By David Futrelle
It’s like a regular Peyton Place, but with Nazis. Violent Alt-Nazi doofus Matthew Heimbach, leader of the so-called Traditionalist Worker Party, has gotten himself into a little bit of trouble with the law, and his followers, and perhaps most of all his extended family after allegedly assaulting his wife and father-in-law after allegedly being caught in flagrante delicto with, er, his mother-in-law.
It’s a novel way to try to fulfill the Traditional Worker Party’s mission of “defending Faith, Family, and Folk,” I’ll grant you that, but Heimbach had apparently been honoring Family pretty enthusiastically with his mother-in-law for several months, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
According to the police report on the incident (which you can find here, courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center), Heimbach’s wife and father in law (now ex-TWP spokesman Matt Parrot) discovered the affair last week, and after being confronted with this, young Mr. Heimbach and not-quite-as-young Mrs. Parrott said they had broken it off.
But dad and daughter didn’t believe it, so they decided to spy on the star-crossed couple to see if they could really manage the difficult task of not boinking each other. The amateur spies snuck up on the trailer where the two had gone — did I mention that they all live in the same trailer park? — and peered in a window only to find that, well, the affair wasn’t quite over. Matt Parrott literally watched himself get cucked by the leader of the organization he had sworn loyalty to.
At this point, the police report notes, Heimbach’s wife
got scared and ran away while [Matt Parrot] stayed behind watching the encounter on a box through a window. While doing this the box broke and he ran around the trailer to confront Matthew.
It’s like a fucking Coen brothers movie.
In the scuffle that ensued, the report continues, the lovely lad allegedly choked his father-in-law twice, leaving him briefly unconscious both times. Matthew H. fled to his trailer, where he was later arrested for the alleged assault on Matt Parrott and for allegedly assaulting his wife in front of their young children.
In case you’re having trouble following all this, one Twitterer has prepared a chart:
https://twitter.com/itsadamntragedy/status/973786599556354048
On the police report, all those involved declared that their occupation was “white naitonalist.”
When a reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center called papa Parrott to ask him about the whole weird thing, the not-so-proud papa-in-law bitterly declared that
I’m done. I’m out. SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life.
He’s not the only one quitting, evidently. The TWP web site is currently down and the future of the group (or whatever emerges from all this mishegoss) is in doubt.
Over on Gab — the social media site that Twitter-banned Nazis have made their home — some mourned the TWP implosion.
A few hoped that something could be salvaged from the wreckage FOR THE SAKE OF THE (WHITE) CHILDREN.
Others gloated.
A parody TWP account offered a new slogan for the now apparently non-existent group.
Still others riffed on the same theme.
And of course there were the memes.
This fellow, meanwhile, knows who the real villain in all of this is: WHITE WOMEN.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the current troubles of the Alt-Right have a lot less to do with female betrayal than they do with the fact that it’s a movement full of macho shithead losers overflowing with hate and rage and bitterness and ego.
Also the fact that people have been standing up to them every time they try to organize anything.
With all the horrific crap that’s going on these days, it’s sort of nice to see some of the world’s worst humans bickering and demoralized.
The word is “cuckolded”. The other word doesn’t exist.
Do Female Y*d’s comments even adhere to the comments policy at this point?
Plus, people who hate on a particular group generally tell themselves that any member of the group they know personally and don’t hate is “one of the rare good ones,” “the exception that proves the rule,” or something. I can definitely see someone mentally classifying his mother, and *possibly* his wife or girlfriend (if she’s submissive and pretty enough), as “good women in need of protection” while sincerely decrying all other women as harpies trying to subvert civilization.
@WWTH:
Thank you for that answer. I bow to your superior knowledge both of Americans and of misogyny.
As for South African travel restrictions, that’s something of a different matter (although also abhorrent.)
@Scildfreja:
<3
Generally, re trailer parks:
IIRC, Violet Beauregarde lives in one, and she's one of the kindest, gentlest people anyone could hope to meet.
Anyone who throws accusations around that malign her, gets a big ol' sideeye from me.
(We should never forget that Trump didn't draw his support from impoverished hinterlands. The people who supported him and weren't already party-line Republicans were generally suburbanites earning above the national average. As ever, poor people get blamed for the sins of wealthy people.)
@Scild
Going the way of the wolf, eh? Favor the way of the bear more, myself 😛
Well spoken.
@Scildfreja
Aye, just gotta keep workin’ the mindfulness of language. I’ll get there. 🙂
@Diego
This is my assessment as well, which is why I support BLMTO in most of its demands, but the one that I disagree with is the one that ended the Student Resource Officer (SRO) program in schools. Essentially, it was a program where a uniformed Toronto Police Services (TPS) constable was present in certain Toronto high schools after the gang-motivated shooting of 15-year-old Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute in 2008. Opinion polls of the students consistently indicated a majority felt safer with the police presence, but a certain segment of the student body felt uncomfortable or targeted and thus the TDSB shuttered the program.
This move strikes me as counter-intuitive. Not only does the TPS lose its liaison with students and can no longer offer them somebody in authority they can talk to about being intimidated or pressured into doing something illegal, but the cops no longer have the opportunity to observe what it means to be a student in these schools. If the problem is that the cops are in predominantly black/Latinx schools, that can be fixed, but this program felt like a step in the right direction and now it’s gone… and now what?
@Scildfreja
You ma’am deserve an award for composure and cool use of logic in the most adverse of circumstances. You would’ve made an excellent lawyer.
Absolute truth. The media likes to maintain the narrative that it’s White, working class families, without much access to education, voting for fascists like Trump; despite the fact that the bigotry runs more rampant in the upper classes.
Anybody who has ever been to a private event, with these people, will tell you exactly what kind of person they are. I’ve heard far more vanity and bigotry from upper class White people, than from the least educated, lowest income Nazi.
cw: rape, harassment
So apparently something bad happened in my city three months ago. I only heard about it now, and rather wish I hadn’t.
There was a sentencing in a defamation suit. A defamation suit about a law student telling her friends and student tutors about being sexually assaulted by another student. The rumours then spread in a way that, according to the court, the student should have anticipated and taken measures to prevent. It is defamation because the other student was not accused or convicted of any form of sexual assault, and “her experience of the events” does not justify claims of rape or sexual assault, ie. telling other students what happened. The plaintiff was awarded 10 000 eur in damages. Defendant also got a small fine and has to pay a nominal sum for court expenses.
The defendant says she went to the police to report the assault. She gave it up because she was treated in an unwelcoming manner and told that proving a crime occurred would be almost impossible. She was also warned about the possibility of a defamation suit.
At least one alternative media outlet published the story with her picture and name. I can only imagine what is happening to her right now. I hope she stays alive.
I’m very confused and frankly disappointed to learn this is the reality here. I hope the sentence gets reversed in a higher court, but I’m a bit short on optimism at the moment. Obviously the public details of a case like this can’t always be expected to make sense or paint an accurate picture of the whole, but. If this is version of events is going to end up being the takeaway, maybe this country just needs to be slash-and-burned to the ground and sown with salt.
@Katamount, we all will. Words are hard! They are very close to the mechanisms of how we think, so changing how we use them involves changing our beliefs. That’s really hard work. A lifetime project for everyone.
Guards don’t always develop empathy for the guarded. Sometimes they develop the opposite. Given the military, us-vs-them mindset the police in the USA are instilled with, I don’t feel like having them in schools is a great idea. Just my opinion, though!
And in other news, the giant radio conglomerate formerly known as ClearChannel, which owned a lot of right-wing talk stations as well as being the Borg Cube threatening the very existence of independent and diverse radio voices … is bankrupt. Chapter 11.
@dust bunny, that’s so terrible :C I mean, it happens every day in a thousand ways, but each time is awful. I hope she gets through it. I hope she gets some justice too, but, well, I won’t pin my hopes on that too hard.
@Diego, hee! I’m glad you thought I was measured. You should’ve seen the paragraphs I edited out 😉
@Scildfreja
Good point. I’ve read the reasoning of the TDSB and while it strikes me that the SRO program was a “let’s look decisive” decision done under pressure, I agree with them insofar as more emphasis on social work would have a far bigger impact. And I have read accounts of Somali students being reported to immigration authorities, which is just abhorrent, so clearly it was being abused. I’m still of the opinion that the SRO program could have served an important purpose with changes, but ultimately time will tell.
@Surplus – All I’m getting are results about iHeartMedia, and no links to right wing radio shows. Do you have a link talking about that?
I think iHeartMedia was advertising up here in Canada, actually. I seem to remember that logo on billboards? (Not owning them, they’re all owned by Pattinson up here I think.)
… Well TIL that apparently Pattinson doesn’t believe in climate change?
GREAT.
@Valentin
Sorry, I thought you were making a joke that Nazis are terrible at presenting a good image.
‘Optics’ is used widely outside right-wing circles, in politics and PR etc.
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/optics.html
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07FOB-onlanguage-t.html
Just because it should be repeated:
I agree with Scildfreja.
One observation:
Most party(groups) have sexscandals (okay not like that one), they can survive that.
If your group can’t survive to loose one member, you have a problem.
Okay different from country to country. (nearly of topic)
I know of one prominent German politican whose carier survived an illigimate child.
jo,
it’s okay! I’m not very good at making sarcasm or understanding it ? so my jokes are quite bad. you can recognise them – they are not funny? thanks for the links!
Apropos of language and intent and what not: a few weeks ago on Twitter, of all places, I was gently reminded that “marijuana” as a word has a racist (anti-Latinx) connotation.
It had just somehow never occurred to me, but when I thought about it… well, I learned something. Duh.
As for trailer parks, well. I’ve lived in a trailer park before, and I have to say, the people that lived there were overall pretty good folks. Let me put it this way: they behaved as well as or better than the trust fund kids I’ve known, and had they started out with those advantages, they would have been indistinguishable from them.
Not that that’s necessarily a compliment, now that I think about it.
On the subject of the use of problematic language and insults in debate I find it more effective to speak politely but to carry the sharp spear of logic. They start out with insults and threats, hit them with logic in a weak spot, the true believers will be compelled to defend their position with obviously faulty illogic through which you can thrust the spear and lever them right open. If they don’t really believe what they are saying, then they will try and change the subject or just plain flounce out. I’ve been having great fun doing this with gun nuts and britain firsters recently.
@ misophistry
Speaking of which 🙂
I keep falling into that one myself so I’m certainly not criticising. I quite like the ‘gun-fetishist’ alternative that I picked up here though, so I keep trying to remind myself to use that instead,
Very well, Gun-fetishist it is, and actually a much more accurate description. Words are important, and have meanings beyond what was intended.
I’m partial to gun-fondler, myself.
I still use Tackleberry.
Yeah it’s VERY different from country to country. Here in Sweden we’ve had a lot of politicians having affairs, getting divorced etc. It does make the news, but not the front pages, and it never really hurts anyone’s career. I understand it’s much different in the US.
Although most of the people we debate are unlikely to change their minds, those who might will be put off by insults. But on the other hand mocking the real bad apples can give us a morale boost no?
I think perhaps there is a difference between mocking and insulting but it’s a grey area.
Gun-lover?
I like to call them gun-worshippers or gun-fetishists.