Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the white nationalist organization Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP) who has been called "the next David Duke," was arrested and charged with two counts of battery Tuesday in southern Indiana, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The incident, involving multiple white nationalists who are all members of the same extended family, revolves around an alleged act of infidelity.
Heimbach, who is accused of attacking his wife with their minor children present — a felony charge — was a key organizer of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last summer that left many counter-protesters injured and one dead after a man with white nationalist ties drove his car into a crowd.
Heimbach founded the Traditionalist Workers Party, which has been designated a hate group by the SPLC, with Matthew Parrott, the organization’s spokesman. Now Parrott is one of two people accusing Heimbach of violence, along with Heimbach’s own wife Brooke, who is Parrott's stepdaughter.
According to the police report, the incident was sparked by an allegation of infidelity between Matthew Heimbach and Parrott’s wife Jessica Parrott (who is not Brooke’s mother, but is her landlord).
It’s not a surprise when white nationalists makes headlines involving violence — Charlottesville taught us that, at least. But the prurient nature of the private dispute surrounding Heimbach’s arrest offers a glimpse of how history could be repeating itself yet again when it comes to the rise and fall of hate groups in America.
So yes, there is a greater purpose to recounting the sordid details of Heimbach's arrest. From the officer’s report:
Brooke advised me that Matthew Heimbach had been having an affair with Jessica Parrott and that she and [Matthew] Parrott had learned this last week. Both Jessica and Matthew [Heimbach] had stated they were done seeing each other after a 3 month affair. After this Brooke and Jessica made a plan to “set up” Matthew Heimbach to see if Matthew would in fact attempt to sleep with Jessica after they had stated they would end things.
Brooke and Matthew Parrott peered through a window into a trailer on Parrott’s property ostensibly to watch “my wife and her boyfriend preparing to have sex,” as Parrott wrote in his statement. The box Parrott stood on to peek through the window broke. Parrott then confronted Heimbach and told him to “get off my property” — presumably speaking of the actual land — and poked Heimbach in the chest.
Matthew [Heimbach] grabbed his hand and twisted down then got behind him and “choked him out” with his arm. [Matthew Parrott] stated that he lost consciousness briefly and that when he came to Jessica was standing over him.
This was followed by a second altercation between the two leaders: Parrott threw a chair, Heimbach "choked him out" again. Parrott called the police from a nearby Walmart. When the cops showed up at the property, according to Brooke’s affidavit, “my husband asked me to dismiss the police at my door. I refused, he kicked the wall, and then grabbed my cheeks, making them bleed, and threw me with the hand on my face onto the bed.” The police report stated that Brooke seemed nervous and upset. Brooke also told the police she recorded the incident on her phone.
“In the report,” says the SPLC article, and confirmed by the police paperwork, “all four people involved in the incident recorded their occupations as ‘White Nationalist.’”
Heimbach made national news for violence before when he was charged with “harassment with physical contact” of a protester at a 2016 Donald Trump rally in nearby Louisville, Kentucky. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and was given a suspended sentence, provided he not re-offend within two years, which he may have now, albeit across state lines. That incident is named in a pending federal civil lawsuit against Trump for incitement of violence. Last week, Heimbach popped up at a speech that white nationalist figurehead Richard Spencer, creator of the term “alt-right,” was set to give at Michigan State University, where he and other members of the TWP physically fought with demonstrators, according to the SPLC.
The subject of a December 2016 “Nazi Next Door”–style New York Times profile, Heimbach has maintained a high profile for himself and his organization throughout media coverage of the recent resurgence in hate groups. Last month, a Washington Post profile of “a young neo-Nazi” in Columbus, Ohio detailed the young man's membership in the Traditionalist Workers Party and quoted Matthew Parrott.
Membership and awareness of the organization has grown sharply over the last two years, according to the SPLC, likely in part because of Heimbach’s media-friendly profile and Parrott’s work as spokesperson. In addition, their marital family ties have served as a facsimile of a wholesome face on the brand of hate they promote. But this arrest might be the end of their work together, and that could also spell the beginning of the end for the organization, which has successfully recruited new members under the auspices of promoting “an independent white ethno-state” in America. Parrott, for his part, told the SPLC that he was “done,” stating, “SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life.”
If allegations of violence sparked by a family dispute over infidelity ends up unraveling the organizing work Heimbach and Parrott have done to promote racist hate in America over the last few years, it won’t necessarily be an outlier. There are many parallels in this current wave of white-nationalist hate groups to the second wave of the Ku Klux Klan, which roared to prominence briefly in the 1920s, as detailed in Linda Gordon’s insightful 2017 history, “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan and the American Political Tradition.” As I wrote in my review of Gordon's book:
None of the success of the Klan's recruitment schemes would have been possible without an emotional landscape ripe for exploitation. “As individual Klan writers and speakers elaborated their ideas imaginatively, one set of emotional tropes dominated: fear, humiliation, and victimization,” writes Gordon, emphasizing that Klansmen felt the America they knew and valued — “traditionally unified and virtuous” — was under siege by outside forces. This contradiction — that "real" Americans were both superior to others yet constantly threatened by outsiders who have the power to destroy said "real" America — is still in place today.
In a time in which the parallels to 1920s Klan recruitment are all there — a culture of white grievance; a patina of respectability around such an organization, such as that which university-educated, golf shirt-clad organizers like Heimbach put on their movement; a subculture built on memes; a hatred of racial minorities, targeted immigrant groups and Jews — it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the same forces that took down the Klan’s infrastructure might also crumble the TWP. When leaders turn on each other viciously, it tears apart the infrastructure of an organization, and punctures the absurd fantasy the rank-and-file cling to — of a group identity forged by a message of positivity, however warped, rather than outright hate.
Certainly, allegations of violence against Heimbach's wife, with kids present, might dissuade other women from joining up. Organizations like the TWP rely on their messaging being received as aspirational by recruits, and much of that rides on the credibility of their leaders. That sad police report doesn’t portray Heimbach as a leader or a person of integrity, to say nothing of a family man concerned with taking care of "our people," as he has claimed.
Here’s how it went down for the Klan in the ‘20s. Infighting split the national organization into rival factions; “rank-and-file resentment,” as Gordon writes, led to apathy among members, who stopped paying dues; and scandals exposed “its leaders’ crimes, hypocrisy, and misbehavior.” A propaganda newspaper editor was sentenced to life for killing his Klan rival, which an Imperial Wizard tried to brush off as a personal affair. Indiana Gov. Ed Jackson, a Klan member, was indicted for bribery. And again in Indiana, what Gordon calls “the Klan’s final undoing,” came when an Indiana Grand Dragon was convicted for kidnapping, raping, and murdering his secretary in a story that shocked the nation.
Now "Nazi Next Door" profiles have become de rigueur, along with the criticism of their utility — again, as I wrote back in October, sometimes sunlight is a disinfectant and sometimes it's a growth agent. Yet it's worth considering that while soft-focus, emphasis-on-understanding coverage can be turned into a recruitment tool for gullible readers, it can also be used against hate-group leaders when they are exposed as hypocritical frauds through routine follow-up reporting. In the end, a critical op-ed may be less damning than a simple local police report, detailing how the leadership of an up-and-coming white nationalist organization began to tear itself apart through allegations of violence and betrayal, all in their own words.
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