Journey to the Center of the white nationalist ethnostate BY Luke O’Brien // Jessica Valenti: 'This election has uncovered something vile about America'
NB: Indian and NRI sympathisers of Trump (I know some of them), should remember the murder of six Sikhs in a gurudwara at the hands of a former Hammerskin activist in Wisconsin in 2012. They will all get short shrift at the hands of the racist gangs that have allied themselves with the Republican candidate. You can all cry 'Trump zindabad' all you like - they only see the colour of your skin. Good luck gentlemen! - DS
This is the alt-right. Until recently, not many Americans knew this term, a catchall for a loose confederation of far-right locos so deviant that.. they were in danger of extinction. Then they found Trump. Or Trump found them. Now, they are stationed along his parapets in a union that represents the biggest uptick of white power activity in American politics since the Ku Klux Klan’s invisible empire in the 1920s. Neo-Nazis do door-knocks for Trump and scream “Sieg Heil” outside his rallies.
Journey to the Center of the white nationalist ethnostate
I went to a white nationalist ethnostate in Indiana. I got bounced from a secret meeting in D.C. I spent weeks figuring out how hate gurgles up from the nastiest recesses of the Internet. And I'm sorry to report that unconscionable racists will be a force in American politics well beyond November 8.
To get to the white
ethnostate, I drove through cornfields, listening to a man on the radio hype an
upcoming “machine-gun shoot” at a nearby firing range. Paoli is a pretty
postage-stamp-size town in southern Indiana. The seat of Orange County, it has
a charming central square and a beautiful Greek Revival courthouse built in
1850. It also has an alt-right base camp occupied by neo-Nazis.
My instructions were
to meet the “comrades” outside the Walmart. From the entrance, I watched a
horse and buggy clop into the parking lot. An Amish couple got out and tied up
the horse, then pushed shopping carts into the store. After a few minutes, I
noticed a dirty red van idling nearby. There were three men inside, dressed in
black shirts emblazoned with a pitchfork surrounded by a gear of industry—the
logo of the Traditionalist Worker Party, which the Anti-Defamation League
categorizes as a hate group. The men motioned for me to come over, and a
side-panel door swung open. Behind the wheel, wearing a black military cap, was
Matt Parrott, 34, the TWP’s co-founder. A figure in the back introduced himself
as Jason Farrell, a 31-year-old musician who plays in a “pro-European” heavy
metal band. In the passenger seat was Matthew Heimbach, a burly, black-bearded
25-year-old who has been referred to as the “next
David Duke”and the “future
of organized hate.”
When I first spoke to
Heimbach on the phone in August, he sounded intelligent and good-natured,
although his aw-shucks folksiness could seem forced. (“I woke up on the right
side of the dirt this morning,” he observed in our initial conversation.)
Heimbach had grown up in the Washington, D.C, suburbs, where his parents teach
in the public school system in Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the
wealthiest areas in the country. A week before we met, he’d attended the annual
gathering of one of the most violent neo-Nazi groups
The Hammerskin
Nation: In 2012, Wade Michael Page, a former Hammerskin, murdered 6 people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.
Jessica Valenti: I thought I was just scared of Trump – but it's his America I fear: In the past week, a Ku Klux Klan newspaper endorsed Trump and white supremacists announced their plan for widespread voter intimidation. Trump rally-goers shouted antisemitic invective at reporters, and a historically black church in Mississippi was burned and “vote Trump” scrawled across the side. Another woman came forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault, and a Texas official called Hillary Clinton a “cunt”. This isn’t a political divide between left and right, Democrats and Republicans; it’s an immeasurable moral chasm.
Until recently, not
many Americans knew this term, a catchall for a loose confederation of
far-right locos so deviant that a few years ago they were in danger of
extinction. Then they found Trump. Or Trump found them. Now, they are stationed
along his parapets in a union that represents the biggest uptick of white power
activity in American politics since the Ku Klux Klan’s invisible empire in the
1920s. Neo-Nazis do door-knocks for
Trump and scream “Sieg Heil” outside his
rallies. And Trump has gone along for the ride, retweeting alt-right
propaganda and hiring Stephen Bannon, whose Breitbart News Network has become
the most significant transmitter of the movement’s ideas to a mass audience.
Thanks to Trump, ethno-nationalism is poised to be a force in American politics
for the first time in decades.
Experts who track hate
groups lament that the alt-right is just old white nationalism rebranded. And
it is. But it’s more than that, too. It is also a grassroots movement that
coalesced online, in the primordial ooze of chat forums and message boards like
4chan, 8chan and Reddit. Most alt-righters are digital natives, and they have
weaponized social media. To appreciate how far through the looking glass Trump
and his online storm-troopers have taken us in this strange election, consider
that Hillary Clinton devoted an entire speech to denouncing alt-right ideology,
and that Pepe, a once-harmless cartoon frog transformed by the alt-right into
an anti-Semitic icon, now needs little introduction.
Heimbach, however,
wants to be more than a keyboard race warrior. The TWP is a small operation: It
has 16 chapters around the country with about 500 dues-paying members, plus
thousands of active supporters on social media, according to Heimbach. (Caveat
lector: These guys are propagandists.) But it has big plans for the future. He
is building “boots-and-suits” alliances between skinhead soldiers and
politically minded racists such as William Johnson of the American Freedom
Party, who nearly sashayed into the Republican National Convention as an
official delegate, until a reporter sniffed
him out. Heimbach travels to Europe regularly to seek tips from white
nationalist politicians.
And then there is his nascent ethnostate. At a German
restaurant where the TWP comrades like to take visiting journalists and make
Holocaust jokes, he and Parrott talked about their dream of building an
all-white fiefdom for their extended race-family. Farrell described his “big leap
of faith” to move to Paoli. He’d arrived a week earlier from New York, where
he’d left a corporate job and his entire life behind. The pressure to “despise
yourself as a white person” in New York was too much, he explained, and then
told a story about Dominicans harassing him at a bodega. The comrades told me
more TWP members were moving there by the end of the year.
“I can’t get over how
rapidly this has come alive,” Parrott said, attributing the surge in interest
to Trump. Heimbach described the Republican nominee as a “gateway drug” to
white nationalism. “We’re all growing and using this momentum,” he said... read more:
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/alt-right/