for ten years with hundreds of guests that run the gamut, and it is likely that, not until recently, the extent of the racial and political views of the hosts were not known to all of the guests. Over the last year they have honed in on fascist and racist commentators almost exclusively, from anti-immigration activists in Australia to nationalist politicians in Britain like the British National Party’s Nick Griffin.
Some of Red Ice’s recent videos, showing the fascist sensationalism their recent success has been built on.
More recently they are trying to do regular videos and live broadcasts, following the recent trends on the Alt Right to refer to everyone as “cucks” and to use silly internet Alt Right personalities like Millenial Woes to chatter about any possible issue, usually showing their inability to think through complex social problems.
Their largest point of crossover is in the broad world of conspiracy theory, which is an important component of far right ideology. To reach the point where by you center power on Jews or that non-white racial groups are lacking in intelligence and “agency” you have to created a complex matrix of conspiratorial power that is suppressing this information and denying the truth. These ideas cannot exist on their own, so it is useful to “jump down the rabbit hole”(they prefer “take the Red Pill”) of conspiracy theory, calling most known facts into doubt. From 9/11 Truthers to Climate Deniers (and Holocaust Deniers) to JFK Assassination theories, Red Ice has had major players in these fringe circles all over the place. Besides the Ancient Aliens and “Big Pharma” conspiracies, they have focused on another crossover point: libertarian/Austrian economic ideas. While they certainly do not politically side with Libertarians, especially those of the Mises or Caito Institutes, they do enjoy finding an audience with shows about the gold standard, BitCoin, and the Federal Reserve.
Their connections to the anti-vaxx community have been one of its more solidified crossover points. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, a well-known anti-vaccine activist, has been on the program often, talking about things like Zika Virus conspiracy theories. The far right has often found inroads into spaces otherwise considered left or “progressive” through Alternative Medicine, which often comes from their generalized conspiratorial worldview.
Lana’s show, Radio 3Fourteen, seems to have always had a foundation in European “identitarianism” right from the start, and has had a slew of recent guests like the Political Cesspool’s James Edwards, pan-Europeanists Melissa Meszaros and Alex Gabler, Counter-Currents’ Greg Johnson, and Walter T. Richmond on various Syrian refugee blaming.
What you can see both in Lana and in Henrik’s show where the crossover points to non-racialist subcultures is going to be. Inside of organized power-lifting, martial arts, and cross-fit communities were are seeing a difficult flirtation with the various “tribalist” factions inside the Alt Right, from the masculanism of Jack Donavan to the barely-literate rants of The Pressure Project. And example of this is with David Whitehead, a popular martial arts instructor in Canada who has his own podcast called Truth Warrior. He runs the Warrior Arts Academy in Sooke, which ranges from broad martial arts classes to a condition type of “warrior” training. From his professional personae there is nothing explicitly racial yet on Radio 3Fourteen he joins in with an open racialist to discuss the “warrior” ethic in what he calls a “Culture of Victimhood.”
The question about the guests of Red Ice Creations is not so much whether or not they are open fascists like the hosts. It is likely that they would disagree about many things, yet they still will flirt with those ideas and empower a movement that is explicitly about creating authoritarian ethnostates. Each of these guests should be challenged for this association and we should make it so that they do not feel welcome to associate with the openly racist radical right. The vast majority of guests on the show are open about their fascist politics, but for those that are not, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to distance themselves from the crowd they are associating with.
A Lana’s Lama image, from their marketing campaign. The logo is in the upper left hand corner, which you will see on their various products.
Lana has decided to move out of simply broadcasting from her living room studio and has created a clothing company, saying that fashion is normally a “lefty cesspool.” Lana’s Llama is a “non-toxic clothing” company, which is her attempt to carve out a space inside of the organic community. The clothes themselves are your general mid-range mix of blouses, shirts, skirts, and pants, with only a few styles of each. Fabrics are of a major focus for Llama, which advocates the use of natural fibers over synthetic. Nothing about the website indicates her intended “subversion of the fashion world,” which lends to its intent to use the natural clothing/foods community as a Trojan Horse of white nationalist entryism. She goes further than she needs in this way by trying to assert that synthetic fibers are responsible for hormone disruption, fungal infections, respiratory problems, joint pain, muscle fatigue, and a number of other ailments. There is some real agenda in this, especially with the claims about hormone disruption. This plays directly into her notion that chemical companies are responsible for “feminizing men,” or for somehow “creating” transgender people through hormone manipulation. This conspiratorial thinking works to further essentialize gender and to create the notion that “globalism” is actively working to subvert “natural gender roles.”
There is a rash of alarmist images and language along these lines, an important component of continuing the sense of dread and conspiracy that is necessary for laying the foundations of a revolutionary white reactionary worldview. Much of the rhetoric that they use draws on elements that are, again, associated with the left, such as the need to have environmentally sustainable clothing production. This has always been a focal point of Third Positionist fascist ideologues, and one that, because of environmentalism’s current cultural image, has allowed for fascist associates to go under the radar.
Lana’s Llama continues the slick appearance of Red Ice and is well linked up with ordering options and social media. Right now it seems that their website is the only way to get the clothing, but it will be important to begin broadcasting what this company is and who it is run by before it gets any further crossover. This means letting people know right on the social media accounts for the company, and to keep up pressure to make sure that those who do not want to fund white nationalist causes do not do so unwittingly.
The same has to be true for Red Ice more broadly, and now that their politics are becoming more known it seems that the guests on their shows are narrowing a bit. The list of those who have been guests is so expansive and touches so many bizarre subcultural spaces that it would be hard to list them one at a time, but it is going to be important to monitor who goes on there from here on out and to make sure they are contacted about their associations. Racial politics are not a safe space because we will not allow it to be. We will make it socially dangerous to associate with these ideas because white nationalism is founded on violence and oppression.
Red Ice has made extensive crossover into the broader Alt Right over the last year, so much that they co-hosted the NPI Conference live podcast with Richard Spencer and Mike Enoch as well as live-streamed, with obnoxious commentary, the videos from Richard Spencer, Nathan Damigo, and Johnny Monoxide from the Berkeley Alt Right Safe Space “event.” They also went to the American Renaissance white nationalist conference in Tennessee this year, broadcasting live and doing interviews with speakers and those attendants who were willing to have their faces on camera.
Image they used when interviewing the Traditionalist Workers Party leader/founder Matthew Heimbach
They extended this live stream project to the recent Traditionalist Workers Party/Traditionalist Youth Network event with the Sac Town Skinheads and Golden State Skinheads, neo-Nazi skinhead gangs who often try to flirt with more “suit and tie” organizations.
Going forward, Red Ice Creations is going to be the leader of this particular wing of the white nationalist movement, consolidating speakers and media output in a way that fascists have rarely achieved in the past. By finding a (slight) financial model that keeps them afloat and by driving deep connections in the conspiracy and pseudo-science/mystical worlds, they have created enough of a base to keep speakers lined up and people paying for premium memberships. Their own folly will likely be in their attempt to follow podcasts like The Daily Shoah and go “full Alt Right,” where their vulgarity will limit their guests to fellow open racists. You can see a direct descent over the last six months as their own “diversity” has been reigned in so as to replicate the ugly success of many of the Alt Right trolls that have defined their movement.
Never the less, they have taken the lead position in the Alt Right digital mediascape, and because of their lack of ideological presence they are bringing in everyone from Britain First activists to open neo-Nazis and Holocaust Deniers. They remain a good marker for those inside of occult, “alternative medicine,” libertarian, and conspiracy circles who are willing to flirt with fascism, and can be a bridge point for confronting the creeping nationalism and racism that often finds these marginal communities as a cross-over pathway into the larger social discussion. Their “success” can also be a tool for anti-fascists who can use their broadcasts as a window into the less-confronted areas of the “intellectual” fascist world, as well as be a regular news feed for what the inside of these new nationalist projects look like.
No matter what Red Ice intends their project to be, the anti-fascist community will use it as a resource to further understand the Alt Right and to build a movement that will shut it down at every turn.
The Traditionalist Youth Network and their leader Matthew Heimbach’s attempt to fundraise on their massive loss in Sacramento has been shut down by a massive show of pressure by anti-racist community organizers.
The Traditionalist Youth Network and their political wing, the Traditionalist Workers Party, linked up with neo-Nazi skinheads and KKK members throughout California to have their rally against multiculturalism in Sacramento. TradYouth, which often tries to act as a working-class oriented Alt Right organization, likes to mask its fascist ideological roots. This rarely works since it shares members with the Golden State Skinheads and Sac City Skinheads as well as various neo-Nazi and Klan groups.
The event was shut down when hundreds of anti-fascist protesters arrived, canceling down their event before it happened, forcing their permit to be voided, battling them out in the open in a large street action, and chased the NAzis out of the park. In response, TradYouth started stabbing people.
Afterwards, TradYouth claimed “victory” even though their event was shut down and they were publicly beaten and humiliated. They then continued to fundraise through PayPal, asking supporters to give money to the Traditionalist Youth Network LLC. This fundraising effort was shared on neo-Nazi and Alt Right websites while they went on social media calling their members “Spartans” who went up against Antifa.
This plan violates PayPal’s terms of use, which says that they will not support any racialist or terrorist organization. We published an article asking supporters to call in and email and ask PayPal to review their account and cancel their fundraising effort. By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) sent a powerful public message that PayPal heard, and the company listened.
On Tuesday, TradYouth announced that they had their account blocked and were unable to receive donations. When someone attempts to use their fundraising link a warning comes up and lists that the recipient was unable to receive payments.
This is a major victory, one that follows the strong showing of community power this last Sunday. Cutting off their line of funds is an important part of stopping the violence that they spread and their attempts to threaten and intimidate communities of color.
After the Traditionalist Youth Network, Traditionalist Workers Party, the Golden State Skinheads, and various KKK members and neo-Nazis rallied in front of the California Capitol Building on Sunday, the anti-fascists in the crowd swarmed them in ways they couldn’t have imagined. Before they were even confronted directly, one of the Nazis stabbed an elderly woman who was doing nothing more than yelling. As they were shut down and had their members humiliated, they began stabbing anti-fascist protesters, sending several to the hospital.
Yep, this is the future of Western Civilization.
Even though their members almost all left broken and bruised, and their meeting was not allowed to happen, the Traditionalist Youth Network are continuing to “claim victory” for stabbing people. Matthew Heimbach, their leader, often prided himself on “fighting fair,” yet this act of stabbing protesters and then hiding is one of the most shameful in their sordid history.
Using this rhetoric, the Traditionalist Workers Party/Traditionalist Youth Network is using this act of putrid disgrace to fundraise for their nationalist aims. Alleging, still, that they are a “peaceful” ethnic nationalism, TradYouth is asking that supporters use this opportunity to send money to their PayPal account.
We delivered the message we intended to deliver today; We will not be intimidated. We will not stand down. Our event was a victory by all metrics. We won the physical fight. We provoked the leftists into showing their true colors. The national media story about our event is becoming a conversation about how our attempt to peacefully demonstrate was viciously attacked by the leftist mob.
Christians, pagans, and skeptics marched as one today, fighting and winning as one. Workers of all professions battled side-by-side. High school dropouts and the college educated stood their ground against what was the single greatest show of anti-white force ever organized in America…and won! Today was not only a victory against the forces of the Left who wish to exterminate our people, but against the voices on the Right who would divide our cause up by religion, class, and background.
No clever “metapolitics” can work around the fact that our enemies want us dead. While blog posts and social media debates are excellent work for our cause, they’re not a replacement for men who are willing to risk injury or even death to guarantee that our message is heard and our voices are not silenced or marginalized. I was not out there today and neither was Matthew Heimbach. We fully trusted the leadership of our California chapter and GSS to host a successful event, and they succeeded against staggering odds. We all owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude.
But we also owe them a real financial debt, as well.
The fact that PayPal is still allowing them to do business, even though they are technically an LLC, is surprising. PayPal has shut down funding to a number of nationalist organizations, such as the Daily Shoah podcast and National Youth Front, the organization that was later rebranded by Nathan Damigo as Identity Europa. Neither of those groups, as disgraceful as they are, have ever engaged in the type of racist violence that Trad Youth has now displayed, yet Matthew Heimbach is continuing to raise money using PayPal.
The Donation link on their page takes you to pay directly to the Traditionalist Youth Network, LLC, which does not have the protections of a non-profit organization. It is time to let PayPal know that Trad Youth is using their service to fund a violent terrorist movement, one that stabs protesters when their event gets shut down.
We need to contact PayPal’s Customer Service center collectively and let them know that a violent neo-Nazi organization, which is easily provable with public information, is trying to use PayPal to raise money. You can either email the report in at aupviolations@paypal.com, or you can go to their Customer Service center here to do a direct email or a phone call. We recommend doing both if you have the time.
When looking back at the event, it is delusional that they are claiming victory today. They were not able to recruit, almost all of their organizers were chased out with force, and they were made to look like the degenerate fools that they are. This is attempt at spin will not work simply because the KKK and neo-Nazis skinheads have so destroyed any public media game they could have had with their persistent and cartoonish violent racism.
What the action in Sacramento really displays is that anti-fascists are growing in numbers and increasing in militancy. This has come in response to the growing threat the Alt Right and the rest of the neo-fascist movement presents, and is one that has to be shut down at every chance.
If sending an email, feel free to send along a link to some of the articles below to give them a better idea of who this group is and what they have done.
For most of its post-WWII history, white nationalists have not exactly been on the cutting edge of technology. What they have done, however, has had mixed results, with some of their outreach efforts becoming massive operations.
Willis Carto turned the Liberty Lobby and its paper, The Spotlight, into a business with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, creating the platform for the Populist Party and making Carto a very wealthy man. This even lead to the Institute of Historical Review, an “academic institute” whose only function was to deny the Holocaust, which Carto lost and then battled with IHR members like Mark Weber for years over endowments. Tom Metzger tried to draw out a niche for the White Aryan Resistance by bringing it down into the gutter by producing what they labeled as “the most racist newspaper on earth.” As his operation and outreach to racist skinheads like Hammerskins and Volksfront grew, he lost his house and everything he owned after Mulugeta Seraw was murdered by WAR affiliated skinheads in Portland, Oregon. The lawsuit that followed destroyed WAR, and set a new precedent of responsibility for these “behind the scenes” racist organizers.
The real step forward for the white nationalist movement was the development of Stormfront, a white nationalist web-forum developed by Klansman Don Black out of Florida. Even now, Stormfront has a special place in the world of internet hate, growing month after month. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s The Year in Hate and Extremism 2015 outlined how their growth has been steady.
The total of registered users is just shy of 300,000, a fairly astounding number for a site run by an ex-felon and former Alabama Klan leader. And that doesn’t include thousands of visitors who never register as users. At press time, Stormfront ranked as the Internet’s 13,648th most popular site, while the NAACP site, by comparison, ranked 32,640th.
Their number of registered users has now broken that 300,000 mark, and they have had to update their servers recently just to be able to match the increase in traffic that has come from people discussing Donald Trump.
All of these different communications methods, as successful as some have been for them, are still fossils. They are relics of the past, both in their distribution format and in their cultural affiliations, rhetoric, and philosophical starting points. Movements like the Alternative Right, Neoreaction/Dark Enlightenment, Human BioDiversity, Radical Traditionalism, and all related “identiatrians” have almost no cultural connection to many of these more KKK/neo-Nazi derivative formations, even if their ideas are cut and paste from them.
Instead, these movements were New Media bound right from the start, circling around internet blogs like Alternative Right or hidden forums on places like 4Chan. Today, their outreach has only grown, and the foundation of this outreach strategy has become podcasting.
A real vanguard of this, so to speak, was Richard Spencer and Vanguard Radio. As we have written before, Richard Spencer began his website Alternative Right in 2010 to bring together all the disparate edges of the conservative movement that were no longer a part of the GOP. Paleoconservatives, race realists, neoreactionaries, radical traditionalist catholics, ethnic pagans, Evolian traditionalists, nationalists, identitarians, Men’s Rights activists, and so many more were all drawn into this movement. The real center of this was Vanguard Radio, which was the podcast that was used both as an interview show and, for a time, a regular chat segment with Spencer talking to co-hosts Andy Nowicki and Colin Liddell. The end of 2013 had a traumatic break from Alternative Right for Spencer who, after stepping down as editor, continued to be associated with the website in the press. After Rachel Maddow did an expose on Spencer and Alt Right after the Jason Richwine scandal at the Heritage Foundation, Spencer became increasingly upset with Alternative Right continuing. On Christmas of 2013 he pulled the plug on the website, angering the Nowicki and Liddell, who had become the current editors. He moved Vanguard Radio over to his new project, the National Policy Institute affiliated Radix Journal, and renamed it the Radix Journal podcast. Over its years it has interviewed names from the far-right movement, such as anti-semitic psychology academic Kevin McDonald, the male-tribalist Jack Donovan, Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson, American Freedom Party Presidential Candidate Merlin Miller, the Traditionalist Youth Network’s Matthew Heimbach, and Pat Buchanan, among dozens of others. He has included a series looking at films by Stanley Kubrick, James Bond books and movies, and a range of other television and films, all of which intending to bring a sort of artistic intellectualism back to the racist right.
Greg Johnson followed suit, using his podcast stream to host talks that he gave on Plato, speeches by nationalists like Johnatahn Bowden, interviews and panel commentaries on white nationalist topics, and to sync together disparate podcasts like Robert Stark’s the Stark Truth. Matthew Heimbach went on to host episodes at Counter-Currents, help out on the briefly lived Kinest racialist Christian podcast Tribal Theocrat, and to do the occasional Traditionalist Youth Hour. The podcast field was eventually swamped with white nationalist content, with places like the White Voice, the Nationalist Network, and White Rabbit Radio. All of these tended to ally with the conspiracy world, often devolving into White Genocide and Zionist Occupied Government narratives. The very popular Daily Stormer website attempted to bridge the gap between the more bizarre and “old school” factions of the white nationalist scene with the smarter and more contemporary crowd, but they eventually moved their show over to Aryan Radio to be alongside speeches by the neo-Nazi William Pierce.
The internet has been critical for outreach of these groups, and it has been since the mid-1990s, so the fact that there are entire podcast networks dedicated to their work is not surprising. What is disturbing, however, is the popularity that many of them have gotten. Radix Journal Podcast and The Daily Shoah, especially, are seeing a renaissance in terms of listeners. The Daily Shoah, which is the podcast project of The Right Stuff, has only been around since early August 2014 but has already soared in popularity. This has come mainly from their “Opie and Anthony” approach to politics where they have vulgar skits targeting Jews, people of color, and LGBT people in the most disgusting language possible. Their popularity has led for them to develop a podcast network of their own coming out of their own crowd, all of which are complete with their own jargon and code-names. This includes Free Radio Skyrim, Fash Britannia, and Fash the Nation, where two hosts banter mainly about how Donald Trump is the savior of the white race and that Bernie Sanders is just a Jew.
The tools that have allowed their successful outreach are the same ones that have aided the general public in creating the podcasting revolution. Soundcloud and iTunes are just as accessible for amateur podcasters as they are to NPR, which means that they have incredibly mainstream access points for their streams. Soundcloud will flag certain types of content, and just a few weeks ago it banned The Daily Shoah for violating its terms of use. TRS obviously made a joke of this, but it slowed them down as they briefly had to host over at the clunky Archive.org. They wanted to just host on their own website, but at the point at which they post their show there are literally thousands of downloads. On every weekly episode they read donations, which account to hundreds of dollars a week, coming from listener donations.
The Radix Journal podcast itself has maintained the popularity immensely, and you can see that on their Soundcloud listings there are between 3,000 and 20,000 full listens even on shows that have not been available for very long. Spencer has done this all in an incredibly smart way as he utilizes his iTunes streams effectively. He uses multiple channels, one for the regular podcast, one for the audio of speeches at his conferences, and one for the older conversations he had with Jonathan Bowden several years ago. All of the podcast stream in iTunes with an RSS feed, which is the same deal with The Daily Shoah, Counter-Currents, Tribal Theocrat, American Renaissance, and several others. Even for less specific far-right projects, like Jack Donovan’s Start the World or The Pressure Project, subscribers are in the thousands, and only increasing. As places like The Daily Shoah helped to increase the number of white nationalists active in these online publications and forums, Radix took off as well. In 2015, Spencer increased his podcasting to about once a week, and the listenership tripled. He has now publicly committed to doing a once a week podcast, a once a week video(which will also be streamed on the podcast), and also doing a monthly Google Hangout on YouTube, which is a format that has become popular for The Daily Shoah contributor, Millenial Woes. What this amounts to, when looking at the entire Alt Right network of media, is an almost constant stream of content who is increasing more rapidly than anyone would have expected. Spencer says that he expects to, conservatively, double his reach in 2016, and he just might be right.
Stormfront itself has created a podcast of its own, a five day a week operation where Don Black babbles incoherently, showing both that he is out of touch with the world and even his own movement. This feed has failed to become anywhere near as popular as his successors, which generally shows how different that movement of today has become and how it has left the old-guard racialist groups in the dust. Even leaving out this radical fringe of the fringe, the numbers are staggering when you simply look at just how many people are listening to the vast majority of these shows on an almost daily basis.
People assume that a huge part of this increase is the candidacy of Donald Trump, and it certainly is, as well as white reaction to changing demographics, refugee immigration, recent crimes from Islamic participants, and Black Lives Matter. The real issue, however, is less that there is just a “spark” that has caused it, and rather than this new generation of the radical right is just more effective at targeting and growing their base. They have crafted a message that is more effective than the KKK ever had, and now they have grown to a point that their community has an echo chamber through social media that allows them to continue growing their reach. In this way, it is less that new converts are being made through events and arguments, and instead that the already-racist are simply being “activated.”
For anti-fascists, this presents an incredible challenge, which means effectively targeting their outlets when possible while continuing to shine a light on the way that they code their messages. An example of this is their use of iTunes is almost monolithic, and Soundcloud has already proved that it is not going to accept open racialist content. What anti-fascists and anti-racists cannot do is continue to ignore this faction of the racist community, assuming that they are only an irrelevant fringe. Instead, their growth signals a real shift in the thinking, and it is going to be critical to grow anti-racist work, confront their organizing directly, and to develop strategies that go far beyond liberal anti-racists narratives so that the very structures of racial inequality can be dismantled. “No Platform” is critical in this context, and now we are heading to the digital world of confrontation as well as meeting them in the streets.
Over the months, as the Donald Trump campaign has shifted from bumbling loudspeaker-style racist quips to copy-and-paste fascist political programs, the media response has moved from mockery, to horror, and, finally, to click-bait. Trump’s campaign has rode this wave, which was a “shock/response” model, and the left-leaning media outlets that use a social media business model have been central to its ability to spread through the culture. The “outrage machine” has been very real in that, from identifying a room full of Jewish Republicans as “deal makers” to banning and registering Muslims, his politics have only made their way up the ladder of offense and guttural bigotry. The echo chamber, which has led his message and created the offense-racket that has made him popular with reactionary sectors of middle America, has been driven by this, and it has given his voice the kind of reach that he simply couldn’t have achieved with his own appearances and the standard political news machine.
Trump himself has created an entire media model of exploiting the disbelief in leftist coverage, but he has also been the gate-keeper to mainstreaming an entire narrative that has been developed over the last five years in the annals of web forums and news sites. The Alternative Right, Neoreaction, Dark Enlightenment, and all the other variants of internet-focused and pseudo-academic neo-fascism has been developing a new language for speaking and “critiquing” society that breaks from the two sided coin of neo-Nazis and the Klan. Now they return to race and IQ talking points, critiques of contemporary democracy, attacks on the idea of equality, rejection of modernity, and a range of other simple ideas repackaged in the aesthetics of Continental Philosophy. Backed by the ideas of European New Right intellectuals, much of this resurrects previously fringe ideologues like Julius Evola or the Conservative Revolution, looking to build a strictly hierarchical society and the idea of ethnically defined societies. This is not the posturing that Donald Trump has gained his popularity on, but it is much of the long-term vision that his seemingly casual comments have as their end game. Just as there are “dog whistle” words that use economic rhetoric to signal racial tensions, neo-fascist supporters hope that his reactionary remarks are a “dog whistle” to an open fascist political program.
What the “Donald Trump phenomenon” has done, even more than just Trump himself, is to open the door to the voices of this reactionary movement in that they have a direct lineage between the two. Buzzfeed began publicizing the use of “alt right” as a hashtag on Twitter, which has been used for years up to this point, giving extended interviews to people like Richard Spencer, RamZPaul, and Jared Taylor. Rosie Gray, the Buzzfeed reporter who did the article on white nationalism and the Trump campaign, got pulled into an even more difficult situation when RamZPaul gave one condition to doing the interview: that he could film and broadcast it. What resulted is another one of Paul’s well-known videos, this time where he talks to an understandably timid Gray over an iPhone speaker. While Paul’s rhetoric in the video is confusing and rambling, it still gave him the perfect opportunity to actually draw some of the Buzzfeed crowd to an unedited piece of his own racial nationalist script.
Richard Spencer got extended time in Vice’s recent “We Asked a White Supremacist What He Thinks About Donald Trump,” which followed a similarly vapid premise as their “We Asked a Fascism Expert About Trump.” Here, again, Spencer’s ideas were given an open platform, not because he is an expert on the Trump campaign, but simply because his politics have now become a relevant part of the discourse. Spencer was additionally interviewed in the New York Times for an article that placed him alongside David Duke and Stormfront founder Don Black, which angered him enough to do a response on the Radix Journal website going through the references to him point by point and discussing how he was misrepresented. This shows a particular character of these internet-focused racialists, who exist in word vomit where they constantly have to ramble at length and can never give up the last word.
These articles are small snippets of dozens of articles in recent months that have shown that white nationalists from David Duke to the Traditionalist Youth Network’s Matthew Heimbach. When interviewed, all parties are allowed a platform to explain very clearly their key points, why we should support trump, and what kind of vision they hold.
The problematic nature of this coverage often comes directly from its intention to reveal something very real about the Trump phenomenon and its growing far-right affiliations. What these articles are intending to show is that Trump is, first, associated with these types of characters and, by association, tarnish his name. But this does not end up being a straight line since, as much of the neo-fascist rebranding has done purposefully, the alt right bloggers are often prepared to muddy the discussion so as to avoid conventional critiques of white supremacist politics. Reports in places like Gawker and Alternet are then not prepared to counter them, instead simply offering them an open platform that they could never have dreamed of on their own sites. The intended effect, for these people to hang themselves on their own words, is often ineffective.
The issue that liberal anti-racist activists often clash with radical anti-fascists over is free speech. The liberal notion of free speech is to defend even the most vile and erroneous forms, which, in essence, the protections are there for. Antifa organizers then have to propose a counter view, which is not to actually argue for state intervention to criminalize certain forms of speech, but instead to mobilize direct action to stop it cold. The distinction here is based around the use of the state and whether or not empowering its infrastructure will have a long-term positive effect. When the organs of political power shift they could very easily use the same rhetoric and repression used in hate speech laws against us on the radical left, and it is also less than appropriate to further empower a state that is designed to maintain capital and ruling class interests. The “no platform” concept in Antifa organizing is to show the community’s resistance to all the methods by which fascist organizing attempts to gain a foothold. The direct result of every racialist project is violence, inequality, and authoritarianism, either politically or socially, and therefore stopping it at the root is critical. People are free to have any ideas they want, but we are also free to mobilize to stop violence and oppression from becoming an unstoppable wave in our community.
It is difficult, then, to figure out exactly what “no platform” will always mean. An example of this difficulty is with someone like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor. Taylor has made a name for himself arguing points on the fringes of acceptable discourse, such as concepts like racial difference in IQ, racial disparity in crime, and the “inherent” problems and conflicts in multicultural diversity. Taylor then uses any oppottunity, whether it is being brought by controversial student groups to campuses or going on liberal talk shows that use him as an oddity, to pitch his well choreographed lines. His discourse is not meant to outline a clear point, it is to inspire doubt in the listeners. People are generally not up on all the ways that race and IQ correlations have been disproven, or the very well documented explanations for racial disparity in the judicial system. Taylor then uses this as a break through opportunity to then shift a small segment of the viewers into their whole world of “research,” explanations, and narratives.
This presents a conflict, which is often seen in how people respond to him. One could be to simply ignore his work, refuse to debate or comment on it lest actually give it more exposure. This has been successfully done in many Holocaust Denial situations, which is the pattern offered up by people like Deborah Lipstadt and in her book, Denying the Holocaust. This is often the best course of action, but what if the ideas are already starting to spread because an effective counter to them has not been made? This is often while people like Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine debated Mark Weber from the Holocaust denying Institute for Historical Review, or when anti-racist author Tim Wise has debated Jared Taylor on several instances. The concept here is that the ideas actually are beginning to grow as the only available narrative is the one provided by the fascist right, and it is important to expose and disprove them.
The answer is actually situational, but if a “debate” or disproval of sorts is going to be in effect, the people have to be prepared to do it. It is not that Jared Taylor is an expert on the sociology of race or intelligence and genetics, in fact he consistently embarrasses himself anytime he moves beyond platitudes to try and actually discuss these topics, but he is completely prepared to debate in sound bites. This is really the entire front edge of the racialist movement, especially in the U.S., which means that those who are attempting to engage them as a means of attack have to be prepared to effectively counter their stylized argumentation. Instead, Buzzfeed and related outlets, who clearly believe that exposure will generally lead to enlightened society expelling the Nazis, have not done due diligence and instead are providing them a platform completely open and uncontested.
The second real purpose, at least from an activist standpoint, would be to educate people about these movements and ideas so as to effectively understand and resist them. This, again, has been a problem for reasons that parallel our own, yet miss the mark. The conversations with Richard Spencer in the New York Times, Vice, Buzzfeed, and CBS are especially telling examples of this. He was allowed to put out points of propaganda, very attractive soundbites that are how he thinks people should first engage with his ideas. They did not, however, actually deconstruct those ideas, provide much history, correctly correlate them to their more obvious neo-Nazi counterparts, and discuss what the real threat of them are. This comes, partially, because they do not care what the details are because he is a racist and that is good enough. On a certain level, we certainly agree. Fascists of all stripes think that their specific narratives and sub-ideologies are incredibly important and unique. In reality, to us and for our purposes, they are all really just branches of fascism, an ideology of nationalism, inequality, and anti-democracy. The problem is, however, that we still have to understand them to effectively counter organize, and even to just have a better understanding of philosophy and politics. In this way, we are provided with literally nothing by these articles, which instead provide a platform for fascist organizers while providing us no useful information and engaging in no concrete refutation.
Publicity of any sort can be useful to a fascist fringe, yet it can be on us to continue to create a strong counter narrative. In a certain sense, Donald Trump has actually done this by boiling down the “alt right’s” pseudo-academic drivel to offensive racial sound bites. Creating a strong counter-narrative is the real work that people on the radical left can do in this regard as the mainstream media can and will do what it knows and not what is best suited to anti-racist struggle. This means confronting claims directly, continuing to be open about about the how and why of revolutionary projects, and shutting down public organizing and presence of the radical right in every available opportunity.
Trump and the Alt Right echo chamber provides us with a couple of opportunities, the primary one being the ability to counter organize and openly refute the outright lies. If we cannot expect conventional media outlets to do this effectively, the torch is passed to us, though this can be done without providing any additional power to the voice of the racists. The greatest weapon against their reactionary ideas of race and social divisions is to actually uproot white supremacy in our communities, and this is a project that goes far beyond the fascist framing. As we grow anti-racist struggle, their voices will become angrier, yet we will continue to set the narrative agenda. When Donald Trump makes claims about undocumented peoples, it provides an opportunity to undermine that false narrative and to organize a movement to stand with immigrant rights no matter who the opposition is.
When thinking further about “no platform,” the most important lesson to take into media and propaganda is to not let the racialist fringe set the conversation. Anti-fascists around the world are growing alongside the opposition, and we can together make confronting racial oppression a priority and not just a response to the reactionaries. Avoid sharing their lines, do not link to their blogs, block their Tweets, and generally make unavailable their rantings, while also confronting any of the lies and memes that they are successfully getting into the general culture. It is by walking this line that we are able to undercut the only power they have while eliminating any crossover points they have.
The media is going to continue to use white nationalists as an oddity, but if we know how to approach these daily case studies we can use it to continue to silence and step over their violent impulses.
If the rhetoric of the racist right is tweaked at the edges, with the sharp language about minority groups shifted towards a broad discourse of “white dispossession,” then it can easily go under the radar as coded racial attacks are common to Tea Party groups and Donald Trump rallies. As we see an anti-racist movement with teeth evolve out of Black Lives Matter, many whites are taking the calls of a combed-over Fuhrer figure and feeding the darkest recesses of their reactionary impulses. It is in this wave of Islamophobia, “all lives matter” retorts, and increasing racist violence, that the Traditionalist Youth Network has gone under the general public’s radar.
The Traditionalist Youth Network and its political wing, the Traditionalist Worker Party, has been hitting the streets in a series of actions where their message has gotten through by being disconnected from their open white nationalism. In a recent action in Cincinnati, Ohio, Trad Youth picketed outside of the Great American Ball Park to highlight the attack on Christopher McKnight. McKnight had recently been attacked by a group of people who beat him pretty severely, all of which was caught on camera phones and posted on YouTube. The reason that Trad Youth became interested in this case was that McKnight was white and the attackers were black. They then wanted to call attention to the fact that one of the filing police officers who addressed the case had briefly considered filing it as a “hate crime,” even though there is no credible instance that the attack was racially motivated.
Trad Youth’s action garnered a great deal of publicity, and a lot of people they passed were sympathetic to the “heartland” rhetoric they laced their argument with. The news reports never mentioned their close neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan relationships, nor their open fascist political program. Trad Youth also does not invite these comparisons as they kept their language incredibly limited when dealing with the crowds that poured past them.
Over the weekend of December 5-6, the Traditionalist Worker Party joined the Madisonville, Kentucky Christmas Parade complete with their Fallange inspired political signs. Here they passed out hundreds of candy canes to the children of the town with messages that read “Local Solutions to the Globalist Problem.” This is a very particular choice in wording as they play on the “go local” language that is often used in small towns around the holidays where small businesses are trying to stay afloat against big box competitors. The real key to this line is “globalist,” which is a particular framing that is key to their conception of nationalism. They handed out anti-immigration flyers to the rest of the crowd, which also indicated that they were “pro-worker” since they wanted to keep out foreign workers. With a general support from the semi-rural, conservative community, their actual political affiliation was never suggested even as their political wing was discussing programmatic solutions. On their own website, in the discussion about the event, they listed a quote from the Spanish fascist Fallange party founder, Jose Antonio.
Nobody was ever born a member of a political party; on the contrary, we are all born members of one family; we are all citizens of one Municipality; we all press forward in the exercise of one task of work.
Even more disturbing, the Southern California chapter of Trad Youth has been organizing in a coalition with neo-fascist National Anarchist groups to organizing Food Not Bombs. Usually anarchist in nature, FNB is a project where by the boundaries between those who cook and those who are hungry are broken down and act as a community-building alternative to the traditional soup kitchen. Often considered an anarchist counter-cultural staple, FNB is an attempt by National Anarchists to co-opt anarchist cultural items so that they can go under the radar as “just another type of anarchism.” Instead, they believe in a decentralized form of racial nationalism, one where “autonomous” communities are driven by racial identity and traditionalist authoritarianism. Together, the N-A and Trad Youth also had a sit down meeting with Ron Paul, which continues to show that the left libertarian support for Ron Paul has been a bizarre misstep.
In a continued attempt to wear the shoes of the revolutionary left for a reactionary agenda, Trad Youth and the N-A affiliates formed a four person “black bloc” to defend anti-abortion protesters around the trumped up Planned Parenthood attack. They note particularly that they were going up against the Revolutionary Community Party, which they use to show that they are utilizing the left’s organizing strategy “against them.”
Further, since one of our national-anarchist members came from a leftist to a traditionalist mindset over time, as he grew from a teenager to a man, he was familiar with the flyering techniques of the RCP and was able to help us locate their flyers they were dropping in the downtown area to invite local drug users and homeless from skid row to a “community meeting” they were organizing in a Methodist church. While we chose not to counterprotest this meeting at that time, having located the flier and considered options to act against them as a group shows the level of discipline we have developed in just a few short months.
The Traditionalist Youth Network has shown itself to be one of the few white nationalist groups capable of even moderate organizing, though they use marginal actions more as a chance to create endless blogs and media rather than as a larger strategy. Any success that they do have really comes from their ability to adapt to the particulars of the area. In Kentucky they stick with a traditional rural ultra-conservative messaging, while in California they join the rhetoric of alt-fascism that tries to employ elements of the revolutionary left. All of this tends to come under the cover of leader Matthew Heimbach’s smiling face, which provides a certain optimism that is very different from the traditional image of racist skinhead anger.
Because they intend to go under the radar in their particular areas and sub-groups, this gives anti-fascists key tools to confront and destabilize their strategy. In this way it is simply stating the reality of their politics, showing their quotes and affiliations openly, and mobilizing coalitions against any appearance they have. As we just saw in Seattle with the successful counter-action against Hammerskins from Rose City Antifa, there is the ability to mobilize large actions when people see that open racialism is gaining a foothold. This fury can be organized with Trad Youth as the target, and the mild community support they have will dry up immediately when they are exposed for what they really are.
Heimbach’s calm demeanor and Christian apologetics will only go so far when the sheet is pulled off of their dog whistle politics and their plans for an Ethno-state is laid bare.
Over the last few years, antifascists have watched as a young new face has come from the “radical traditionalist” milieu. Matthew Heimbach, who is only 25 at this point, started by organizing a chapter of the ultra-conservative Youth for Western Civilization at Townson University before forming the White Student Union. After graduating he helped to form the Traditionalist Youth Network, which organized white nationalist “youths” on a range of cultural issues. He is closely associated with the usual suspects, including organizing with and speaking at the conferences of the League of the South, Council of Conservative Citizens, Stormfront, and the American Freedom Party. He began touring around the country, then around Europe, meeting with far-right groups, neo-Nazi skinheads, KKK locals, and nationalist parties. In a lot of ways, he is a sort of “jack of all fascism,” where he is bringing a Southern flare back to the “alt right.”
His fiery style, big smiles, and lack of a filter has also made him enemies, and not just of the anti-racist crowd. At the recent National Policy Institute conference, Heimbach was banned entry because of his publicly repulsive statements about homosexuality. The bright new face of nationalism is more friendly(which still isn’t very friendly) to queer people, and they did not want to insult the one gay speaker on their line-up. He still made it to DC to hang out with the crowd, but this was certainly a blow.
At the same moment, he was officially banned from entering the United Kingdom for his racist views, which he feigned glee over since it gave him some racist “street cred.” The letter the Homeland Department’s Theresa May said that he violated the Unacceptable Behavior Policy. His claims that homosexuality is a “deviant lifestyle” and needed re-education camps is what got him removed from both NPI and the Britain border, which says something about the level of reactionary he has become. His upcoming trip to England was to speak at a private Southport lunch event that is held by organizing white nationalists in the area, all of which have been confronted so thoroughly by Antifa that they have to hold their events in hiding. Heimbach has been challenged regularly by anti-fascist organizers in places like Bloomington, Indiana, which is right near the home he shares with his wife and her father.
It is not the first time that Heimbach has been kicked out of his own movement. In 2013 he was seen fist clenched at a National Socialist Movement event, smiling that dopey grin in front of an emblazoned swastika. This got him dropped from the League of the South temporarily, but he is now training to become their new director. After a confrontation with anti-racists where he used a large, wooden crucifix to savagely beat a protester, his Orthodox Church booted both him and his father-in-law, Matt Parrot. Conservative Orthodox Christianity is central to Heimbach’s identity, where he especially aligns himself with Eastern and Russian Orthodox churches that maintain support for regional nationalism, deep homophobia, and implicit anti-Semitism(though this is not monolithic in these Orthodox regions.).
This picture of Heimbach attacking anti-fascist protesters got him excommunicated from the Orthodox Church. The Traditionalist Youth Network then turned it into an Internet meme.
Heimbach has steadily moved to the right over his time as an organizer for white nationalism. He started as a “patriot” type who was a strong supporter of Israel, yet today if you were to check his social media it would be filled with the most vile anti-Semitism and support for fascist killers. The Traditionalist Youth Network has just started an electoral wing, the Traditionalist Workers Party, which is surprising since Heimbach has stated over and over again that revolution is the only solution. This could be simply an attempt to gain a larger platform for street-based fascism, which was successful for the National Front and British National Party. None the less, Heimbach is one of the more successful targets for Anti-Fascist Action as he wears his hate on his sleeve yet acts as an entry point to the more “suit and tie” fascist organizations.
