The Cautionary Tale of Matthew Heimbach
The fall from grace is a long one that is as much a dark comedy as it is a tragedy.
As of this writing, the Maryland College Republicans event with white supremacist Jared Taylor is still scheduled for Salisbury University this Monday evening. As Maryland College Republican Chairman Colin Evers continues to double-down on the event and his promotion of “accepting white advocacy and white advocates in the Republican Party”, we remember a cautionary tale of somebody who went down this road as a college student before.
It is worth understanding how people end up in Jared Taylor’s orbit, and what tends to happen to them when they get there. The tragedy of Matthew Heimbach is instructive.
Heimbach grew up in Poolesville, Maryland as the son of two public school teachers who, by his own description, were Mitt Romney Republicans. Then he went to Towson University, discovered Pat Buchanan, then Jared Taylor, then something much darker, and set about building the most embarrassing white nationalist operation in recent American history.1
The story ends in a trailer park in Paoli, Indiana. A sting operation. A man standing on a box, watching through a window. Two chokings. A police report listing everyone’s occupation as “White Nationalist.” It is, depending on your disposition, either the funniest or the most pathetic way a hate group has ever collapsed.
Heimbach founded the White Student Union at Towson in 2012. From there, he moved to the Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) in 2013, and then to the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) in 2015, with his father-in-law, Matthew Parrott, serving as co-founder, chief ideologist, primary financial backer, and landlord. Each step was more explicitly neo-Nazi than the last. By the time TWP formally launched, Heimbach had invited Putin’s pet fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin to address the group via video conference. He had forged ties with Greece’s Golden Dawn. He was meeting with the Russian Imperial Movement, later designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department. The Southern Poverty Law Center called him “the face of a new generation of white nationalists.” ThinkProgress named him the most important white supremacist of 2016.
For a brief, ugly moment, that wasn’t entirely wrong.
TWP was shrewder than your average neo-Nazi outfit, at least superficially. The group deliberately avoided overt Nazi iconography in public. It pitched itself as the defender of the white working class. It wa anti-capitalist, pro-union, explicitly working-class in its aesthetics and messaging. Heimbach viewed Donald Trump as a “gateway drug” to white nationalism and told the Council of Conservative Citizens in March 2016 that the goal was to move Trump voters “from civic nationalism and populism to nationalism for us.” He wasn’t entirely wrong about the opportunity, nor was he wrong that Trump has been a “gateway drug” for the toleration of nationalism in political life. Heimbach was, however, catastrophically wrong about his own ability to seize it.
TWP peaked in 2017. It played a significant organizational role in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville , the one that ended with Heather Heyer dead and the broader “alt-right” project fatally discredited. Heimbach and his black-helmeted TWP members were there in force, brawling with counter-protesters. It looked, from a certain angle, like a movement on the march. A jury later found Heimbach and TWP guilty of civil conspiracy in the Sines v. Kessler case, with punitive damages assessed at $1.5 million. He later claimed he was a single father working paycheck to paycheck who would never be able to pay it.
By March 2018, Traditionalist Worker Party had set up something resembling a commune in Paoli, Indiana. It was a collection of neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists living in trailers on property owned by the Parrott family. Heimbach was living there with his wife, Brooke, who was Parrott’s stepdaughter from a previous marriage. Parrott’s wife, Jessica, was also on the property. At some point, Heimbach and Jessica Parrott began an affair that lasted three months.
When the affair came out, Brooke Heimbach and Jessica Parrott hatched a plan. They told Heimbach the affair was over, then staged a sting to see if he would try to resume it anyway. Matthew Parrott, Heimbach’s father-in-law, ideological mentor, chief spokesman, and landlord, stood on a box outside a trailer window to watch. Heimbach tried to resume the affair. Parrott confronted him. Heimbach choked Parrott unconscious. Parrott threw a chair. Heimbach choked him unconscious again. Then Heimbach grabbed his wife by the face and made her bleed, in front of their one-year-old and three-year-old children. Police arrived just after 1 a.m.
The police report, again, listed everyone present as “White Nationalist.”
Parrott walked away from the organization within hours of the arrest, telling the SPLC: “I’m done. I’m out. SPLC has won.” He destroyed the membership rolls and took down the website. Just like that, the “face of a new generation of white nationalists” had destroyed his organization, his marriage, his mentorship relationship, and his living situation in a single night because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself in a trailer he didn’t even own.
Even some white nationalists couldn’t hide their contempt. “I feel sick reading this police report. It’s so cliche, so Jerry Springer, you can almost hear it set to dueling banjos,” one Gab poster wrote. Another called it “white trash circus” content. These were his own people.
Heimbach briefly tried to reconstitute himself. He served as “community outreach director”, a title of almost cosmic irony, for the National Socialist Movement. He published an open letter in 2020 suggesting he was stepping back from the movement. He reversed course in 2021, relaunching as a “National Bolshevik” and hosting something called “National Bolshevik Public Radio.” By 2023, he’d affiliated with the Patriotic Socialist Front and was waving a Soviet flag at the Rage Against the War Machine rally. The ideological journey from “face of a new generation of white nationalists” to Soviet-flag-waving rallygoer is, in its own perverse way, clarifying.
Now let’s return to Jared Taylor, because Heimbach’s path started with him. And Taylor is not a provocateur and not a gadfly, but a white supremacist who has spent four decades convincing credulous people that he’s something more sophisticated than what he is.
Matthew Heimbach attended American Renaissance conferences as a young man at Towson. Taylor’s framework, that of being respectable and in intellectual packaging, gave the ideology a foothold in Heimbach’s mind before Heimbach radicalized into something Taylor would have considered too crude. That’s how this pipeline works. The suit-and-tie version is the on-ramp. The trailer park in Indiana is where the road leads.
Colin McEvers is not Matthew Heimbach. The comparison is not one-to-one. But a 20-something who fancies himself a journalist, espouses alt-right content with racial overtones on social media, and decides that bringing Jared Taylor to a Maryland university is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in his capacity as chairman of a state party youth organization, is not simply engaging in edgy contrarianism. He is making a choice. He is telling you who he is. The organizations that have elevated him are also making a choice. Whether they understand that yet is another question.
Matthew Heimbach is still out there.2 He still posts. He still tries to build something. The man who was once described as a David Duke for the millennial generation is now hosting a podcast styled after NPR, for an audience of dozens, while owing a $1.5 million civil judgment he openly admits he’ll never pay. He started with Mitt Romney Republicans in Poolesville, turned himself into one of the most prominent neo-Nazis in the country, and ended up choking his father-in-law twice in an Indiana trailer at one in the morning.
That’s not a tragedy. That’s a punchline. And Jared Taylor is still out there too, still doing the suit-and-tie version, still looking for the next Heimbach. The Maryland Young Republicans may have just handed him one.3
To be fair, being a “white nationalist” is embarrassing in and of itself. Though not as embarrassing as being a white nationalist or white supremacist and pretending you’re merely a “white advocate” or “supporting free speech” or whatever buzzwords wannabe edgelords use.
Literally and figuratively.
Heather Heyer was killed at Charlottesville. Thirty-five others were injured. Heimbach's TWP was a named co-conspirator in the civil suit that followed. Whatever dark comedy attaches to his personal implosion, none of it touches those facts.