Inside a White-Nationalist Cookout

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

“The white majority are fed up with all of these lying, cheating, thieving, war-mongering, child-molesting, political pimps and whores,” Art Jones roared. “Of this corrupt and decadent two-party, Jew-party, queer-party system!” He was gesturing wildly, waving liver-spotted hands. His tie quivered at his throat, bedecked with a two-headed enamel pin: an American flag and a red one with a black swastika, fused together.

It was a glorious, soft late April evening in 2017, and a coalition of white supremacists were gathered high in the green, lush foothills of southeastern Kentucky. Their meeting place was a grassy, lumpen field on private land, overtaken with trucks and dotted with a few tents and a duo of Port-a-potties. A very pale, very male crowd was lingering among the cars as the sun sets, laughing and smoking. A guy who looked barely out of his teens bounced by, wearing a T-shirt for the Daily Stormer, a website popular with neo-Nazi internet trolls. A bald man with a neat, professorial beard and round silver glasses stopped in front of me and the photographer I’m traveling with.

“Do y’all have any unscented lotion?” he inquired, gesturing at the new tattoo on his leg, scabbed-over and looking itchy. We didn’t, but I made a show of looking in my purse anyway, to be friendly, I guess. The purpose of the evening, after all, was to make new friends, to try to bring together disparate racist groups into a harmonious whole, to denounce the vicious Jewish cabal enslaving the country and the world, and to prepare for possible war the following day.

For Matthew Heimbach, this meeting of the different groups was a moment he’d been waiting for his whole young life. Heimbach was the founder and most recognizable face of the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), and at the moment we met in Kentucky, he was busy capitalizing on two things: increasingly open rage and disaffection from white voters, and Donald Trump’s shameless pandering to those feelings, a few months into his presidency.

The TWP was described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a white nationalist group that advocates for racially pure nations and communities and blames Jews for many of the world’s problems.” Put more simply, the TWP was Heimbach’s baby, the conduit for all his white-nationalist ambitions.

Personally, I couldn’t help thinking of Heimbach and his cadre as the Social Justice Racists. At the time of the rally, Heimbach was barely 25, chubby and beaming, with a beard creeping up his face and down his neck. He lived in a trailer in Indiana, with a wife, a baby son, and another one on the way. He often mentioned his family when he was getting floridly poetic about his determination to organize in defense of the downtrodden white man.

-more-

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/anna-merlan-republic-lies-white-nationalist-cookout-kentucky-822598/

[jpak]

1. ...

[mcar]

3. Oh death, oh death...

A great film!

[TlalocW]

2. A friend of mine

When he lived in Chicago learned about a White Nationalist gathering at a house that served as the local headquarters (Illinois Nazis? I hate Illinois Nazis). He and I met in college and coincidentally had both done a senior project dealing with white supremacy groups. So he decided to go check it out as "famous skinhead" Tom Metzger was going to give a speech. They were across the street from a park with a bench directly in front of them so my friend sat and watched the proceedings. He was looked at suspiciously but ignored for the most part until he started uncontrollably laughing when after the rally and the bbq started, he noticed all of them were drinking Coronas. He made the wise decision to leave after that.

TlalocW