The Wignat Strikes Bach

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If there are two things I write about a lot, it’s Bernie Bros and wignats. And now I get to write about both in the same article!

Several socialist outfits have come together to form a group called March for Medicare for All [2]. On July 24, they plan on staging rallies in over two dozen cities across America in support of universal healthcare. At each rally, different speakers will give speeches in support of universal health care.

One of the scheduled cities was Muncie, Indiana. One of the keynote speakers they had lined up for the Muncie rally was Jim Davis, creator of the Garfield comic strip.

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Another scheduled keynote speaker for the Muncie event was a guy billed as Matt H. Bach.

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Yes, that is exactly who you think it is. That is none other than Matt Heimbach [5], former leader of the neo-Nazi outfit Traditionalist Workers Party [6] and current anti-racism activist.

If you don’t know who Matt Heimbach is, you must be new here. Welcome to the Dissident Right. For those who don’t know, I’ll give the Cliff’s Notes. For worse or for even worse, he is a significant figure in the history of our movement. If it weren’t for Matt Heimbach, the Great Optics War of 2017-2018 might never have happened. The word “wignat” was literally invented to describe him and his followers (although it has taken on broader meaning since).

Matt Heimbach first rose to prominence in 2012-2013 when he tried to create a “White Student Union [7]” at his college. It generated a lot of controversy and became a national news story. The college refused to officially recognize the group, but it continued in an unofficial capacity. They once had Jared Taylor speak at one of their events.

After college, Heimbach and his right-hand man Matt Parrot started the Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP). While the Alt-Right was pioneering new and innovative methods on online white activism, Heimbach chose instead to stick to the failed model of 1990s skinheads complete with uniforms, fascistic symbolism, and ostentatious displays of Nazi fetishism, with predictable results. 

Heimbach thought online activism was for suckers and that serious white activists need to be out doing things in the real world. So instead of building an online presence, he did lots and lots of talking to the media which resulted in hit piece after hit piece after hit piece. He allowed a journalist to follow him around and write a book [8] about him. He staged street rallies that were one public relations disaster after another. The TWP’s profile was raised considerably after the Wignat Woodstock known as Charlottesville.

In 2017, Richard Spencer was still doing public appearances and needed private security for his events. For a while, Identity Evropa filled this role of rent-a-mob, but after ousting sociopathic pathological liar Eli Mosley from leadership, new leader Patrick Casey cut ties with Spencer. Richard Spencer then turned to Heimbach and the TWP, as they were the only other rent-a-mob that could bring sufficiently large numbers to Spencer’s events. Being allied to the most prominent white identitarian in the country gave Heimbach and TWP a new level of prestige.

The Optics War really began when TRS attempted to add the TWP’s podcast to their roster. This is when Andrew Anglin and Weev of the Daily Stormer, the biggest white nationalist website in the world, stepped in. After Wignat Woodstock, the Stormer did not want the Alt-Right to be associated with costumed neo-Nazism anymore and gave TRS an ultimatum: the Daily Stormer would cease promoting TRS podcasts unless they dropped TWP. TRS relented. This led to a huge online debate over optics, the value of real-world events, and how to tailor the message for a mass audience. In the ensuing Optics War, people were doxed, reputations were ruined, and alliances shifted.

The Optics War ended when Matt Heimbach was caught having an affair with Matt Parrot’s wife (who was also Heimbach’s mother-in-law, as Heimbach was married to Parrot’s step-daughter from a previous marriage). He also assaulted Parrot in front of his children. This was the end of Matt Heimbach’s career in white nationalism.

A couple of years later, he re-emerged as a member of Light Upon Light, an anti-hate organization made up of several prominent “former extremists.” Light Upon Light is a fairly disreputable organization that has been disavowed by Antifa and Christian Picciolini, who consider it a grift and doubt the sincerity of its leaders. For example, Jeff Schoep, former leader of the National Socialist Movement, was a member despite the fact that his girlfriend was still running the NSM website.

For more information, watch Ryan Faulk’s video “Matt Heimbach and the Perils of Wignatism [9].”

So let’s get back to this March for Medicare for All. Once Matt Heimbach’s picture appeared on March for Medicare for All’s official Instagram page, it took all of two seconds for people to recognize that Matt H. Bach was the notorious neo-Nazi Matt Heimbach.

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When I first heard about this Muncie rally, I knew there were three possibilities as to what happened:

  1. The organizers booked Matt Heimbach without knowing who he was.
  2. The organizers knew who Matt Heimbach was and thought booking him would be good for the cause.
  3. The organizers knew who Matt Heimbach was and thought booking him would be bad for the cause (deliberate sabotage).

Immediately, I could think of all sorts of reasons why #1 and #2 were unlikely but I could not think of any reasons to rule out #3. Deliberate sabotage seemed to be Occam’s razor: an attempt to tarnish the reputation of the socialist Left by associating it with Neo-Nazism is the most likely scenario.

There is precedence for this. I have previously written [13] about a Daily Beast article written by ADL and Antifa-affiliated writer Alexander “Reid Siege” Ross where he very disingenuously tried to connect every major figure in the “Dirtbag Left” to Nazism.

I have cautioned people from writing off the socialist Left as controlled opposition. As race-cucked as the socialist Left may be, they are pretty consistently anti-Zionist, and this has got a lot of Jewish organizations worried that the socialist Left is on the verge of going full-blown antisemitic. During the recent Israel-Palestine fiasco, I saw a ton of Jews on Twitter losing their marbles about it.

In the short term, Leftist anti-Zionism is more dangerous to Jews than Rightist antisemitism because the socialist Left has more social respectability and a shred of institutional support. Anti-Zionism is also harder to justify censoring than outright antisemitism, so orchestrating a smear campaign against the Left would be the next best option.

I could believe that Matt Heimbach would want to be a speaker at an event like this. He always had communist tendencies even when he was a white nationalist and he was also an attention whore.

What I couldn’t believe is that the organizers of this rally would have booked him without knowing who he was. How would that work? “Hey, you may not know me, but do you think I can speak at your rally?” “Sure thing, stranger.”

If you are organizing an event like this, there are going to be two things that you will be looking for in your speakers. You want them to be either a) really good at giving speeches or b) capable of getting boots on the ground. Ideally, you would want both. Either way, you’re going to want to see some evidence, like former speeches, or that this person has a following.

An exception might be if someone put in a lot of time or money into the event. In such a case, an organizer might throw them a bone with a few minutes of stage time as a way of saying thanks. Maybe Heimbach did that. If that were the case, that might let the organizers off the hook slightly in the sense that they were not deliberately malicious. Heimbach is enough of a narcissist that he might not have realized or cared about the damage his presence might cause. Or he could be a Fed. He has a criminal record and is facing lawsuits. He could have cut a deal along the way.

I also didn’t believe that someone booked him thinking it would be good for the cause. There exist some Leftists who are open to the idea of working with Right-wingers, but they usually mean someone like Tucker Carlson, or maybe a Pat Buchanan. But even the most “based” Leftist would have considered Matt Heimbach several bridges too far. Even if someone thought it would be a propaganda coup to say “Hey, we stole one of the Alt Right’s guys! He’s on our side now!”, I had a hard time believing that person would not at least run it by the national committee.

There was also the fact that Matt Heimbach was not advertised as “Matt Bach,” but “Matt H. Bach.” Why throw in the “H”? Heimbach’s real middle name is actually Warren. It looks like the saboteur, be it the organizer and/or Heimbach himself, was purposefully trying to make it easier for people to figure out who he really was by making his alias absurdly close to his real name. Only three letters off.

All signs pointed to deliberate sabotage.

But immediately, Antifa started holding up the controversy as evidence of their crackpot theory that class reductionist Leftists were secret Nazis.

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A few days later, the first news story [15] about the event came out. It was published by (surprise, surprise) the Daily Beast. It turns out that I was about 80% right. It was deliberate sabotage. However, neither the organizers nor Matt Heimbach (who says he was never contacted) were in on it. That was the part I was wrong about.

Apparently, someone infiltrated the M4M4A’s Slack account using the name Ethan Rae Steele, claiming to be involved with the Muncie event. From there, they sent the pictures to M4M4A’s graphic designer, who then made the flyer. The same person tried to gain access to M4M4A’s social media accounts. Later on, someone tried to join in on one of the M4M4A national committee’s Zoom call. Unfortunately for the infiltrator, the organizer he was trying to impersonate was already on the call.

[16]So who was responsible for this prank? I think we can safely rule out the infiltrator being a Right-winger. If the Right were going to do something like this, they would have used the prank to promote someone who was still within our ranks who could then have capitalized on the publicity. They would not have used Matt Heimbach, who was kicked out of our movement years ago. If Nick Fuentes, Sam Hyde, or Andrew Anglin had appeared on the flyer, I might have said “OK, that was one of our guys.” But there is no reason why someone on our side would have wanted to promote a current anti-racist activist. Whoever did this wanted to harm M4M4A without helping us.

The culprit was most likely either Antifa, establishment Republicans, or the Zionist Democrats. I don’t think establishment Republicans would have had the imagination to pull something like this off nor are most of them aware of the “class reductionists are secret Nazis” meme peddled by Antifa and the ADL. When normie conservatives call the Left “fascists” and “Nazis,” they mean it metaphorically. When Antifa and the ADL say it, they mean it quite literally.

One of the suspects is the Las Vegas chapter of the Green Party. It appears to be a shady operation that is not recognized by the official Nevada Green Party. There had previously been a bit of feuding between the M4M4A organizers and members of the Nevada Green Party.

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There is another lesson here that perhaps we already knew but it bears repeating. Our enemies have reached their quota of traitors. They don’t need any more Christian Picciolinis.

Former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh tried to pull a Christian Picciolini. She doxed dozens of people and handed over hundreds of e-mails from people, some of them as prominent as Stephen Miller. Several anti-white hit pieces have been written based on information McHugh provided, and in return, she got next to nothing. The liberal establishment just said “Thanks for the doxes, now fuck off.” She got a couple of fluff pieces written on her, but she did not get the Picciolini-style career of a reformed racist that she was hoping for.

Matt Heimbach’s latest attempt to become a reformed racist has also spectacularly failed to launch. I don’t think he even got any fluff pieces. Now after this episode where he has actively harmed the side he was trying to defect to, I’d say that’s the nail in the coffin of his public life.

Some people have popped up on YouTube in recent years with “I went down the Alt-Right rabbit hole” stories, and a few of them have parlayed that into minor e-celeb careers. Their stories go something like this: “I started watching Molyneux videos and before you know it, I was hanging out in the chat rooms with people using racial slurs. It was changing the way I think and started affecting my social life. My mother was starting to worry about me. But then I watched a Destiny debate and it saved my life. Now I’m a nice anti-racist liberal.”

Those guys can get away with it because they never actually did any pro-white activism or content creation. They just watched some naughty videos and then found the error of their ways. Because they can claim that they were never aggressors, they can portray themselves as pure victims in a way that Heimbach and McHugh can not. They said mean things about minorities and there is no forgiveness for that.

Plus, all these “rabbit hole” YouTube guys also make clear what they never believed. They’ll say “I never believed the stuff about Jews,” or “I wasn’t sure what to think about all the race realism stuff.” Or they’ll stress that it was mostly the anti-feminism stuff they were into. That’s quite a bit different than someone like Matt Heimbach, who is on record calling Hitler a “great guy” and has loads of pictures out there of him getting in fistfights in defense of the self-described [18] ruler of the world Richard Spencer.

If you have ever done pro-white activism, you can always quit, but don’t even think about trying to switch sides. It won’t work.

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