Everything You Love Will Burn, page 30
“In that case, no. They shouldn’t have rabbits.”
For all their preparedness when it came to weaponry, they had forgotten the generator, and it was discussed at some length whether they should just stand there without speeches to make their presence known. Gabe was teaching some rookies the difference between a German salute and a Roman salute. “A roman salute is with a lower arm and your thumb tucked under your palm,” he said, demonstrating. “The German kind, arguably the more imposing of the two, has the arm raised higher, and the thumb straight along the fingers. You know, I heard that Hitler himself did a Persian salute, which is a little more like a hello.” Gabe tucked his elbow to his side and raised his lower arm straight up with a flat hand.
Someone finally got their hands on a generator, and the speeches started. As always, they were largely a waste of time. Fifty or so Antifa protestors had arrived and screamed from across the street, drowning out everything else. The nationalists told them to come over to fight like real men, which, of course, they couldn’t because there were police everywhere. The pantomime of it all was getting a little old. Jeff spoke first and did his standard spiel about coming together and fighting for the white race. The nationalists seemed happy with the speech and joined in for a chorus of “Hail Victory” when he was finished. There were even a few “Sieg Heils” from overzealous NSM members. Old habits die hard.
Gabe, Robbie, and Scotty at the Nationalist Front rally in Pikeville, Kentucky.
Matthew’s speech was fairly boilerplate too. I’d heard it dozens of times. The call to action, the fellow nationalists around the world, the faith, family, and folk mantra.
He wound the whole thing up with a “Hail Victory,” but the nationalists behind him started their own chant, singing “Hail Heimbach” over and over. The chant went on for minutes, and Matthew turned to his followers with a sheepish grin, bowing awkwardly at times but letting the adulation wash over him like a warm shower. Jeff didn’t join the chant and stared straight ahead. Matthew aw-shucks’ed for another minute or so until the chanting ended and was replaced by backslapping and applause. If there had ever been any doubt as to who was running the largest coalition of white nationalist groups in America, there was none now.
IN THE CAR on the way back Matthew was beaming. “That was pretty special,” he said. “I mean… yeah, that whole Hail Heimbach thing… it was silly, but, yeah… it was pretty special.”
“You earned it,” said Tony. He despised the NSM and was happy to watch Matthew take charge. “Those fucking guys need to fold. They can’t go on like this.” The night before he had told me how Matthew had ended up paying for all the food both days, even though it was, on paper at least, the NSM’s event.
“That’s fine,” Matthew said. “I don’t mind. But honestly, how many guys did they even bring to this thing? Like, five?”
“They haven’t built this,” Tony said. “They’ve fucked it up several times, but they haven’t built it up. You did that.”
Matthew knew he was right. He had done all the legwork. Jeff had started the Nationalist Front—although it had been the Aryan Nationalist Alliance at the time—but Matthew renamed it, wrote most of the principles, and weeded out the groups that never would have gotten onboard with what he was trying to build. What’s more, Matthew credited Jeff at every turn, despite the fact that everyone knew Matthew was the one who built it. Just that morning a Klan group from Alabama had come up for the rally because they had been following Matthew’s work for years. He’s the one who went to Auburn to defend Richard Spencer—the NSM was nowhere to be seen. He was in talks with the League of the South (LOS) about bringing them on board. In the years following its foundation in 1994, LOS had been the most important neo-Confederate, secessionist group in America, with membership at close to 10,000. Since then it had fallen on hard times, and although their leader, Michael Hill, claimed to have 25,000 members, the actual number was probably closer to 250. Regardless, joining forces with LOS was important because they had contacts and credibility all over the South, and it was Matthew who had made that connection happen. No one else. And Tony was right: every time there was a fuck-up it had come from the NSM. They’d even almost cost them the Pikeville event because of that stupid family reunion booking that anyone could have seen was fake. Who knew what they would screw up next?
“Jeff’s a great guy,” Matthew said in a conciliatory manner. “He’s a solid leader, and some of his guys are good. I’d follow Culpepper anywhere. But his troops are just so goddammed dumb. It’s the only word for it. They’re just too dumb to get what we’re doing here.” He called Brooke and told her about the event. “They ended it all with a ‘Hail Heimbach,’” he said into the receiver. “It was pretty great actually. No, no, my head is the same size. I love you too.”
Back at the coalfield the party was in full swing. We’d gotten lost again and were late coming back. Mike Enoch was giving a speech about white privilege, saying that there was no privilege from where he was sitting. He was followed by a guy with a guitar and wearing wraparound sunglasses, even though it was dark, and a shirt he’d opened to the bellybutton. He explained that he’d written a song about the struggles of white people. “Shit’s getting real out there, baby,” he said with a Dirty Harry–esque squint behind the glasses. “It’s a war, and that’s why this song is called ‘The Battle.’” He started playing a fumbling bluesy chord progression while his voice searched up and down the spectrum for the right tone. He settled on a pitch that wasn’t quite there but close enough.
“So sick of white genocide,” he sang atonally. “Our children, our children’s children are counting on us. I’m a white working man, and work is what I do. I work every day, every week, maybe two. I always pay my taxes, always pay my bills.”
It was hardly Dylan, but it went over well enough with the crowd, who seemed to find nothing odd about someone writing a blues song about whites having it hard.
A short kid in his early twenties called Max took the microphone and immediately started screaming about liberals “building transgender bathrooms on our graves.” “There was no Holocaust! At least not yet!” He went on and on, skipping from topic to topic but always coming back to the detestable Jew. “We need to act as an exterminating vessel of holy rage to defend ourselves.”
Everyone thanked Matthew, who beamed proudly in the front of the room throughout. Vanguard America had built a massive axe, a replica Italian fasces, where the handle was wrapped in a bundle of sticks to symbolize strength in unity, which they presented to him with a “Hail Heimbach!” while the entire coalfield joined in.
I thought back to when I’d first met him, drunk on a pickup truck with some skinheads somewhere in North Carolina. I wasn’t sure whether he had changed or if America had, but whatever had happened, he was now somewhat of a leader of men. I still had no real idea what he wanted or what his end goal was, but I was sure he wasn’t happy to just be a cog in the machine anymore. I thought about something his old professor Kurt Borkman had mentioned. He believed that Matthew wanted to become a martyr, and as I watched Matthew lift the axe he had been given over his head like a Viking, I thought Borkman might be right. Realistically, what other acceptable outcome could there be? All his heroes were martyred, and Matthew was smart enough to know that political victory most likely wasn’t in the cards for him or any of the others in the movement. He could be a leader in a movement whose leaders were either killed, imprisoned, or turned into Art Jones, and although I could easily see Matthew become the latter, he would probably much prefer martyrdom.
The bonfire was dying, and the landlord, who had no affiliation with the movement, stood by the embers and played a sad song on a trumpet. Cars were filing down the dirt road, kicking up dust that would infuriate the neighbors. Matthew was driving a rental back to Tennessee and was slowly backing out of the parking lot when he called me over.
“What did you think?” he asked me again.
“It was good,” I said. “A lot of people.”
“How many people do you think the NSM brought?”
I said I wasn’t sure. “Maybe a handful?”
“That’s what I thought too. What should I do with those guys?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. Later I would find it curious that he’d asked my advice about NF business and even more curious that I hadn’t thought it was strange at the time. Matthew seemed preoccupied with his cofounder’s group. “I’m sure if you talk to Jeff, he’ll have his guys fall in line,” I suggested. “They’ve come a long way already.”
Matthew thought for a while. “That’s the thing,” he said finally. “I don’t want to talk to Jeff. I want him to bend the knee.”
And with that he drove off.
POSTSCRIPT
The Hard Right
Young fool. Only now at the end do you understand.
—Emperor Palpatine, Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi
Of course, Pikeville wasn’t my last event, and I don’t know why I assumed it would be. Writing a book about something that is ongoing is a surreal affair because one needs to decide at some point when the story in the book ends, whereas in real life it continues, unaffected by narrative concerns.
There is always a next rally. Always something bigger and more consequential. In this story it was Charlottesville.
Pikeville changed almost nothing. For all the talk, press, online bluster, police presence, shops closing, plane tickets bought and miles traveled by people to get there, it had zero effect on anything. The Nationalist Front gained one new group, the Exalted White Knights out of Alabama, who promised they weren’t white supremacists and claimed they were as committed to politics as Matthew was. People had fun, though, and it was decided that the far right should do these kinds of events more often. Other than that, things went back to normal. Matthew went back home and set about relocating his family to Tennessee. Early in May his second son, Patrick Heimbach, was born.
Members of the “hard right” getting ready to march to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Shields are decorated with the alt-right flag.
Charlottesville would build on the solidarity created in Pikeville. It was given the hashtag-friendly name Unite the Right and was to be a grand and much-overdue coming together of the leaders of the alt- and far right. The lineup of speakers was unquestionably impressive, living up to the name of the rally. Richard Spencer would be there, as would David Duke, Matthew, and Mike Enoch. Also scheduled to speak were David Hill, founder of the League of the South, and alt-right internet luminary Anthime Gionet, aka Baked Alaska, who announced on his Twitter feed on the eve of the rally on August 11,
Tomorrow we make history at #UniteTheRight.
Matthew had top billing. His name was on the poster along with the other prominent leaders of the far right. He had arrived.
I hadn’t planned on going. I’d been to more than my fair share of these things, and I wanted to be done with it. But throughout the summer of 2017, as the rally drew nearer, Matthew began telling me that Antifa promised to bring thousands to Charlottesville. According to him, they were flying in from New York, Chicago, and Oakland as well as busing in from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. At the same time, the number of threats against him had been increasing. In the end a mix of curiosity, fear of missing out, and force of habit drew me to Charlottesville. I’d been going to these things for so long that it seemed strange not to.
I hadn’t seen Matthew and the rest of the TWP members since Pikeville, but once I arrived at Charlottesville, it felt immediately like something had changed. The night before the rally a few of the members kicked me out of a party at their house. I’d brought another journalist who they immediately suspected was a Jewish spy, and Scott, Matthew’s gormless henchman, fetched a bacon pizza and asked her to eat it in what he believed was a clever ruse to ferret out Jewish infiltrators. There was an edge to the crowd I hadn’t seen before. There were more guns than I was used to and much more bravado. As soon as I got there Matthew Parrot told me I had to leave. “Nazi Joe is here, and he’d be fucking pissed we invited a journalist. He’s going to come up and start something. You guys better get out.” As menacing a name as it was, I soon found out that “Nazi Joe” was an alias the TWP used for Eric Striker, undoubtedly another alias. Striker was a short, skinny kid with a big head and cartoonish features who liked to rant against Jews on the website the Daily Stormer. He was about as daunting as a very small dog, but his animosity spread among the usually bookish TWP crowd and, in some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, altered the tenor of my relationship with the group. Matthew wasn’t there, but Striker said he spoke for him when he said I could stay but “the kike had to go.” I was taken aback by the aggression. It felt more like a skinhead gathering than a TWP party.
The next day provided further hints that Matthew was hardening, slipping further to the right.
A couple dozen TWP members in matching uniforms and construction helmets (a not-so-subtle nod to the TWP’s pro-worker bent) gathered early in the morning in a parking structure a couple of blocks from the park where the rally would take place. In their hands were riot shields, flags, and clubs. They were the tip of the spear, primed in case Antifa was there. Then came the LOS, NSM, and a few other groups. All told, there must have been close to a hundred people—all marching behind Matthew. He wore his new uniform, a snug, black shirt that stretched over his paunch, a black armband emblazoned with the silver logo of the TWP, and a black tie stuffed into the buttons of his shirt. Unlike his men, he didn’t carry a shield or a club, and his helmet was a military-style combat helmet rather than a construction hat. One of the guys from the LOS was telling the group to use the clubs against the abdomen, not the head. The head was assault, the abdomen was not. I wasn’t completely convinced he knew what he was talking about, but to be fair, he also said to not strike unless the enemy struck first, which I guess made it all more legal. “We’re not the alt-right and we’re not the far right,” he roared with his club in the air. “We’re the hard right!” A pickup rolled up, and as if to underscore his point, Chester Doles, Peaches, and a couple of other guys from the Confederate Hammerskins jumped out.
I was surprised to see them, but not as surprised as Gabe, who had not left the Hammerskins on good terms. “Did you know about this?” I asked Matthew.
“Of course,” he said. “Me and Chester have been talking. They want to go political.” This was either a lie or Matthew was delusional. Thinking the Hammerskins could become a political group was like believing a pack of hungry wolves could perform community theater; it was an entertaining thought, but clearly the wolves would just eat the audience and everyone else. I looked at Matthew’s crowd again. Spencer wasn’t there. He, Mike Enoch, and the members of American Vanguard, Identity Evropa, and everyone else who belonged to what had become known as “white nationalism 2.0”—simply another term for the suits of the movement—were meeting elsewhere. This was a 1.0 crowd, and I was struck by the realization that Matthew, who had once spent a freezing March day outside the Conservative Political Action Conference happily arguing with conservatives, was now a completely different person from the one I met years ago. The transition had been gradual, and perhaps I had been too close to see it. Much like you don’t notice yourself aging, I had failed to see Matthew’s politics harden over time. Now, in the stark glare of the parking lot fluorescents, surrounded by what could only be described as troops, shaking hands with the Hammerskins, marching with the old guard of the movement, his transformation was obvious. Matthew was no longer “the affable, new face of organized hate” but rather someone who believed he was at war.
THE RALLY IN CHARLOTTESVILLE was terrible and inevitable. After years of egging each other on, after threats, small and not so small clashes, after countless boasts of the glory of fighting for one’s race or the justness of smashing the fascist hordes, Antifa and the far right finally got their battle. It was ugly, violent, and tragic, and when it was over it had torn the far right completely apart.
The TWP partied that night as if someone hadn’t just died at a rally they had taken part in. They told themselves that they had been attacked and that Heather Heyer, to the degree they mentioned her at all, was an enemy combatant who had died in battle. The next day Matthew put out a bland statement blaming the left for inciting violence. I remembered how, during the inauguration, he had screamed at a car driving through a throng of demonstrators to “Fucking run them over!” I was convinced at the time it was hyperbole, but seeing now how little he cared that a life had been lost, I wondered if I had misjudged his capacity for cruelty and violence. As long as I’d known him, Matthew had used the phrase “They are literally killing us!” with great pathos as he described the alleged attacks against whites by the elites and Jews. Now that a person had died, he refused to even name her. Matthew Parrot wrote on Facebook that as far as he was concerned, James Alex Fields, the driver of the car that rammed into counter-protestors and killed Heather Heyer, was an honorary member of TWP for life. Jason Kessler, until then the relatively unknown organizer of the event, tweeted out an article from the Daily Stormer that in graphic terms called Heyer a communist and implied that she was, by extension, responsible for the Gulag and all other atrocities performed in the name of communism.
In the days and weeks that followed, a schism appeared between those who took a hard-nosed approach to the events at Charlottesville and those who didn’t. Richard Spencer disavowed Kessler after his tweet and expressed regret that Heyer had died; he was then immediately labeled a coward and a sell-out by those who believed Heyer was an enemy combatant. American Vanguard, the group to which Fields allegedly belonged, claimed he was not one of theirs, maintaining that Fields was just a guy who happened to dress like them and got his hands on one of their shields. Matthew believed the murder in Charlottesville would break American Vanguard. “They don’t have the maturity as a group or the infrastructure to be able to absorb something like this,” he told me over the phone. “They’ll vanish soon enough.”
For all their preparedness when it came to weaponry, they had forgotten the generator, and it was discussed at some length whether they should just stand there without speeches to make their presence known. Gabe was teaching some rookies the difference between a German salute and a Roman salute. “A roman salute is with a lower arm and your thumb tucked under your palm,” he said, demonstrating. “The German kind, arguably the more imposing of the two, has the arm raised higher, and the thumb straight along the fingers. You know, I heard that Hitler himself did a Persian salute, which is a little more like a hello.” Gabe tucked his elbow to his side and raised his lower arm straight up with a flat hand.
Someone finally got their hands on a generator, and the speeches started. As always, they were largely a waste of time. Fifty or so Antifa protestors had arrived and screamed from across the street, drowning out everything else. The nationalists told them to come over to fight like real men, which, of course, they couldn’t because there were police everywhere. The pantomime of it all was getting a little old. Jeff spoke first and did his standard spiel about coming together and fighting for the white race. The nationalists seemed happy with the speech and joined in for a chorus of “Hail Victory” when he was finished. There were even a few “Sieg Heils” from overzealous NSM members. Old habits die hard.
Gabe, Robbie, and Scotty at the Nationalist Front rally in Pikeville, Kentucky.
Matthew’s speech was fairly boilerplate too. I’d heard it dozens of times. The call to action, the fellow nationalists around the world, the faith, family, and folk mantra.
He wound the whole thing up with a “Hail Victory,” but the nationalists behind him started their own chant, singing “Hail Heimbach” over and over. The chant went on for minutes, and Matthew turned to his followers with a sheepish grin, bowing awkwardly at times but letting the adulation wash over him like a warm shower. Jeff didn’t join the chant and stared straight ahead. Matthew aw-shucks’ed for another minute or so until the chanting ended and was replaced by backslapping and applause. If there had ever been any doubt as to who was running the largest coalition of white nationalist groups in America, there was none now.
IN THE CAR on the way back Matthew was beaming. “That was pretty special,” he said. “I mean… yeah, that whole Hail Heimbach thing… it was silly, but, yeah… it was pretty special.”
“You earned it,” said Tony. He despised the NSM and was happy to watch Matthew take charge. “Those fucking guys need to fold. They can’t go on like this.” The night before he had told me how Matthew had ended up paying for all the food both days, even though it was, on paper at least, the NSM’s event.
“That’s fine,” Matthew said. “I don’t mind. But honestly, how many guys did they even bring to this thing? Like, five?”
“They haven’t built this,” Tony said. “They’ve fucked it up several times, but they haven’t built it up. You did that.”
Matthew knew he was right. He had done all the legwork. Jeff had started the Nationalist Front—although it had been the Aryan Nationalist Alliance at the time—but Matthew renamed it, wrote most of the principles, and weeded out the groups that never would have gotten onboard with what he was trying to build. What’s more, Matthew credited Jeff at every turn, despite the fact that everyone knew Matthew was the one who built it. Just that morning a Klan group from Alabama had come up for the rally because they had been following Matthew’s work for years. He’s the one who went to Auburn to defend Richard Spencer—the NSM was nowhere to be seen. He was in talks with the League of the South (LOS) about bringing them on board. In the years following its foundation in 1994, LOS had been the most important neo-Confederate, secessionist group in America, with membership at close to 10,000. Since then it had fallen on hard times, and although their leader, Michael Hill, claimed to have 25,000 members, the actual number was probably closer to 250. Regardless, joining forces with LOS was important because they had contacts and credibility all over the South, and it was Matthew who had made that connection happen. No one else. And Tony was right: every time there was a fuck-up it had come from the NSM. They’d even almost cost them the Pikeville event because of that stupid family reunion booking that anyone could have seen was fake. Who knew what they would screw up next?
“Jeff’s a great guy,” Matthew said in a conciliatory manner. “He’s a solid leader, and some of his guys are good. I’d follow Culpepper anywhere. But his troops are just so goddammed dumb. It’s the only word for it. They’re just too dumb to get what we’re doing here.” He called Brooke and told her about the event. “They ended it all with a ‘Hail Heimbach,’” he said into the receiver. “It was pretty great actually. No, no, my head is the same size. I love you too.”
Back at the coalfield the party was in full swing. We’d gotten lost again and were late coming back. Mike Enoch was giving a speech about white privilege, saying that there was no privilege from where he was sitting. He was followed by a guy with a guitar and wearing wraparound sunglasses, even though it was dark, and a shirt he’d opened to the bellybutton. He explained that he’d written a song about the struggles of white people. “Shit’s getting real out there, baby,” he said with a Dirty Harry–esque squint behind the glasses. “It’s a war, and that’s why this song is called ‘The Battle.’” He started playing a fumbling bluesy chord progression while his voice searched up and down the spectrum for the right tone. He settled on a pitch that wasn’t quite there but close enough.
“So sick of white genocide,” he sang atonally. “Our children, our children’s children are counting on us. I’m a white working man, and work is what I do. I work every day, every week, maybe two. I always pay my taxes, always pay my bills.”
It was hardly Dylan, but it went over well enough with the crowd, who seemed to find nothing odd about someone writing a blues song about whites having it hard.
A short kid in his early twenties called Max took the microphone and immediately started screaming about liberals “building transgender bathrooms on our graves.” “There was no Holocaust! At least not yet!” He went on and on, skipping from topic to topic but always coming back to the detestable Jew. “We need to act as an exterminating vessel of holy rage to defend ourselves.”
Everyone thanked Matthew, who beamed proudly in the front of the room throughout. Vanguard America had built a massive axe, a replica Italian fasces, where the handle was wrapped in a bundle of sticks to symbolize strength in unity, which they presented to him with a “Hail Heimbach!” while the entire coalfield joined in.
I thought back to when I’d first met him, drunk on a pickup truck with some skinheads somewhere in North Carolina. I wasn’t sure whether he had changed or if America had, but whatever had happened, he was now somewhat of a leader of men. I still had no real idea what he wanted or what his end goal was, but I was sure he wasn’t happy to just be a cog in the machine anymore. I thought about something his old professor Kurt Borkman had mentioned. He believed that Matthew wanted to become a martyr, and as I watched Matthew lift the axe he had been given over his head like a Viking, I thought Borkman might be right. Realistically, what other acceptable outcome could there be? All his heroes were martyred, and Matthew was smart enough to know that political victory most likely wasn’t in the cards for him or any of the others in the movement. He could be a leader in a movement whose leaders were either killed, imprisoned, or turned into Art Jones, and although I could easily see Matthew become the latter, he would probably much prefer martyrdom.
The bonfire was dying, and the landlord, who had no affiliation with the movement, stood by the embers and played a sad song on a trumpet. Cars were filing down the dirt road, kicking up dust that would infuriate the neighbors. Matthew was driving a rental back to Tennessee and was slowly backing out of the parking lot when he called me over.
“What did you think?” he asked me again.
“It was good,” I said. “A lot of people.”
“How many people do you think the NSM brought?”
I said I wasn’t sure. “Maybe a handful?”
“That’s what I thought too. What should I do with those guys?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. Later I would find it curious that he’d asked my advice about NF business and even more curious that I hadn’t thought it was strange at the time. Matthew seemed preoccupied with his cofounder’s group. “I’m sure if you talk to Jeff, he’ll have his guys fall in line,” I suggested. “They’ve come a long way already.”
Matthew thought for a while. “That’s the thing,” he said finally. “I don’t want to talk to Jeff. I want him to bend the knee.”
And with that he drove off.
POSTSCRIPT
The Hard Right
Young fool. Only now at the end do you understand.
—Emperor Palpatine, Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi
Of course, Pikeville wasn’t my last event, and I don’t know why I assumed it would be. Writing a book about something that is ongoing is a surreal affair because one needs to decide at some point when the story in the book ends, whereas in real life it continues, unaffected by narrative concerns.
There is always a next rally. Always something bigger and more consequential. In this story it was Charlottesville.
Pikeville changed almost nothing. For all the talk, press, online bluster, police presence, shops closing, plane tickets bought and miles traveled by people to get there, it had zero effect on anything. The Nationalist Front gained one new group, the Exalted White Knights out of Alabama, who promised they weren’t white supremacists and claimed they were as committed to politics as Matthew was. People had fun, though, and it was decided that the far right should do these kinds of events more often. Other than that, things went back to normal. Matthew went back home and set about relocating his family to Tennessee. Early in May his second son, Patrick Heimbach, was born.
Members of the “hard right” getting ready to march to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Shields are decorated with the alt-right flag.
Charlottesville would build on the solidarity created in Pikeville. It was given the hashtag-friendly name Unite the Right and was to be a grand and much-overdue coming together of the leaders of the alt- and far right. The lineup of speakers was unquestionably impressive, living up to the name of the rally. Richard Spencer would be there, as would David Duke, Matthew, and Mike Enoch. Also scheduled to speak were David Hill, founder of the League of the South, and alt-right internet luminary Anthime Gionet, aka Baked Alaska, who announced on his Twitter feed on the eve of the rally on August 11,
Tomorrow we make history at #UniteTheRight.
Matthew had top billing. His name was on the poster along with the other prominent leaders of the far right. He had arrived.
I hadn’t planned on going. I’d been to more than my fair share of these things, and I wanted to be done with it. But throughout the summer of 2017, as the rally drew nearer, Matthew began telling me that Antifa promised to bring thousands to Charlottesville. According to him, they were flying in from New York, Chicago, and Oakland as well as busing in from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. At the same time, the number of threats against him had been increasing. In the end a mix of curiosity, fear of missing out, and force of habit drew me to Charlottesville. I’d been going to these things for so long that it seemed strange not to.
I hadn’t seen Matthew and the rest of the TWP members since Pikeville, but once I arrived at Charlottesville, it felt immediately like something had changed. The night before the rally a few of the members kicked me out of a party at their house. I’d brought another journalist who they immediately suspected was a Jewish spy, and Scott, Matthew’s gormless henchman, fetched a bacon pizza and asked her to eat it in what he believed was a clever ruse to ferret out Jewish infiltrators. There was an edge to the crowd I hadn’t seen before. There were more guns than I was used to and much more bravado. As soon as I got there Matthew Parrot told me I had to leave. “Nazi Joe is here, and he’d be fucking pissed we invited a journalist. He’s going to come up and start something. You guys better get out.” As menacing a name as it was, I soon found out that “Nazi Joe” was an alias the TWP used for Eric Striker, undoubtedly another alias. Striker was a short, skinny kid with a big head and cartoonish features who liked to rant against Jews on the website the Daily Stormer. He was about as daunting as a very small dog, but his animosity spread among the usually bookish TWP crowd and, in some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, altered the tenor of my relationship with the group. Matthew wasn’t there, but Striker said he spoke for him when he said I could stay but “the kike had to go.” I was taken aback by the aggression. It felt more like a skinhead gathering than a TWP party.
The next day provided further hints that Matthew was hardening, slipping further to the right.
A couple dozen TWP members in matching uniforms and construction helmets (a not-so-subtle nod to the TWP’s pro-worker bent) gathered early in the morning in a parking structure a couple of blocks from the park where the rally would take place. In their hands were riot shields, flags, and clubs. They were the tip of the spear, primed in case Antifa was there. Then came the LOS, NSM, and a few other groups. All told, there must have been close to a hundred people—all marching behind Matthew. He wore his new uniform, a snug, black shirt that stretched over his paunch, a black armband emblazoned with the silver logo of the TWP, and a black tie stuffed into the buttons of his shirt. Unlike his men, he didn’t carry a shield or a club, and his helmet was a military-style combat helmet rather than a construction hat. One of the guys from the LOS was telling the group to use the clubs against the abdomen, not the head. The head was assault, the abdomen was not. I wasn’t completely convinced he knew what he was talking about, but to be fair, he also said to not strike unless the enemy struck first, which I guess made it all more legal. “We’re not the alt-right and we’re not the far right,” he roared with his club in the air. “We’re the hard right!” A pickup rolled up, and as if to underscore his point, Chester Doles, Peaches, and a couple of other guys from the Confederate Hammerskins jumped out.
I was surprised to see them, but not as surprised as Gabe, who had not left the Hammerskins on good terms. “Did you know about this?” I asked Matthew.
“Of course,” he said. “Me and Chester have been talking. They want to go political.” This was either a lie or Matthew was delusional. Thinking the Hammerskins could become a political group was like believing a pack of hungry wolves could perform community theater; it was an entertaining thought, but clearly the wolves would just eat the audience and everyone else. I looked at Matthew’s crowd again. Spencer wasn’t there. He, Mike Enoch, and the members of American Vanguard, Identity Evropa, and everyone else who belonged to what had become known as “white nationalism 2.0”—simply another term for the suits of the movement—were meeting elsewhere. This was a 1.0 crowd, and I was struck by the realization that Matthew, who had once spent a freezing March day outside the Conservative Political Action Conference happily arguing with conservatives, was now a completely different person from the one I met years ago. The transition had been gradual, and perhaps I had been too close to see it. Much like you don’t notice yourself aging, I had failed to see Matthew’s politics harden over time. Now, in the stark glare of the parking lot fluorescents, surrounded by what could only be described as troops, shaking hands with the Hammerskins, marching with the old guard of the movement, his transformation was obvious. Matthew was no longer “the affable, new face of organized hate” but rather someone who believed he was at war.
THE RALLY IN CHARLOTTESVILLE was terrible and inevitable. After years of egging each other on, after threats, small and not so small clashes, after countless boasts of the glory of fighting for one’s race or the justness of smashing the fascist hordes, Antifa and the far right finally got their battle. It was ugly, violent, and tragic, and when it was over it had torn the far right completely apart.
The TWP partied that night as if someone hadn’t just died at a rally they had taken part in. They told themselves that they had been attacked and that Heather Heyer, to the degree they mentioned her at all, was an enemy combatant who had died in battle. The next day Matthew put out a bland statement blaming the left for inciting violence. I remembered how, during the inauguration, he had screamed at a car driving through a throng of demonstrators to “Fucking run them over!” I was convinced at the time it was hyperbole, but seeing now how little he cared that a life had been lost, I wondered if I had misjudged his capacity for cruelty and violence. As long as I’d known him, Matthew had used the phrase “They are literally killing us!” with great pathos as he described the alleged attacks against whites by the elites and Jews. Now that a person had died, he refused to even name her. Matthew Parrot wrote on Facebook that as far as he was concerned, James Alex Fields, the driver of the car that rammed into counter-protestors and killed Heather Heyer, was an honorary member of TWP for life. Jason Kessler, until then the relatively unknown organizer of the event, tweeted out an article from the Daily Stormer that in graphic terms called Heyer a communist and implied that she was, by extension, responsible for the Gulag and all other atrocities performed in the name of communism.
In the days and weeks that followed, a schism appeared between those who took a hard-nosed approach to the events at Charlottesville and those who didn’t. Richard Spencer disavowed Kessler after his tweet and expressed regret that Heyer had died; he was then immediately labeled a coward and a sell-out by those who believed Heyer was an enemy combatant. American Vanguard, the group to which Fields allegedly belonged, claimed he was not one of theirs, maintaining that Fields was just a guy who happened to dress like them and got his hands on one of their shields. Matthew believed the murder in Charlottesville would break American Vanguard. “They don’t have the maturity as a group or the infrastructure to be able to absorb something like this,” he told me over the phone. “They’ll vanish soon enough.”
