Matthew Heimbach

Matthew Warren Heimbach (born April 8, 1991) is an American white supremacist and neo-Nazi.

He has attempted to form alliances between several far-right extremist groups.

In May 2013, Heimbach and Matthew Parrott founded the Traditionalist Youth Network, which later morphed into the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), which ceased operation in March 2018.

In 2013, Heimbach received a Bachelor of Science in History from Towson University.

Heimbach met his former wife Brooke at an American Renaissance conference.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has commented that Heimbach is "considered by many to be the face of a new generation of white nationalists."

According to the Counter Extremism Project, "Heimbach's platform is based around the idea that the white race has been disadvantaged because of globalism and multiculturalism, which he has largely blamed on a global Jewish conspiracy. Heimbach claims that white unity is necessary because the Jews hate all white people equally."

To promote his anti-Semitism, Heimbach publicly supported terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad writing that there should be "a unity between those who struggle against the Zionist State and International Jewry here in the West and those on the streets of Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon. We face the exact same enemy, one who doesn't care if they kill our women, children, and elderly. We are facing a truly Satanic enemy."

Heimbach has forged ties with nationalist groups from other countries, like Greece's far-right nationalist party Golden Dawn.

As the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, Heimbach visited European far-right organizations in Germany, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Russia.

The Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) was established in May 2013 by Matthew Heimbach with Matt Parrott as an offshoot of a "White Student Union" which was active on the Towson University campus.

In 2014, Heimbach was photographed at a SlutWalk protest brandishing an Orthodox cross as a weapon against anti-racist protestors.

The United Kingdom government banned Heimbach from entering the country in October 2015 because his extremist rhetoric could incite violence.

Heimbach called for the dissolution of the United States of America under the pretense of supporting self-determination for different ethnic and religious communities, going so far as to declare "Death to America."

He stated that Americans should "stop fighting a culture war. Just declare both sides victors, and in your respective region, do what you think is best."

In January 2015, the TYN established the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) as its political party prior to the 2016 elections, and a small group of candidates from the far-right ran under its banner.

In 2016, in response to his racist beliefs and his violent actions, Heimbach was excommunicated from the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Heimbach was born in Poolesville, Maryland.

Heimbach's parents, Karl and Margaret Heimbach, are public school teachers whose political affiliation he describes as Mitt Romney-style Republicans.

Heimbach says his views on race and immigration were formed early on by the writings of Pat Buchanan, especially his book The Death of the West, and particularly Buchanan's paleoconservative writing in American Renaissance.

As early as his entrance to college, Towson University, he had begun to take in the writings of Jared Taylor, a self-described "race realist".

In 2016, Heimbach was formally received into the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

Following online circulation of the photos, Heimbach was excommunicated from the Church several weeks later.

Following his excommunication, Heimbach received communion from a sympathetic noncanonical Romanian church.

Avowed anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism differentiated Heimbach and the Traditionalist Worker Party from many other American far-right groups.

Heimbach stated that "For us, to be truly anti-capitalist is to be a nationalist. Nationalism is a bulwark against capitalist exploitation and globalism."

Heimbach identified at the time as a Strasserist.

Heimbach is a defendant in the Sines v. Kessler lawsuit which was filed by Integrity First for America, the lawsuit claims that he and other organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, "planned and promoted violence against [a] protected group."

In 2018, Heimbach briefly served as community outreach director for the National Socialist Movement (NSM).

On March 13, 2018, Heimbach was arrested in Paoli, Indiana, on charges of domestic battery arising from a domestic dispute.

Before his arrest, Heimbach had assembled a community of neo-Nazis and anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists in a Paoli, Indiana trailer park.

Heimbach was considered the leader of this community, and he had received media attention for his role in this regard, but he lost credibility following his arrest in 2018.

In early 2020, Heimbach and Parrott once again began collaborating on projects such as the Global Minority Initiative, a "prisoner aid organization", and they publicly discussed a relaunching of the Traditionalist Worker Party.

The Russian Imperial Movement, an organization that was declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States Department of State in 2020, had extensive ties with Heimbach.

Meetings between the Russian Imperial Movement and the Traditionalist Worker Party were called "the first time that we had a meeting on the U.S. soil of the American white nationalists and then the members of the Russian far right nationalist community."

In April 2020, Heimbach published an open letter saying he was "pulling back" from the white nationalist movement.

He has since clarified that his beliefs have not moderated, and has launched a website to fundraise for White nationalist and “National Socialist” prisoners.

In July 2021, Heimbach announced his intention to reform the Traditionalist Worker Party along National Bolshevik lines.

He is currently a member of a group known as the Patriotic Socialist Front.

Heimbach and the Patriotic Socialist Front appeared during the Rage Against the War Machine rally with a Soviet flag.