Student Group at Towson University to Host White Nationalist Tomorrow
Anyone wondering what the future of organized hate might look like need cast their eyes no further than Matthew Heimbach, the outspoken and energetic former president of Youth for Western Civilization’s (YWC) erstwhile chapter at Towson University in Maryland and the aspiring leader of its newly proposed but as yet unsanctioned White Student Union. Heimbach’s YWC group was disbanded last year when its faculty advisor withdrew after members chalked white pride slogans on sidewalks. Now a senior at Towson, Heimbach has threatened to take the university to court if his new organization is not approved.
“Free speech advocates in Maryland are supporting our case and agree that University policies are at best in the gray or worst outright unconstitutional,” he told The Towerlight, the Towson student newspaper. “Our message will not be silenced, we have the right to meet. If the University decides to overstep their legal boundaries … then they will meet definitive, quick action.”
And to highlight the first planned first meeting of his White Student Union, set for tomorrow, Heimbach has invited his “personal hero,” a white nationalist writer named Jared Taylor who once wrote, “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”
Heimbach had been moving steadily to the right for some time before he reached the point of bedding down with Taylor. Heimbach made his first foray into white nationalist activism when he proposed that his hometown of Poolesville, Md., erect a memorial to its Confederate soldiers. “Preserving slavery was not the only reason for the war,” he told The Gazette of Gaithersburg, Md., at the time, likening the South of the period to “a tea party conservative against big government” today.
On April 4, 2011, the then-19-year-old Heimbach appeared before Poolesville’s commissioners to oppose (pdf) a counter-proposal for a monument that commemorated both Union and Confederate soldiers — a notion inspired not just by political correctness but by the historical fact that Maryland, a border state, had soldiers in both armies. Identifying himself as a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a re-enactor for the 8th Virginia Infantry, Heimbach argued that Poolesville had been a hotbed of secessionism. “If we were a southern town and our men fought for the south,” he said, “a memorial to both sides … is … almost insulting to the men who fought and gave their lives from Poolesville and the surrounding areas of Montgomery County.”
As previously noted at Hatewatch, Heimbach has kept himself busy since his YWC chapter went dark. As the director of the Baltimore subchapter of the National Capital Area Chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens — a group directly descended from the White Citizens Councils that resisted desegregation during the 1950s and 1960s — he attended that organization’s national conference in Nashville, Tenn., this July. The U.S. is “a terminal cancer patient,” he told the Southern Nationalist Network (SNN) at the time. “There’s nothing we can do to save her, we just need to be prepared and ready to defend ourselves and our sovereignty when the time comes.”
Later that same month, he appeared on an SNN podcast again, this time from Montgomery, Ala., where he was attending a conference of the neo-Confederate League of the South. Heimbach bragged about some of the “after hours” fun he and his fellow attendees had been having 20. They’d waved the Confederate battle flag outside the church where “the honorable and distinguished Reverend doctor” Martin Luther King had preached — a man, Heimbach sneered, “who had the audacity to change American while cheating on his wife, hanging around with Communists, and stealing and plagiarizing all his material.” On July 20, they’d visited and “flagged” the outside of the nearby Southern Poverty Law Center’s headquarters as well. The SPLC building, Heimbach wrote, looked “like an abomination created by the empire in Star Wars. You look at it and you can just feel the evil.” Apparently worried by that, Heimbach came wearing what appeared to be a holstered pistol.
Heimbach insists that the White Student Union he is proposing will be in the same mold as Towson’s existing “Black Student Union, Caribbean Student Association, Chinese Student and Scholar Association, Filipino Cultural Association, Greek Heritage Society, Hillel, Iranian Student Union, Il Circolo (The Italian Club), Korean American Student Association, Latin American Student Organization, Pakistani Student Association, Saudi Student Club, South Asian Students Association, and Vietnamese Student Association.” He added that it would allow “students to celebrate their unique identities and to learn about their forefathers and their ancestral homelands.” WSU organizers told WBAL-TV that they would act as “an advocacy group, a source of pride and a safe haven for white students who have been discriminated against.”
When an ADL report characterized Heimbach and his proposed group as “white supremacists,” Heimbach fired back in kind, encouraging readers to research “the history of the ADL, which was founded after Southerners killed a convicted child-rapist — named Leo Frank — who happened to be Jewish.” (Actually, most historians believe Frank was innocent of the charge for which he was lynched.)
As aggrieved as Heimbach pretends to be at the ADL’s criticism, the links on the WSU website make it abundantly clear that his agenda has become militantly racist. They include Taylor’s racist journal American Renaissance; the American Third Position, a white supremacist political party; the Council of Conservative Citizens; Counter Currents Publishing, the publishing arm of the “New Right,” whose goal is to “make white racial consciousness and self-assertion hegemonic”; the virulently anti-Islamic English Defense League; Jobbik, a neo-fascist Hungarian political part; the League of the South, a racist neo-secessionist group; Occidental Dissent, a white nationalist publication that claims we are living through the historical epoch of “Black Run America,” whose policy is “Jim Crow in Reverse”; Ram Z. Paul, an Internet radio show that mocks “cultural Marxism”; The Occidental Quarterly, another racist journal; “The Political Cesspool,” a white supremacist radio show based in Tennessee; the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party, and the white separatist Voice of Reason Radio network. The WSU’s recommended readings include Francis Parker Yockey’s neo-Nazi classic Imperium, as well as Sam Francis’s Essential Writings on Race, Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive Until 2025? and Jared Taylor’s newest book White Identity.
The Yale-educated Taylor, founder of the New Century Foundation and publisher of American Renaissance magazine, poses as a thought leader whose contribution to American discourse is “racial realism”—which upon closer examination turns out to be racism dressed up in academic clothing. Marshaling an array of pseudoscientific “evidence,” Taylor maintains that since human beings prefer to be with their own kinds, the races should live separately; that “there is a substantial genetic contribution to well-established racial differences in average IQ”; and that “whites have legitimate group interests just like everyone else.”
Heimbach invited Taylor to speak at the White Student Union’s first meeting, supposedly as a way to test the waters and see how much interest there is in the Towson community for such a group (though one might reasonably suspect that Heimbach and Taylor’s real purpose is to stir up as much controversy and attention for themselves as they can). Since the WSU is not formally sanctioned, Towson required it to pay for the rental of the meeting room and extra police protection. Deploring that “unconstitutional assault on free speech and assembly,” American Renaissance blogger Henry Wolff issued a call for tax-deductible donations to defray the costs. The funds were raised, the check was delivered to the university, and the event will go off on schedule, at 8:30 tomorrow evening.
“I could not think of a better way to begin the school year than by hosting a speech by [Jared Taylor],” Heimbach said about his upcoming event. “The students of Towson will finally be afforded the opportunity to learn something other than the cultural Marxism that is espoused by their professors.”
