In this episode Daniel and Jack take another look at Matt Heimbach, formerly of the Traditionalist Workers Party and National Socialist Movement, and his supposed turn to anti-racism. Content Warning Contains Clips Notes and Links: Matt Heimbach SPLC. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/matthew-heimbach SPLC article 'Two Prominent Neo-Nazis Recant, but Their Actions Sow Doubts' https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/05/14/two-prominent-neo-nazis-recant-their-actions-sow-doubts Everything You Love Will Burn. https://www.amazon.com/Everything-You-Love-Will-Burn/dp/1568589948 Vice White Student Union documentary (from 2013). https://youtu.be/GJ_MHp8iqtQ Matt Heimbach assaults woman at Trump rally 2016. https://youtu.be/-YeYZtXHo8E Kelly Weill article on Night of Wrong Wives. https://www.thedailybeast.com/matthew-heimbachs-traditional-workers-party-implodes-over-love-triangle-turned-trailer-brawl Matt Heimbach joins Light Upon Light. https://youtu.be/w4DGkvsJLP8 Light Upon Light Upon Light (independent blog critical of LuL.) https://lightuponlightuponlight.home.blog Take A Walk On the Right Side podcast. https://anchor.fm/take-a-walk-on-the-right-side * Relevant previous episodes: Episode 8: The National Socialist Movement Episode 28: The Siege Pill, Part 1 Episode 29: The Siege Pill, Part 2 Episode 3: Unite the Right, Part 1 Episode 4: Unite the Right, Part 2 * Jack's splenetic ramblings on J. K. Rowling, Part 1, Part 2, review of Fantastic Beasts 2
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Every episode comes with a big content warning.
And welcome to episode 55 of I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he-him, as usual, and I'm here, as usual, with Daniel Harper, also he-him.
Hi, Daniel.
Hi, Jack.
I'm glad we're doing pronoun checks now.
It was kind of a gag that we did in the last one, but I think it's worthwhile.
Yeah, pronoun checks.
Yeah, no, it wasn't a gag as far as I was concerned, so you've just outed yourself.
Well, we just stole it from another podcast, but I think it's worth doing, and ultimately it's going to make the Nazis real mad at us, so I think that's probably the best way to go about this.
Well, that's the best reason for doing anything.
Yeah, no, I think all podcasts should do pronoun checks at the start.
I actually, I asked around before I started, you know, did the thing where you put he, him, or whatever your pronouns are in my Twitter bio, because I sort of, I am, I just feel like I am so obviously just a cis man, you know?
Right.
But, you know, I asked around, should I do this?
And people were generally, yeah, you should do it, so I do it now.
So, yeah.
Well, it's just it's just a mark of respect ultimately and it's a mark of like, you know, the whole point is like Passing and not passing and sort of like, you know, like I had somebody Who I respect, you know, kind of a couple years ago, kind of talked to me about like, well, why would you do that?
Isn't it like, isn't that kind of like, you know, I've never really had a problem telling who is and is not trans.
And I said, are you sure?
Yeah.
Because that's, and that's ultimately the point of like, you know, you put your pronouns in and you say, we make it sort of a generic thing that like everybody does as a mark of, because you really can't tell.
For a lot of people and like it's it's it's a marker of like it doesn't matter Who's passing and who's not and so it's it's a you know, I consider just a mark of just kind of a general respect And so, um, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely No joke there.
Um, what am I jk rolling?
um who is a fucking asshole just like why oh my god, we I'm not even should we should we just not We should just not like Jesus Christ JK Rowling like all you had to do was be just go be a billionaire and leave us of the fuck alone instead.
You gotta be a fucking transphobe it's it's oh god it's so like I'm not even like a big Harry Potter person and I'm just like just go away.
Just go away.
Yeah.
You've written your shitty books.
Just fuck off and enjoy your completely unearned billions.
And just shut up.
I feel kind of uncomfortable telling any woman to shut up.
But really, everybody just needs to tell JK Rowling to shut the fuck up at this point.
She wrote these books that a lot of people really love, and that were a big part of people's childhoods, and I'm a little bit too old to have been a part of that, but I can respect that.
Like, you know, I can say, look, you wrote books that are beloved, and people really responded to them, and they have some really shitty politics, and they're not great books.
But, like, that's fine.
Like, ultimately, like, you know, you were a big part of people's childhoods, and people use your stuff as a metaphor.
You should just rest on your laurels, and not have to be a shitty person, ultimately, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, those books are fucking poison.
I mean, really, they are.
Well, yeah.
Our listeners are now gonna want us to do a Harry Potter episode.
Well, I wrote a series of articles, I only actually got two of them done, it feels like a billion years ago now, What With Everything, about this, because I was going to do, and I think there were only ever meant to be three or four essays in the series on my blog about this, but I never actually quite got around to doing a third one, which was going to be the one where I went through the books and documented the racism.
But those I mean, you know loads of people have talked about this, but I don't think people quite really get just how absolutely fucking Poisonously racist those books are but never mind.
Let's I mean at this rate you remember that bit where like she put out this like tweet or statement or whatever where it was like
You know before indoor plumbing Wizards just shit on the floor whenever they needed to go to the bathroom or whatever Yeah, and they just magic did away and I'm just kind of imagining at the rate that we're going She's gonna be like and that's because they got that practice from India back in the day, you know She's just gonna start talking like she's just gonna get really overtly racist in like, you know She's just listening to like alt-right shitheads or something, you know Yeah.
We're way far afield from what we're supposed to be talking about.
Who are we?
Actually, not as much as we would like to be.
But, you know, it's fine.
Yeah, she's like, every time she tweets, she gets completely destroyed by people laughing at her and telling her she should just stop talking.
And she's like somebody with a sore tooth that just can't stop wiggling it.
She's got to go back and, you know, tweet some more.
And somebody needs to intervene.
It's like with Glinna.
Same thing happened.
And Glitter, like, defended her, which is, you know, anytime Glitter says something nice about you, that's a sign that you've done something wrong.
That's just the, you know.
If Glitter said something nice about me, I would immediately apologize.
Absolutely.
But let's steer this episode back off the cliff.
With everything happening and all the incredible exciting things happening in the world right now, let's just ignore all those and talk about J.K.
Rowling and Glinner for a bit and then go on to Matthew Heimbach.
Yeah, Matthew Heimbach, who we've done an episode about before, but we're going to talk a little bit more about him in this episode, because apparently he's reformed.
He's an anti-racist now.
Is that right?
Well, we're going to explore that question a little bit, and we're not going to come to a firm determination.
Because ultimately it's not for me to decide what's in people's hearts.
But we're going to present some evidence, and we're going to talk about this issue.
And hopefully, the point of this episode is to Get some kind of response and maybe Some people will do things better than they have been doing previously if he is legitimately reformed So this is meant to be sort of the beginning of a bit of a like public discussion about this issue if you can Kind of understand that Right, yeah, good.
But before we get on to that, we do have the first installment, it's kind of a mini-sode, but it's the first installment of TRS News, or Hallucinating Hammers, as I christened it last week.
I had someone in my mentions who was definitely happy about calling it that, although it does feel like that's a little bit of a, that's enough of an inside joke that maybe we should not call it that.
Yeah, TRS News, Hallucinating Hammers.
We're going to be talking a bit about what TRS, TheRightStuff.biz, is doing on a regular basis just to make sure that they are aware that I'm still following them because apparently they were unaware of that previously.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, so so what have you got to tell us about about TRS?
What have they been up to?
Sure, and this isn't even really like I don't have like a particular like, you know sort of like event But I did want to just kind of like expose kind of what they've been saying about the riots and the the protests Relating to the George Floyd murder and just sort of the general attitude and this does kind of
Something that will kind of like come back as we get into the main topic of the episode So I did decide to just kind of talk about it and that is Their take and like Enoch's take on you know, kind of what's going on in Minneapolis and I'm a couple episodes behind on The Daily Show Because I spent a lot of time kind of re-listening to very old stuff from Matthew Heimbach this week and so I'm just a little bit behind but They have this kind of general thing that like well
Clearly the riots in Minneapolis are instigated by the Jews and by Antifa in particular are Kind of going out there as a bunch of you know, like upper upper-class elite white Antifa who are really kind of doing the violence and Preventing the police from doing their job and the police's job is of course to corral black people and
Yeah, you know because and and none of this is kind of kind of organically coming from the african-american community in these cities none of this is like you see african-americans don't have the cognitive ability to really understand politics on this level and ultimately all that they understand and this is coming from
The biggest names, some of the biggest names in this kind of alt-right, far-right, dissenter-right, neo-nazi, fascist, whatever online community, all that they understand is the cops aren't after us anymore, let's go loot, right?
And so this is sort of the natural thing that happens when African Americans are not violently policed to within an inch of their lives by a horrifying police state.
And so ultimately it's a justification for Jim Crow laws being instituted which treat the slightest violation by these people with the most harsh punishments and ultimately kind of a rebirth of lynching is sort of what, you know, you kind of see them basically supporting.
And that's not really news.
They've believed this for a long time.
But I think describing the mentality and sort of the take that they have about this is like, well, yes, of course, the cops aren't enforcing the law in Minneapolis, which.
Cops are fucking like as I described in the last episode like cops are fucking tear-gassing Peaceful protests on a regular basis like there's enormous violence going against like innocent people around the country and even the Smallest like metropolitan areas where there is any kind of protest where there is a police force the police force is exerting
Absolutely horrifying violence against innocent people But no like all of that gets like left aside and instead it's like there's a target that got looted There's a you know like and that's the really important thing that we need to consider because ultimately You just gotta you just gotta keep these black people in their place And the reason you have to do that is because they are just naturally looting all they know how to do is steal you understand That's that's it.
That's their they just go and steal.
That's just their nature Right, and this is part and parcel of the I think of the ideology ultimately, you know I understand that like this doesn't sound very interesting necessarily in terms of like a thing because I think that you and I kind of understand this but the fact that like this level of Belief in this kind of race realism that You know, black people are just sort of, like, genetically programmed to just go steal stuff.
The fact that that's, like, so obvious that it just becomes part of sort of the background radiation of these people's, like, understanding of the world, um, plays out over and over and over again.
Because once you sort of internalize that, you then start developing, like, takes and sort of, like, uh, you know, what follows from that.
The arguments that follow from that tend to have kind of like long-term knockdown effects, right?
You know.
And so I did just want to kind of like clarify that as a sort of like introductory to your news because again these people don't make news the way that Cantwell does.
They just have really shitty takes and it was worthwhile to kind of like describe this as this is again endemic to sort of the the world that they are like kind of thought leaders in.
Yeah, and these are their absolutely foundational assumptions held as articles of faith.
Everything flows from this, doesn't it?
Right.
And so, you know, like in other places, you know, like our buddy Southern Dingo will play kind of lively videos of like, you know, black people stealing something from a footlocker or whatever and kind of treat this as like, well, this is just what blacks do.
This is what black people do, etc.
And this this is like endemic to the whole like subculture.
And in fact, the subculture arguably rises out of sort of mid-2000s internet forums and internet blogs and stuff that kind of would collate all this stuff.
I mean, Jerry Taylor was writing The Culture of Crime in the 90s.
The Color of Crime.
What did I say?
Did I not say The Color of Crime?
You said The Culture of Crime.
Culture of Critique, The Color of Crime, you know how it goes.
No, I'm sorry to...
I'm sorry to pick you up on an obvious misspeaking, but that's kind of important, isn't it?
It's called the colour of crime.
The colour of crime versus the culture of critique.
Portmanteaued those, you know, somebody's now gonna write the culture of crime and it's gonna be about how Jews like generate black crime through their pervidious means or whatever.
Anyway, we should move on and talk about Matt Heimbach, but that's our that's our introductory bit of TRS news and we will continue to talk about all the shitty assumptions that lay underneath their really terrible takes as we move forward in this series.
So TRS News, whereas Cantwell News was very much sort of an ongoing kind of comedy show, you know, obviously very dark comedy, TRS News is more going to be just updates on the latest incredibly stupid shitty things they're saying at the moment.
Exactly.
It's more kind of like using the excuse to highlight the bullshit assumptions that underlie their quote-unquote comedy.
Okay, it's nice to learn what the format of my show is going to be as I'm recording it.
It's delightful, it's delightful.
You know, the thing is, again, Cantwell does things, like he actually goes out and, like, threatens people directly.
Yeah.
And so that's what makes, that's what made him, you know, sort of, like, newsworthy on a regular basis.
like he was kind of going out and like making news for himself and again like nobody cares about trs except for like fans of trs and like people who like care about like combating their nonsense and so like you're never going to get a like you know and it turns out that uh mike enoch was arrested for um driving drunk or whatever because he swore enough not to do that um But we can talk about their shitty takes.
Yeah, yeah.
Chris Cantwell might have been an omni-shambles and an utter sort of clusterfuck, but at least he went out into the world and did things.
He was active.
He wasn't just a boring, windy asshole sitting around whinging on a podcast for hours on end.
He was that, but he wasn't just that.
I mean, it's worth noting that Mike Enoch produces six hours on the regular show, four hours on the main show, and then two hours of paywall content on the daily show, a brand, plus at least two hours of call-in show every week.
And then there's another call-in.
Actually, I think he does the Mike and the Madwop thing.
No, he does two hours and then there's another two hour show every week.
So they're producing like 10 hours of content a week.
And imagine trying to like follow all of that and caring about these people at the end of it.
Yeah.
But yeah, let's leave them and move on to the subject of our episode, Matt Heimbach.
I think we should probably warn the listeners in advance that we're going to be playing clips again, as we did in episode 52.
Yes.
I have not edited these in, obviously.
What we're going to be doing is playing clips.
I have three clips we're going to play.
The total length of them is less than three minutes, but it's worth kind of listening to Heimbach's voice a little bit.
Also, there is a little bit of language in one of the clips, but for the most part these are pretty clean In comparison to kind of what we're doing in episode 52, which is much more of a kind of detailed analysis and so Yeah, I really thought about doing this as a kind of full-on Let's play some clips and compare what he was saying in 2018 versus what he's saying now and you know kind of really do like a
A deep dive, and depending on the response to this episode, we may do that, but I would rather not have to put the work in, frankly.
So that's what we're going to do.
We're going to talk a bit about Heimbach, and then we're going to play some clips and kind of talk about that, and kind of explore what he's saying.
Okay, so where do you want to start with that?
Well, what I want to do, first of all, is we have done an episode about the National Socialist Movement.
I think it was episode 8, if I recall.
That sounds right.
It has been a while since we've talked about him.
And we didn't even really do a full episode about Matthew Heimbach.
We really talked about sort of Various members of the National Socialist Movement and I kind of like lumped Heimbach in with that Because at the time that we recorded it kind of seemed like Heimbach was old news and he wasn't worth a full episode despite the fact that Heimbach is someone who was deeply involved with white nationalism Going back to at least his early 20s.
He is even now only I think 29 or 30 years old And he's been involved in this since, you know, he's been a national figure who is like talking to media organizations going back to at least 2013.
In 2013 he was a university student at Towson University, which is a kind of a state school, and he founded a white student union.
He is someone who has kind of gone through the training from the Leadership Institute, which we talked about in the Paul Kersey slash Michael Thompson episode, in which he has learned how to be kind of politically savvy.
He knows how to write press releases.
He knows how to get Press attention to his causes.
This is something that he has been groomed by right wing organizations to be able to communicate his right wing ideology through what is considered to be a hostile media.
And he has kind of been disavowed a bit by you know kind of Mainstream conservatism because he kind of went full Nazi But there's someone who has been like kind of deeply involved in this stuff since the early days There's a book which we discussed in some detail in episode 8 of the show everything you love will burn this man Vegas ten old
Followed him around doing interviews and talking to kind of various people in his orbit.
That book has some issues which we discussed in that episode but it is very much worth a read if you kind of want to understand who Matt Heimbach is or at least was up to kind of basically up to Unite the Right because Tunnel basically wrote the book in that sort of like several month period after the Trump election.
to unite the right and you know it's right kind of ends up being like kind of the end of the book and so that is that is that is kind of worth a read if you kind of want to get a sense of kind of who Heimbach is but he this is someone who again kind of works within this sort of political system who knows how to deal with media knows how to talk to people and to kind of present his ideas in a media friendly way but also has a darker side
and this is where I feel a little bit of a I feel a little bit conflicted here because I kind of get I kind of have like kind of dual dual motives here where on
On one level, I feel the need to talk about the personal violence that he has done to people in his life and the crimes that he has committed as a way of demonstrating that he is not as peace-loving a person as he pretends to be.
But at the same time, I feel like it almost feels like I'm going for the cheap trick in doing that, in talking about those issues, as opposed to confronting the ideology and the propaganda directly.
this is sort of a continual thing in that a lot of the people that we cover on the show do have um you know personal histories of violence and do have personal histories of domestic abuse or at least sort of like um allegations of such and um i always feel kind of conflicted because like my thought is like you know well if that's your person if that's kind of differentiated from like the thing that i'm interested in which is like the fact that you're promoting genocide
um i'm much more likely to just kind of talk about the stuff that you know like you know the words that you're saying are bad enough in themselves um but i do get a little bit Kind of say like you should really talk more about like this other thing and so it is worth noting that I'm Heimbach What assaulted a young african-american woman at a Trump rally in 2016 He was convicted of this.
He was kind of put on probation and Kind of went on and did his like white nationalist bullshit and under probation, to which he was not allowed to be convicted in the crime, or even charged for a crime after that.
And in early 2018, while he was at his high point in terms of spreading his ideology and building his movement, he...
He was found to be cheating on his wife with his sort of white nationalist partner's wife, who was Matt Heimbach.
Also his stepfather.
His stepfather, right.
This is the infamous Night of the Wrong Wives.
This is the Night of Wrong Wives, and I always miss the details on this when I'm trying to describe it, if I don't have it in front of me.
I will put a link in the show notes to an excellent piece by Kelly Wheel, written at the time, which describes kind of the background of this.
But it's this incredibly kind of, like, it's the thing that everybody kind of knows about Matt Heimbach is that, like, he was cheating on his wife with, like, the woman who's kind of technically his stepmother.
Although, like, not really.
And, you know, it kind of gets, like, it's kind of, they smear him with, like, oh.
Oh, look at you like redneck hick and that's not what I want people to take away from this like ultimately The lesson we learn is that like these are people that sort of like live their lives in this compound Yeah, you know this white nationalist compound and you know, you fuck the people who are around you and I
You know, whatever is going on with Matt Heimbach and his dick, I don't really care so long as it's all consensual, which it doesn't appear to be based on the context of this, but I'd rather not spend my time caring so much about that as much as during the incident in which he was discovered doing this by his father-in-law, Matt Parrott,
Heimbach eventually goes to prison for assaulting Matt Parrott in the aftermath of this, and in fact choking him.
The police report is pretty detailed and pretty graphic.
A lot of those stories, and again, I'll link to that in the show notes, but it does appear to be a pretty, pretty nasty incident, and pretty much ended his involvement with white nationalism.
It ended a whole lot of things where he was, again, on the ascendance at that point.
And so it's important to kind of mention that story at least in terms of like that that's his sort of personal thing and as we will learn Heimbach currently describes that as sort of the moment of him kind of starting to come to a realization that he needs to make some changes in his life.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
I mean, I can understand that.
But we... I don't know.
I don't know how... I mean, you sound like you want to... I mean, we talked about this in a previous episode, so we don't really want to go into this particular incident in detail again, do we?
So... Well, I feel like it's... I feel like what we've done here is to sort of, like, hit the high points of kind of who Heimbach is and kind of what he's done.
He is... Sorry, go ahead.
No, I was just gonna say, I mean, the relevance of the private life stuff is really the relationship to the politics, because, I mean, this is my opinion anyway, you could tell me I'm wrong, but the guy he assaulted, and actually, apparently tried to strangle, Or throttle this parrot guy who was his his wife's stepfather.
I think they met them at an American Renaissance event.
Didn't they?
First of all, right?
Yeah, and then they met in the movement.
Yeah.
And yeah, and Matt Parrot has a long history of being a part of kind of like white nationalism.
He's one of those.
Kind of old school guys, although I don't think he's even that much older.
I mean, I don't think he, I think he's like my age, but you know, he was again, sort of a guy who got involved in his teens, but has had sort of a long involvement, you know, kind of going to these things far predating the invention of the alt-right effectively.
But it was Heimbach... I mean, Parrott's not just an incidental figure.
It's Parrott and Hovater who set up the Traditionalist Workers' Party, isn't it?
As the political wing of the... I think it's the... Is it the Traditional Youth Network?
Which is what the white student union at Towson turned into.
They bounce around with a bunch of different names of these things.
That's something that I think is important to note, is that Heimbach regularly... I forget the exact sequence of this.
In fact, we can laugh about this maybe.
There was a Twitter poll that I saw from somebody who also follows this stuff very closely.
And was like, what's the name, what is the official name of TWP?
Is it the Traditionalist Worker Party?
The Traditionalist Workers Party?
The Traditionalist Worker Party?
Or the, um, and the, like, where the apostrophes go, and whether it's an apostrophe, or whether it's just an S, or whether, and so, and I literally went like, oh, I know this, and I clicked on it, and I was wrong.
But, you know, and I still don't remember exactly what it is.
You know, they, Even when you listen to them talk about it, they'll kind of just call it, they'll just kind of slur it into a traditionalist workers party and so like kind of whatever.
But it is worth noting that Heimbach has this kind of long history of creating organizations out of other organizations and sort of like picking and choosing kind of switching like his focus based on kind of where he thinks he can do the most quote-unquote good of spreading his kind of racist agenda.
Um, and so like, yes, there's this kind of like traditionalist youth, youth network.
There's this white student union at Townsend.
Um, the traditionalist workers party kind of comes out of, um, the traditionalist youth network.
Um, and that's kind of like his main thing, but he, he kind of dabbles a lot in various things.
And in fact, in, um, Vegas Tunnel's book he talks about like how Heimbach is kind of going around and trying to create this thing called the Nationalist Front which was like this sort of umbrella organization of various sort of aligned National Socialist oriented white power groups who may not have agreed on everything but
But trying to kind of create this kind of umbrella organization he's in he's organizing with Hammer skins for instance and hammer skins are like, you know a far-right street gang like doing like these are like your Skinhead Nazis like punching people in the streets, you know effectively And so like and these are the people that he's like, you know, he's going to Klan meetings He's going to all these different places kind of trying to kind of figure out how to kind of organize people and
Um, and he kind of flits from one to the other every, you know, on a very, like, kind of quick basis.
You know, every few months he's sort of, like, got a new thing.
He was briefly, um, after the Night of Wrong Wives, after the day the box broke, he was, um, uh, kind of appointed, uh, head of the National Socialist Movement in Detroit.
Um, and the way he tells it is, like, I was going to kind of remake this in my own image and kind of do the whole thing from the beginning.
And it turns out they shit-canned him when they realized he was trying to kind of present a kind of overtly anti-capitalist message because the other thing that Heimbach is known for is being sort of the person who does kind of talk the talk at least on you know kind of vaguely left-of-center political issues like he is like I'm trying to organize on this sort of
From from a kind of working-class workers revolution, but yeah through an explicitly racial lens And that's the other thing you kind of have to know about Matt Heimbach in terms of kind of understanding his His background is that he's always kind of been that as well Yeah.
No, there are certain themes that run through his career.
Like, I mean, the Nationalist Front did actually get set up as an umbrella organisation growing out of the Aryan Nationalist Alliance, which he set up with Geoff Shoup, Sherp, who's another ostensibly reformed character now.
Yeah, which we'll mention him a bit in a minute.
But this drive towards unity... And we covered him in that same episode, to be clear, in episode 8.
So you can consider this sort of a sequel to episode 8 of this podcast.
Yeah.
No, I was just saying, there are certain themes that run through Heimbach's career, and one of them is this drive towards unity.
This is something that he's tried to do several times.
From what I can see, anyway, is this attempt to unify these different groups.
And of course, you know, he was involved in the Traditionist Workers' Party, who was one of the coalition parties behind Unite the Right.
And, like, faith, this Christian emphasis, that's one of them, this emphasis on... He does call himself an Orthodox Christian, among other things, yeah.
Yeah, but it's also, as you said, TWP was a third position party.
It was overtly and explicitly a third positionist party.
Yeah, you know, ostensibly anti-capitalist.
Not really, as we would say, but part of that type of Nazism.
That, of course, goes back to the OG Nazis who claimed to be, in some sense, anti-capitalist.
Well, and Heimbach has also read a lot of the OG Nazis.
He has a degree in history, a bachelor's degree in history, and so he does have at least a baseline understanding of this stuff.
And I'll be honest, he's probably more aware of the history of the Nazis in the 1930s than I am, per se.
You know, I have a kind of working knowledge enough to sort of, like, kind of muddle my way through, but I focus more on sort of the modern-day stuff and sort of the ideology and the propaganda, etc., etc.
But Heimbach has actually done the reading, and, you know, he's someone who does have enough of a background in this stuff to have, and that's part of the, you know, the ones that I really worry about in terms of ideology in terms of the ideology are the people who do have an understanding of the history of the movement either sort of pre-World War II or the sort of American neo-Nazi movement and sort of the failures over the course of the last 70 years.
And Heimbach also kind of has that knowledge.
He's very familiar with the reading and that's because he got into this as a teenager.
He just, you know, he was an edgy teenager.
He started reading some weird books.
He read Mein Kampf.
He claims to have read Das Kapital.
But he said he got like a third of the way through it and was like, this is just too dry even for me.
He doesn't use the term dry.
You know, they use the word autistic to mean They use it as a slur and I don't want to repeat that but like he describes it as like, oh This is way too much even for me as the super nerd to try to read, you know to try to actually read Marx Maybe if he'd you know read some read some Marx and maybe he he might have like come to his senses a little bit more But um, but yeah, that's that's that's Heimbach.
That's that's sort of like the background on him There's a good article at Hatewatch, at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, about Heimbach and Shoup, where there's some interesting... I'm probably pronouncing that name wrong.
But there's some interesting quotes.
I believe it's Scoop, but I could be wrong.
Scoop?
Either Scoop or Shoup.
Alright.
But I don't know.
He ends up in my mentions occasionally, so maybe he can correct us.
Yeah, yeah, write in and tell us.
Yeah, there's some interesting quotes in there.
Like he says, you know, I've switched from supporting the white working class to supporting the entire working class.
And stuff like that.
And yeah, one of the interesting quotes that I found in that, I don't know if you've read this, but they quote from an email that he actually sent, from correspondence between him and Hatewatch, where he talks about the mistakes of fascism in the past.
And there's a bit where he talks about how the capitalists, he sort of uses code drawn from peanuts, as far as I can tell, But he talks about how the capitalists use the fascists and then chuck them out after they've finished with them, you know.
But it still sounds to me, in the quote, like he thinks that the actual sort of sincere aim of the fascist party is to help the nation.
To save the nation.
Yeah, and here's where I get kind of like, I have a little bit, like I came into, I'm going to do this episode and I'm going to prove that Matt Heimbach is lying.
And as I was prepping for this episode, I'm like, you know.
He might be misguided, he might be just kind of doing some bullshit, like it's really hard for you to tell.
Because look, if the guy was a Nazi and he's on his way now to being, you know, to renouncing white nationalism, white supremacism, and towards a genuinely non-racial class-based socialism, you know, that's like music to my ears, you know?
No, absolutely.
I mean, and the thing that I run into, and this is something that, like, de-radicalization is a kind of complicated subject when we talk about, like, these things.
And when we talk about people kind of leaving this kind of white nationalism, leaving white supremacy, you know, leaving their Nazi past behind, and sort of like, what do we expect from this?
And when I was originally prepping this episode, My plan was to have a guest who's an expert on de-radicalization to sort of like bounce this off of and to sort of like have that conversation and uh Hopefully that person will come on in a future episode.
We can have a more general conversation Because I know they are spitting mad about Heimbach because Not to speak, you know, I am in contact with a large number of people who are like former Nazis There are some people sort of on our side of the fence Who don't think that de-radicalization is possible like once a Nazi always a Nazi That I do not agree with that
There are people who are former Nazis who have my trust 100%, who know my docs, who know where I live, and I trust them completely.
Because they have done the work to come to terms with their past and either have done or are still doing the work.
of repairing the damage they did during their time in the movement and I think that's important that I think that people can change and so nothing that I'm about to say about Matthew Heimbach or about his relationship with Light Upon Light etc etc should be interpreted as I don't believe Matthew Heimbach because Matthew Heimbach can clearly not change.
Nothing would make me happier than for Matthew Heimbach to message me after this episode goes out and to convince me that he is doing the work behind the scenes to change and to change the way that the podcast he's currently producing with Light Upon Light and Jesse Martin, which we're going to get to here in a second.
To change some of that content and to correct some of the errors that I think he's making.
Because, again, I feel like we've kind of done a lot of throat clearing in this episode and kind of talking about the background, but I think it's worth noting.
That we now need to kind of move into talking about kind of what Matthew Heimbach is doing now.
Because he did kind of, after the box broke, after the Night of Wrong Wives, kind of fall out of the movement.
He had a couple of forays kind of coming back.
He did Kentwell's show.
He entered AA.
Um, apparently that was really good for him.
I actually legitimately say like if you've had problems with alcohol, uh, dealing with that and kind of processing that like that's, that's a really positive thing.
Um, I know people who have had, um, interactions with Heimbach, uh, and or his, uh, his wife who really want to get them out of it.
You know kind of in just kind of strangely in my personal life I just happen to know somebody who was friends with her back in the day.
And so nothing would make me happier if he is leaving the movement and if he is actually trying to do the right thing and sort of like deal with the history that he has the wreckage that he's left behind.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's what he claims that he's doing.
And so I want to make clear that, you know, this episode is not meant to bury him as much as it's meant to say, you're doing this wrong.
If you if this is what you're trying to do, because I'm back in early April.
2020 released a video with Light Upon Light in which he had declared, I am no longer in the movement, I am no longer, I'm leaving the movement, I am becoming an anti-racist and he kind of talks a good game, like he understands the language he's using, right?
In terms of, like, well, I now realize that there's a broader working class and that, like, we want a better world for everyone and that we need to kind of fight against the ruling classes.
We need to fight against, you know, capitalism and, you know, we need to kind of listen to people's needs regardless.
Now, again, good words there.
The flip side of that is... As long as by capitalism we don't mean a Jewish conspiracy, which is what you meant before.
Right.
Well, and he very explicitly talked about the Jews.
As my preparation, I spent a lot of time re-listening to a bunch of Heimbach stuff for this episode.
In fact, I re-listened to a bunch of stuff like two or three times just to be clear that I kind of understood what I was talking about.
He had a podcast in early 2018 that was called Action.
He left this radio network called Radio Arian with Sven Longshanks, who will eventually do an episode about Radio Arian because it's completely bad shit.
They don't make enough news.
They're not important enough for us to prioritize.
One day we won't have news and I'll do an episode about Radio Arian.
One day we won't have news.
There's a promise for you, listen.
One day, one day we will get to slow down enough to talk about the batshit insanity that is what goes on at Radio Arian.
Anyway, but he had a show called The Daily Traditionalist over there, and he left that network in early 2018.
When, essentially, the TRS boys, Mike Enoch and presumably Jesse Dunston, offered him a spot on their network, and like, hey, just come over and be part of us.
And some three months later, the box broke, and everybody cut ties with him.
But they did produce, in that time, something like nine official episodes of this show, Action.
And I listened to all of those episodes at the time, and I re-listened to like four of them.
And what's important to note is, at that time, Heimbach is all in on, we are not unironic exterminationists.
We do not actually want to kill everyone, you know, every non-white person.
That's a stereotype that, like, what we believe is that National Socialism ...is the political application of natural law.
And I have a clip of him, like, speaking about this on a show.
Well, we'll get to the clips here in a second.
But, um, that what we're doing is doing an application of natural law to... ...doing a political application of natural law to human societies.
And that ultimately everyone would be better off living under a national socialist kind of society.
And that the whole point is that because the races are different because there are these kind of genetic Propensities among people and this is where we kind of go back to this idea that like well black people just go looting, you know Which isn't something that Heimbach would kind of like explicitly talk about but it's certainly something that like kind of plays into this belief that different races have different propensities and that ultimately you need kind of like separate development and
If you can imagine among these things and so High buck is very much about ethnic cleansing but through separation and that like we can work with the various races to all have a better future Separately and maybe kind of like trading amongst each other and doing another thing But ultimately what we need to do is have like a sort of fundamental separation.
Yeah, this is something that he has always said Right?
It's another of their running themes.
Stop the hate, separate is one of his catchphrases.
Exactly.
And this is something that he has said on many, many occasions, both in and out of, you know, sort of in the public eye to official media organizations and in his own sort of communications.
Now, The other thing that's probably worth noting at this point is that while we've kind of talked about Heimbach's own sort of propensity for, you know, domestic violence and that sort of thing, the Traditionalist Workers' Party had a well-earned reputation for being sort of the shock troops of, you know, who were going to go out and like fight Antifa in the streets.
They were well known as being like the people that like Would serve as the as the hard line That would protect like Richard Spencer or protect like some of them some of the more, you know soft hands versions in this kind of like white nationalism alt-right movement at the time
And a whole bunch of those guys in TWP end up moving into Adam Woffin they end up moving into some of those other the base and some of those other groups and in fact after Heimbach is arrested and after the kind of collapse of the TWP in early 2018 You see the formation of this thing the Legion of St.
Ambrose, which is You know A fairly explicitly Christian identity oriented kind of far-right thing based around a much more sort of politicized violence Although they're not kind of they don't go full-on siege or anything but there is this kind of like kind of kind of
there is this kind of much more overt relation between Heimbach's followers, the people who are within his organization, and a willingness to do direct in-person violence on behalf of their ideology, right?
Yep.
And that's something that...
And so, again, we come back to kind of what Heimbach's doing now in this podcast he's doing with Light Upon Light.
Um, again, another aside, um, I know we had talked about doing a full Light Upon Light episode.
This is not that episode, as I think it is.
We're 50 minutes or so into this recording.
This is not going to be a full Light Upon Light episode.
The reason for that is that there are things that I believe that I cannot prove, and there are things that I have been told that I cannot verify, and there are things that I have heard that I may or may not believe.
From sort of like internally from light upon light.
This is not the format to sort of talk about those things.
Both because of, you know, I have a responsibility as someone trying to be honest and trying to be clear about what I can and cannot verify.
And also, there are legal issues around this.
I know there are journalists circling this story.
I have encouraged certain people who have been on this podcast to communicate with those journalists in the hopes that the full story does get revealed, and I will continue to do so.
And at that time, I will kind of cover these issues as I feel it's As I feel like my responsibility goes forward, right?
Understood, yeah.
Just maybe for people who aren't completely up on it, just a brief thumbnail sketch of Light Upon Light.
Sure, Light Upon Light is a organization that was... God, the history is... Part of the problem is that the history is a little bit hazy, but it's essentially an organization that is run by this guy Jesse Morton.
And Jesse Morton is a former jihadist propagandist.
He is an American, but he's a former jihadist propagandist working with ISIS.
Who actually did some prison time for threatening the creators of South Park for depicting the Prophet Muhammad back in the 2000s.
Right.
Who sort of got out of prison and who has kind of gone on to found this thing, Parallel Networks, and then sort of Light Upon Light is a
Organization kind of within this kind of parallel networks thing and this is a CVE organization now CVE is combating violent extremism and This gets complicated because I have had some relationship with people who are within this kind of CVE Banner yeah who work within this and
And there are some people doing this, particularly in sort of the counterterrorism range, who are doing really good research and who are doing, like, really amazing work of, like, trying to understand, like, kind of how these things work.
That said, CVE organizations have a long, long, long history.
Essentially kind of going into, like in the name of combating Islamic terrorism, going into mosques and using sort of like law enforcement methods to harass and they effectively become, you know, hate groups armed by the state.
You know, not to overstate it, but like there is certainly at least hints of that.
Um, and Morton himself seems to say we don't want that to continue to happen and in fact part of his sort of goal in terms of starting Light Upon Light and Parallel Networks is to sort of build a network that can combat the sort of network of groups spreading these kind of far-right ideologies and spreading this kind of like kind of quote-unquote violent extremism
Wherever it lands in terms of sort of de-radicalizing people and so the whole goal is We're gonna bring people in with a variety of perspectives and we're going to produce content that can De-radicalize people we're going to kind of do interventions.
We're gonna kind of do this thing.
He has a lot of propaganda around he has a lot of sort of like press releases and a lot of like a
He has a glossy magazine that he produces, or at least that Light Upon Light produces, which are intended to tell the story about what Light Upon Light is really doing, is to combat these networks where they land, and to reach people where they are, and de-radicalize people so that they don't commit violent acts like mass shootings and terrorist bombings and that sort of thing.
And to the degree that that's true, I actually believe in that mission.
He talks a really good game.
In terms of the stated aims, what could be more unexceptional?
I don't think it's...
I don't think it's talking under terms that I've had.
I mean, I've had personal interactions with Jesse Martin, right?
In fact, he at one point invited me to come and be part of his organization and to make this podcast kind of part of that whole thing.
And at the time I responded, I value the independence of this project enough that you should not have to be responsible for me calling Richard Spencer a fuckhead or whatever.
That was kind of my answer, right?
You need to go off and be respectable and not be beholden to me.
And, dear God, am I, you know, happy that, you know, in retrospect it's very nice.
But, you know, he has said very nice things about this podcast.
And I think this is where it's worth kind of getting to the meat of this episode.
And that is that beginning in April, he started producing this podcast with Batheon Heimbach called Take a Walk on the Right Side.
And it's a podcast in which Morton, well, in which Matthew Heimbach, who is an expert on far-right ideology, who can speak with some eloquence and detail in terms of the interesting details of white nationalism over the course of the last decade, is interviewed about that.
By someone who has a kind of general knowledge about those subjects, but not to the same detail, but who also has a larger knowledge of his own perspective outside of that.
And if that podcast sounds familiar, I'm not making any allegations here, but listening to it does feel like it's this kind of weird, bizarre world.
I don't speak German.
It really is.
And it took me a while to kind of get, like, wow, this does feel very familiar in some ways.
Well, that's wonderful.
We have imitators.
I'm delighted.
That's a first for me.
Nobody's ever imitated me before.
That's amazing.
Well, I've imitated you, Jack.
I can assure you.
Sorry, I was going for a joke there.
No, that's a joke.
Don't worry.
That's a joke by itself.
In the first episode, you get like sort of the history of, you know, Matt Heimbach tells his story of how he got into and sort of out of the movement.
And that episode alone is, again, very convincing.
Like he does kind of talk about like, I got in, I And people could get de-radicalized.
Like, some people get de-radicalized, they leave the movement, and they don't stop being, like, racist.
They just sort of, like, leave, and kind of, like, disappear into the shadows, and just sort of, like, stop doing organizing.
They stop, kind of, going to events, and... Because activity takes a sort of personal toll, so they...
Exactly.
They kind of go off, they raise their kids, they live their life, and they're still fucking racist, but they just kind of do the thing.
Which, by the way, I'm just saying, you know, out there on the streets confronting them causes it to have a personal toll.
Exactly.
Well, we're going to get there here in a second.
Don't worry.
You know, but, you know, a lot of people just sort of leave.
They don't necessarily like stop being racist, but they they do kind of leave and kind of have, you know, just kind of this personal, you know, kind of come to Jesus moment of like, this isn't really worth the effort that I'm putting into it, right?
And that's probably, like, the vast majority of people who, like, stop getting involved in this stuff.
They may say, like, oh no, I don't believe that anymore.
Like, ultimately, like, look, you wanna, you know, if you've been featured on this show and you've decided this is too much for you and you don't want to deal with it anymore, I don't really care if you're a racist in your heart.
I mean, I do care, but, like, you're not my problem if you're not producing propaganda.
Like, go away, raise your kids, go with God, like, fine.
The other side is people who leave, who... and often they leave for kind of the same reasons, like, things get difficult, they get... they have personal problems, they get kind of disconnected from the things, and then they kind of do some soul-searching, and they do...
the work on themselves to sort of like deprogram these ideologies and these beliefs and these sort of assumptions about the world and then kind of come back and say I want to do the work to combat this to say I've done harm in the world and I actively want to come do the thing and I don't want to speak out of turn here because this isn't my experience but I have spoken to a lot of former white nationalists in the last couple of years
about you know sort of what the process is and universally they say it takes years you know you leave you really have to go and you have to do like so much work on yourself just to sort of like become a person again because like the level of hate and the level of stuff that you believe that is just sort of programmed into you like you can sort of mouth the words you can sort of say the thing
But really you can't just you can't like turn on a dime and suddenly be something that you weren't you really have to kind of do that work or else you're just a you're hurting yourself by putting yourself back out there and being exposed to these ideas even if you're sort of like.
You know, on some level trying to combat them.
But also, you know, you're just not going to do it right.
You still have all these like kind of prior knowledge.
And this is the sort of thing to where even if Matthew Heimbach is a completely 100% reformed person in his ideology, and even if he believes exactly what you and I do with regards to the racism about how white nationalism is bad, and even if he believes exactly what you and I do with regards to the racism about how white nationalism is bad, etc., etc.,
the fact that he's being put forward as sort of a voice of anti-racism is a real knock against Jesse Martin the fact that he's being put forward as sort of a voice of anti-racism is a real knock against Jesse Martin because I don't believe Right.
Yeah, I see.
And The reason that I say that, and here's where we're going to start to play some clips, is that what I know, and what I hope Jesse Morton did not know, is that Matthew Heimbach appeared on a show called Waffenhaus back in October, late October, right around Halloween of 2019, so like six months ago.
He appeared on the show, or eight months ago, I guess, at the time that we're recording this.
Waffenhaus is a terrorgram show.
This is a show of uh you know explicit this is this is this sort of like you know on the goitok a siege pill show right?
And, uh, Highbuck is long kind of, like, differentiating himself from sort of the violent white nationalism.
In fact, a lot of the point of this, uh, taking a walk on the, uh, right side show, is to, uh, demonstrate how terrible the, uh, the siege pill community is, as opposed to sort of the, um, the large scale, the, the really kind of interesting and, um, You know, nuanced, you know, politicized National Socialism.
And I think at this point it's worth sort of showing you what he was saying, what Matthew Humpback was saying publicly on a show eight months ago.
And so this episode is still available online.
It is available on the Woffin House slash Surviving Vimerica uh... bit shoot channel uh... you can google it it's called uh... we make in beefsteak again i'm not going to it for obvious reasons but uh... it is easily findable if you go look for it and that we're going to play three clips here uh... the total length is about three-and-a-half minutes on this one is i think twenty two seconds uh... uh... and this one is uh... matthew heimbach he's referring to uh...
The white bourgeoisie, and in particular he's referring to Richard Spencer in this occasion.
So we're going to play that now.
Yeah, we're not allied with the white bourgeoisie.
That is the fucking juice.
And by the way, they are the ones that are pushing all this pause.
They're the ones that are pushing all this globalism.
They're collaborators at best.
I think they're almost worse than the Jews.
They are worse than the Jews.
It's a lot worse when it's your own supposed people, doesn't it?
So in that clip there are three voices, one of which is Heimbach talking about the white bourgeoisie, and he's saying, worse than the fucking Jews.
There's another voice, which I don't actually, there were like ten people on this call and I don't know them all by voice.
It's one of those big hangout shows, right?
And the third voice is none other than our good friend Vic Mackey, who... Yeah, and so Heimbach is the one with sort of the slightly kind of lighter voice, the slightly kind of a bit of a midwestern twang, and Mackey is the one with the slightly kind of like deeper tone to his voice, and we will be hearing him again to be sure.
And I want to be clear on this show, on this episode, which I listened to three times this week as preparation for this.
It does feel like Mackie is trying to sort of court Heimbach's favor, right?
He's trying to kind of bring Heimbach over into his side of this argument.
He's trying to kind of get Heimbach out of this kind of movementarian mainstreamer perspective and bring him kind of more over onto the siege.
He's literally defending Heimbach from the fans, from the people watching the show, from the other people on the call on several occasions.
I was just wondering if maybe you wanted to refresh the memory of the listener about Vic Mackie.
Yeah, sure.
Vic Mackey is a currently undoxed person who is the HBIC, the head bitch in charge of the Bull Patrol.
He is someone who has promoted terrorism and mass shooters.
Who is closely affiliated with the Atomwaffen Division and James Mason.
This is someone with a deep, deep connection to that.
In fact, he is possibly the single most dangerous person in the Neo-Nazi world in the United States and possibly in the world today in terms of his personal influence.
I personally know people who have been threatened by him and We would, if Matthew Heimbach is actually out of the movement, any information he can give us about Vic Mackey's identity would be very, very helpful if he is actually trying to reform himself.
That would be very, very useful there, Matt.
Mm-hmm And we did a whole like pair of episodes about the siege pill and we talked a lot about Vic Mackey at that point I believe that's episode 28 and 29.
So we'll put links to that in the show notes Yeah, so yeah Here we're gonna play another clip.
This is Heimbach is asked about the Saints and I want to be clear that the Saints are It's a meme among this kind of siege people community in that the white nationalists, the Nazi mass shooters who kill people, who kill non-whites in terms of kind of with the aim of starting up a race war.
They get to be they get to be called saints.
So for instance, Dylan Roof.
who shot up a church in South Carolina in 2015, is St. Ruth.
The Christchurch Massacre is St. Tarrant, etc., etc.
And at one point in this stream, Heimbach is asked about the saints.
And we're going to play that now.
So, Matt, what are your feelings and thoughts on the saints?
in terms of the holy sense of the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, or the Church of the Bull.
The Bull Church.
Well, hold on.
You guys need to remember that in the Tradworker server, Matt did tell people to write to St. Roof.
He did tell people to write to him.
So, I mean, Matt's never countersignaled.
I've never seen that, personally.
First of all, for the guys that are in jail, I think it's really important to provide them with physical and spiritual support.
That's crucial.
Do I think that the actions that they've done have been beneficial to the movement?
For the most part, no, but that's not out of moral clutching or trying to moral fag about the issue.
I just don't think it's effective.
Uh, if those guys had gone after, say, Wall Street, um, or, you know, like, an actual institution of power, then I think that's a different question.
So what do you think about Breivik, Matt?
I mean, you know, the attack on the Parliament, um, everything went screwy, and then he essentially went after, like, teenagers and kids.
Um, do I understand his motivations?
Yes, but if he had knocked out the entire Norwegian Parliament, um, I think that would be a different situation than going after teenagers who might have seen the error of their ways and left those sorts of politics.
I mean, some of our best people are former leftists.
I'm glad you stated that.
So what do you get out of that clip, just out of curiosity?
Well, it doesn't sound like a reformed character at all.
It sounds like somebody who's still on the fascist right.
There you go.
It makes me think of something else that I read in that article I mentioned at Hatewatch at the SPLC about this organisation called the National Socialist Charitable Commission that apparently Heimbach set up to raise money for these guys in prison, people like James Alex Fields.
Yep.
Yeah, no, Heimbach is long, and this is something, again, Vic Mackey is defending Heimbach there, and saying, like, no, no, no, don't be too hard on Heimbach, you see, because he did, he's never countersignaled the Saints, he's never countersignaled You notice that when Heimbach goes on the show and he's asked about the saints, his immediate thing is like, oh, the Greek Orthodox saints?
The Catholic saints?
What saints are you referring to?
It's such a disingenuous piece of shit, right?
Yeah, that's bullshit, obviously.
Yeah, that's obviously.
And he's joking with them.
He's trying to go like, I don't know what you're talking about, when clearly he fucking does.
He's showing up on this show in 2019.
I'm back even on the action show which he did on TRS would say we need to write to our guys behind the wire we need to write to our political prisoners and talking specifically about You know, James Alex Fields about Ramos and about some of the other guys who are not political prisoners.
Right.
Right.
Who are people who like committed assaults, etc.
Yeah.
You know, in Charlottesville on August 12th, 2017.
And he has long kind of kind of been on that thing and he is like and I think it's also worth noting at this point and I think that this is really essential is that I apologize for the language which I played earlier in which I'm going to use here.
Heimbach says I don't want a moral fag about this issue and what that means is I'm not trying to say I'm not trying to be like the morality police here.
I'm not trying to say like, oh, it's bad to shoot people.
I'm saying it's not effective to do this.
And the teenagers, you know, it was wrong to shoot them because they might have stopped being on the left at some point in the future.
They might have stopped being communists.
For someone who claims that national socialism and redistribution of wealth and being in favour of workers' paradise as long as we're all white people, et cetera, et cetera.
He is overtly anti-communist.
He is overtly anti-that, specifically because communism is perceived to be a mechanism of the Jews to control society in kind of his earlier incarnations, right?
Not that the kids on the Utea island were communists, by the way.
That was a training camp for the youth division of the Left Reformist Party.
It's like a Labour Party.
Social Democratic or something.
The idea, like, he's saying, like, well, you know, wouldn't it be better if you went and, like, choose your targets better, which is exactly the same thing that, like, fucking Cantwell has always said about these things.
It's exactly the same thing.
I could play hours of clips of essentially, um, these, like, right-wing douchebags.
saying effectively this, you know, about the siege builders, about the people kind of going out and doing mass violence, is what they'll say is like, "Look, I understand you're frustrated, but like you should be working to do something more effective than going out and killing a bunch but like you should be working to do something more effective than going out and killing a bunch of random people because we just don't see that, you And that's essentially what he's saying in that moment.
It's the optics debate again.
Yeah, and that's exactly what it is.
And I think it's important to note that he goes on this Waffenhaus show, he goes, he's literally palling around with Vic Mackey, who's among the worst of the worst, and not Really trying to Fight against them as much as saying like well, this isn't really what I do He's literally trying to rehabilitate his image by going on the show.
He's trying to become part of this group again now he may have changed his mind between you know, October 2019 and today but I do have one more clip if you can Allow me to just go ahead and play this and then we can start to you know, talk about that a little bit more.
Yep.
All right And, uh, this one is the longest one.
I think it's about a minute and 33.
So just FYI.
Sorry, it keeps coming up.
Okay.
And this is, somebody asks Heimbach, "What would you recommend to someone who is a name as you are, someone with a personality and who is known within the movement, what advice would you give them when times get dark and they feel like this is useless and what advice would you give them when times get dark and And this is Heimbach expressing his sort of personal philosophy about why, again, eight months ago, he continues to be a part of white nationalism.
Hey Matt, for anyone who's still in AIM and they're listening to this, what advice would you give to them?
I mean, my number one piece of advice is don't give up.
It's hard.
It's hard to lose jobs.
It's hard to be broke.
It's hard to be isolated from people sometimes.
Fundamentally, at the end of the day, our belief system is correct.
Our enemies, no matter how many movie studios, television stations, school book outlets or teachers' unions they control, everything we believe is just basic biology or history and is built upon our understanding of the natural world.
So while it's easy to get, I mean, kind of broken down and you just want to quit because it would seem easier, You know, just remember that Benedict Arnold, after he betrayed the Continental Army, he ends up dying penniless and alone in the gutter in London, right?
Because no one loves a traitor.
You never have a home.
So if you're thinking about quitting, fucking don't, because traitors never get a place to go.
And at the end of the day, National Socialism is just the political application of natural law to human society and the economy.
So eventually, no matter how absurd this world is, it will swing back to being in accordance with natural law.
So we're on the side of victory.
We're on the side that's right.
Just stick it out and keep the faith because if they couldn't fucking beat us in 1945 Berlin and it's been 70 years, they can't beat us now.
So just keep the faith and keep fighting.
That certainly sounds like somebody who's about ready to reform in eight months, doesn't it?
Yeah, it really does.
If he has actually transformed, then it's a miraculous, very speedy process, obviously.
Which I don't think it actually is, from what you've said.
That's just not how it works.
I mean, it's not the same, but I've gone through the process of divesting myself of incorrect opinions and wrong beliefs.
And it's slow, and it's painful, and it's gruelling, and it takes work.
And I don't see much sign of anything like that going on here.
Well, I, I mean, you know, I'm a, you know, as, as, you know, I might, I might alienate the audience a little bit.
I'm a, I'm a reformed liberal, you know, like, uh, you know, uh, you know, I'm someone... There's more joy in heaven for every sinner who repents.
You're right.
Um, you know, I was someone who, even conversations that you and I had in, you know, like 2015 and 2016, I was you know kind of moving in this direction but I had you know kind of difficulties with certain like Barack Obama as a war criminal kinds of like conversations because you know I just kind of wasn't ready to go there and I can tell you that it's a kind of a difficult thing for me now to sort of
You have to kind of purge yourself of you know sort of base assumptions to some degree and you have to you know it doesn't change overnight even as much as you want it to and like look you know thinking of Barack Obama was probably a decent guy who was given a bad you know kind of rap
as a president, is not a good thing to believe, but it's not on the same scale as the Jews faked the Holocaust in order to make white people go extinct, right?
Just on the level of complexity, there's a world of difference.
Right.
And, you know, and I can say I still, like, kind of combat some of those kind of old liberal priors and sort of, like, have to, like, kind of re-question my assumptions.
And, you know, it's a long process.
And if Heimbach is really, if he's really kind of working through that for himself, I applaud that.
I mean, I would welcome Matthew Heimbach as a comrade if he is legitimately working to do that.
My question is, there's nothing that Heimbach is saying now.
He routinely on this Walk on the Right Side podcast, A, he decries anti-fascists.
I mean, he says, you know, no anti-fascist throwing a water bottle ever, you know, changed my mind about anything.
Routinely, he mentions, you know for instance, he calls George Lincoln Rockwell, he calls him Commander Rockwell.
He routinely uses the sort of the honorifics of these like horrifying white nationalists who He talks about when he's you know, very, you know, you know In a very effective way talking about the history of these movements.
He deflects his own responsibility Over and over and over again in terms of his own history and Jesse Morton lets him fucking do it And that's the that's the real thing like if Jesse Morton wanted to do a podcast with Matthew Heimbach I think like asking him What do you think about the Holocaust?
Talk to me about, like, if you're reformed, talk to me about how you used to believe, what you used to believe about the Holocaust and what you now believe.
Talk to me about National Socialism and about, like, what that meant to you then and what that means to you now, and to document this process of him coming out of that ideology.
I think that could be a really useful thing, right?
Hang on a minute.
You're telling me that that never comes up?
It never comes up!
I mean, sorry, I think I might have just, like, spiked the microphone there.
This is what... I have been incredibly angry listening to this podcast because They never cover any of this.
He treats Matthew Heimbach as a valued colleague combating far-right extremism without ever really talking about the actual process by which... I don't know what Matthew Heimbach believes politically.
I don't know what he believes about history.
I don't know what his process is.
That's it!
That's case closed!
I mean, I wouldn't do this, but if I was doing an interview with Matthew Heimbach, my first question would be, tell me how you came to be a Holocaust denier, and why were you wrong, and what do you think now?
I would love to just say, talk to me about the Jews.
Yeah, tell me what you because there are moments in that action podcast, which Doesn't exist anymore, but I have archives of sorry It's just a it's just worth noting that you know, it did get pulled shortly after the night of wrong wives But like there was some nerdy bearded guy who managed to capture all of that It's not nothing's not often.
We get to say full-heartedly.
Thank heaven for the nerdy bearded I We are I am I am the one I'm the one I'm the one good one That's not true at all.
That's not true at all.
But yeah Thank goodness.
There was a nerdy bearded guy on a computer at that moment You know, that's that never that's almost never a nerdy white bearded guy at that, you know That's almost never a good sign, you know, but yeah, no I That's my secret, Captain.
I'm always on the computer.
No, no, that's fine.
Yeah, I just made a Marvel movie reference, and so now our entire Nazi audience gets to make fun of me.
It's fine.
That's where we get all our politics, as we know.
But no, I'm sorry I didn't lead with that.
I was trying to give you the background and let the audience make the determination here.
And here's where I want to land on this.
I think you're being a little bit too diligent really to be honest.
I do not, I cannot say what's in Matt Heimbach's heart and I cannot say what Jesse Martin is trying to do with this show.
What I can say is that the format of the show and the format of Everything that Light Upon Light has done is to shit on anti-fascists.
At one point Jesse Morton talks about the fact that he, after Unite the Right, and in the lead-up to Unite the Right 2, he had an intervention with this guy Jason Kessler, who was the sort of quote-unquote official organizer of the original Unite the Right rally, which is the Charlottesville rally on August 12, 2017.
Um, he's kind of the patsy.
There's a complicated story there.
We covered a bit of it.
Oh, we kind of covered it in Episode 3 and 4 of this podcast.
But Jesse Morton had an intervention, and the uncharitable way to view that, and the way that I think is largely accurate, and this is my personal opinion, not something that is legally actionable,
is that Morton wanted to impress some donors and show off Kessler to some people as like oh no we are doing interventions with like the worst of the worst etc etc but Morton on this podcast in episode 2 he says you know we have an intervention with Jason Kessler and you know at the right the anniversary and at the right in 2018 was much smaller than a The original one and it didn't result in any violence.
And if he's trying to imply that it was because he did the intervention that that thing didn't go off, he's fucking lying.
Because I can tell you I was following this movement at the time and nobody fucking trusted Kessler to begin with.
Nobody was going to show up to this thing.
Everybody thought he was a fucking joke.
And there were anti-fascists infiltrating his fucking group who told him they were going to do things that they had no intention of doing to help out and completely stymied the entire process.
And so the idea that, you know, it was like a reasoned debate and reasoned conversation and like let's listen to your grievances that kind of caused this to be a big wet fart is complete nonsense.
It was anti-fascists doing the work that anti-fascists do of infiltrating and subverting and, you know, defeating these movements where they land.
So much of this Take a Walk on the Right Side podcast is basically built around Heimbach talking about how, well, if we don't listen to the grievances of these people who have this ideology, if we're not, if we're deplatforming people where they can't express themselves on social media, if you can't talk about, and he expressly talks about, for instance, you know, if
You get to have, like, a child drag show in, like, rural Tennessee, and you don't get to express any disapproval of this.
You're a Nazi, and you get banned from Facebook.
And, like, Donald Trump is President of the United States?
He is.
There are millions of people who express disapproval of, like, child drag shows and who hate trans people and who express violently their opinions about what trans people are and believe.
You get banned from Facebook when you expressly start doing Holocaust denial and shit.
And I'm not saying it's okay that people express those completely bigoted and hateful opinions towards trans people.
But the idea that like this like this talking point that like we're just trying to express our disagreement with mass immigration and we're just trying to express our disagreement with um you know transgender ideology and we get banned for that no you got banned for being a fucking nazi you got brand banned for being a fucking violent fucking nazi
Yeah, like, that's, that's just, like, and the fact that again, and this goes completely unchallenged by Jesse Martin, like, if Martin were to say, um, I'm not here to challenge a sort of like national socialist white nationalist ideology.
I'm only here to challenge against sort of like people becoming mass shooters and whatever you believe about politics isn't my problem, for instance.
And maybe I'm kind of a right-wing guy, you know, personally.
If you were just honest about that and would just express that openly, I could be like, okay, as long as you're effective at preventing the mass shooters, I will take it from here and I will combat this in my own way, you know, and I can deal with that.
Um, the fact that he has, uh, basically told like friends of mine, like Molly Conger at Socialist Dog Mom on Twitter, you know, live by the sword, die by the sword.
Based on like anti-fascist street action, like, well, you know, violence is violence, right?
And the fact that he has consistently opposed anti-fascist action, which is effective at actually combating this kind of white nationalist ideology, and the fact that he
That's the thing that really upsets me and the fact that if he is being honest and if he is working as a good faith actor and trying to use Matt Heimbach's experience to convert people away from this violent journey to get people not to become mass shooters
But in the process is actively platforming a national socialist ideology.
Yeah.
Um, that's deeply, deeply dangerous because this is exactly what all these shitheads want to do.
They want to make national socialism.
They want to make white nationalism and white supremacy.
They want to make that a legitimate point of view.
And that's exactly what this podcast, Take a Walk on the Right Side, and that's exactly what Giving a Platform to Matthew Heimbach is doing in this context.
Period.
You're making National Socialism a reasonable thing.
And I hope I'm wrong.
I would love to eat crow on this.
I would love for Jesse Morton to message me tomorrow and say, oh my god, I feel really terrible that, like, this is taken that way.
We are going to work diligently to correct this.
And please, Matthew Heimbach, contact me.
I would love to be wrong on this.
I would love to have to delete this episode or whatever.
Or, you know, add a correction to it.
But I am very aware of the rhetoric that these people use, as much as probably anybody in the English-speaking world at this point.
And what Heimbach is doing is platforming National Socialism as an ideology.
And if that's not what he's trying to do, then they need to do a fuckload of work to correct the error that they're doing.
I mean, just as a personal note, like, I spend a lot of time thinking about, like, how to do this podcast responsibly and, like, how to discuss these ideas without platforming them, without, you know, making them seem valid.
And the answer, the reason that I think that I'm more or less effective at that is the hate that I get from Nazis for the work that I do here.
Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty good indicator.
Yeah, so I would just like, as you know, again as a sort of like professional advice, you could be doing a lot better unless your goal is to platform National Socialist Ideology.
And if that's what you're trying to do, you're doing it very well!
Yeah, if your goal is actually what you say it is, you're doing a really, really bad job.
Like, you know, to a suspicious degree.
We'd love to be reassured that we've misconstrued this.
I don't really see how we could be reassured of that, but, you know, give it a go!
But yeah, no, if your stated goal is your actual actual goal, you're doing it wrong by the sounds of it.
Yeah.
And yeah, I guess that's I mean, I could talk so much more about this.
And if people want to push back on me and sort of claim that there's not a, you know, that Heimbach is actually not saying all this stuff on the on the podcast with Morton.
We'll just do a clip episode again so don't make me do that I've spent too much time with Matthew Heimbach this week already I'd really like to not have to deal with it again but but trust me It's, you know, I'm not lying, and I will give you a link to the episodes, and you can listen to them for yourselves.
And I suspect a lot of our listeners will say, as you did, that I'm being a little bit, like, I'm bending over backwards to be a little bit overly, you know, deferential to them.
But that's sort of the goal here, honestly, is to say, I'm going to assume I'm wrong, and I'm going to get a really great email in a couple of days.
In which they're going to like change course and really change the way that they produce that podcast.
That's my assumption.
That's where I'm going to land on this because otherwise they're just being fucking Nazis.
Certainly what it sounds like to me.
And that's it for now.
I'm sure there will be a follow-up on this one, I can't wait!
I look forward to probably more on this.
We do plan on doing a more full Light Upon Light episode at some point in the future.
Once there is a little bit more reporting to kind of go on and once there's a, you know, once some of the details get vetted.
Yeah.
Trust me, there's more going on.
This is not the official Out of Conlight episode.
But yeah, we'll come back to this, I promise.
We'll get all our ducks in a line and yeah.
No, this was a really interesting episode.
I've been very educated, I think, by this episode.
And yeah, thanks very much.
So that was episode 55.
Do you want to talk about what we're going to be doing next time?
Do you know?
I have a guest for the next episode.
Yeah, no.
I'm not entirely sure exactly what we're going to talk about, but there will be a very nice guest for the next episode.
There will be a nice change of pace, and I'm looking forward to it.
I don't like to announce the guests ahead of time in case there's some thing that prevents it from happening or whatever, but I've got a guest episode scheduled for next weekend.
Great, great.
Yeah, change of pace.
So it'll be mainly about kittens and ice cream next week.
Yeah, no, that's all we're going to talk about.
Yeah, kittens and ice cream.
Yeah, so you can find me in the usual place and Daniel in the usual place.
I was about to do all the Twitter handle stuff, but it's all in the pre-recorded outro that I've got.
Well, sometimes it's funny when you're editing and you get to the bit where you hear yourself say, I'm going to cut this.
Well, I do anyway.
I think it's funny to leave it in.
But it'll be funny if I leave this in, won't it?
To me, anyway.
If we have two minutes of trailing audio of nothing of any interest to anyone.
You and I find it amusing.
Me just wittering.
Yeah, but thanks for listening everybody.
That was episode 55 and tune in next week, probably for an interesting guest.
And yeah, thanks again for everybody who listens and supports us.
It's very nice of you.
It's very nice of you indeed.
And just to clarify, I've gotten quite a few Patreon subscribers in the last week or so and I got some Really we didn't really get into it.
We will respond to some of the things that people had to say about 54 In a future episode I'm kind of waiting for some some news to to kind of come to kind of come out Because there was a little bit of pushback and I just this episode was full enough as it was so But thank you to all the messages that I've gotten in the last week, and I do read it for one.
Thank you Absolutely and so do I. I've had some really nice messages last little while and they are appreciated and some of them are very interesting.
So yeah.
But that'll do it.
Bye bye.
Cheers.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
We're on iTunes and show up in most podcast catches.
You can find Daniel's Twitter, along with links to pretty much everything he does, at at Daniel E Harper.
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