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.
Can’t get more quintessentially English than that! 😛
Also a very English thing
:3
Mm. This is an interesting one! We know of monkeys that can deceive, and they do so without the concept of language. So it’s a bit more complicated than that! But I’m about to go into a work meeting so will have to leave it till later.
Ravens can deceive too. If you give them food, they’ll ‘hide’ it in a particular spot whilst all the other ravens are watching; then when the other ravens go away they’ll move it.
Monkeys do have language. It’s mostly non verbal, but it’s certainly there. Jane Goodall wouldn’t lie. 😛 (you know my interest in non verbal communication across cultures. It took me into looking at primates as well – rough AF in parts, but about the closest we can get to the origin of communication for us)
And … goody! Were hoping you’d throw out some brain food.
That’s my favorite raven fun fact.
I don’t know if it counts as deception or not, but cats and dogs definitely pretend like they are soooooo much hungrier than they are. As anyone who’s lived with one or both creatures know, they learn so many tricks to solicit food from us.
I like the raven’s (and crows) tool making abilities. Shows definite signs of analytical thought.
@Who?
“Political Framing” by Elisabeth Wehling is a book that made language issues a lot clearer for me. It’s pretty easy to read and it uses examples from German political language and their effects, which was nice.
http://www.elisabethwehling.com/books/
@Scild
I’ll settle for ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ aka ‘the black anthem’ for down here. There’s a ‘fathers’ in the 2nd stanza and the 3rd is chock fulla ‘God’, but I’ll take it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oejB706RXJ0
Hey, y’all got any First Nations spirituals or some such up there? I dunno, might be cool to have summat like that as the national anthem ?
wwth said
I think it must! I’ve had my new kitty beasts since December and we’re still hashing out the feeding* thing. The one thing I know is that they both are keen to convince me they’re starving at all hours of the day and night.
Kitty TMI follows:
*I’ve got “Jack Sprat” and his “wife” in that the baby (baby tank now!) was a starved waif and will probably always tend to overeat and the “runway model” who was skinnier than svelte when he finally left the safety of our closet really needs to free feed. My best solution so far is to keep Stoffy closed off in the bedroom at night with a full bowl while I feed Des twice daily (and Stoffy gets two additional meals while Des eats or else he’ll shove Des aside and eat his kitten chow.) Stoffy has filled out some and Des has lost most of the paunch he developed before I figured out he was snarfing up a lot of Stoffy’s kibble.
@Axe, I’m obviously not one to say what sort of First Nations song our anthem should be, but I like the Sunrise Song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdYlFIR13PE
waniskâ! pêtâpan ôma
âsay piyêsîsak kî-nikamowak
ê-miyonâkwan kitaskînaw
Wake up! The sun is coming.
The birds are already singing
How beautiful this land of ours is.
It’s a simple little song, but I like the idea of our anthem being just a greeting for the sun. Not about borders or pride or history, about birds and sunlight. I think that’s a better idea.
@Who?
This isn’t praising men, that is true. It instead excluding everyone who isn’t men, which is the same thing as ‘in all our sons command’. It only speaks to part of the population, and doesn’t bother with the rest.
I don’t really see any difference, tbh. Anthems were written once, and that version will always exist. but if we want to keep them, they need to grow and change as our understanding of our national cultures and how we interact with each other and the world changes.
(I’m always hoping it changes for the better, btw.)
Hambeast,
I go through the same thing with Dracarys, the kitty in my avatar. She was two when I adopted her and all I know about her life is that she was picked up as a stray and bounced around a couple of shelters. She was very skinny. She will just eat anything she can get. She’s calmed down a bit but at first I wouldn’t even be able to stop and take my coat and shoes off after coming home from grocery shopping because she’d jump up on the counter and bite into the bread right through the wrapper. You put cat food in her dish, she eats every morsel. But Darrow is a free feeder and he refused to defend his food from her. The only way I could keep him from starving was to shut her in my bedroom while he ate. It’s not safe to leave meat, cheese, cookies, donuts or bread out as long as she’s around. If I make a tuna sandwich I have to shut her in the bedroom because she will not wait for me to dish some out for her. She’ll jump up on the counter and steal. A couple times she’s thrown herself against the door trying to break it down and get to the tuna.
Her name means dragonfire and it’s appropriate. She’s got a fiery temper and like a dragon will always swoop in and take any food she can get!
My personal opinion is that the text as a whole is actually quite alright. It seems not so much like we just sing the unproblematic part but instead that we got rid of the problematic stuff that’s not who we wanted to be anymore and kept the part that reflects who we want to be: Unity (we were a divided country for most of the time this was our anthem), Freedom and the rule of law as the cornerstone to a good life for everyone. I can still get behind that, today. And I like that it’s inward focused. It’s no longer: We’re so much better and we’re claiming all your lands. It’s a commitment to what we have to do here to make this a good place to live for everyone. Would probably be better to change the music if anything, since most people won’t understand the text while the music might bring back some … unfortunate memories.
I wasn’t aware of there being any big discussion about changing it, to be honest. Brotherly can perhaps be argued to be exclusive and fatherland is a word that’s already dead everywhere else, so having “father” in it, is really not it’s biggest problem. It’s one of those right-wing words, too. You say “my country” not “my fatherland”. Neither of those sound exclusive to me personally – as in I don’t feel excluded, mainly because the immediate associations I have with the words are not “brother” and “father” but “in friendship together” and “my country/archaic artifact word”. Which of course does not mean they don’t provoke that association for a lot of other people (I really don’t know this), in which case it would connote the exclusion of half the population to them, and be problematic because of that.
@Axe and Rhuu
I don’t mean to say that you don’t make good points or that I’m right and you’re wrong. Just wanted to add my thoughts as this has got me thinking a bit.
Glad your anthems are getting changed to something more inclusive. Unfortunately my country went backwards in that regard. President Alan Garcia managed to promote a sneak change to it, back in 2010, to pander to evangelicals.
The lyrics that expressly recognized slavery were taken out and instead replaced with lyrics which explicitly exalted “Jacob’s God”.
I refuse to sing that drivel and feel particularly excluded by it.
@Scild
If I wanted to be really cheeky, I’d suggest we just replace O Canada entirely with Maple Leaf Forever. It’s totally gender neutral! (It just takes pokes at the French.) XP
…I go to a lotta baseball games (Jays opening weekend in two weeks!) and they play the bilingual version of O Canada, where the bridge lapses into French, then turns back to English in the final chorus, but I read the lyrics to the French version and holy hell is it ever different. Way more militaristic and religious. This is the translated French version:
So yeah. Swords and crosses. O.o
The Finnish national anthem is pretty much gender neutral (the last line of the first verse is “dear land of our fathers”, other than that it’s perfectly gender neutral), but then again the Finnish language doesn’t have gendered pronouns. It’s also worth it to mention that Finland was the first country in the world to give all people of sufficient age the right to vote, without any bias towards gender or race or language or creed in 1906. Of course, around that time Finland was pretty isolated, but still… (It should be noted that you have to be 18 years old and a citizen of Finland to vote in national elections, although for local and parish elections you just have to resident in the area of question for at least a year.) If anyone is interested, here’s the first verse of “Our Land”, the Finnish national anthem (translated by me, the Finnish name is “Maamme”, the Swedish name “Vårt land”):
Oh our land,
Finland, our country of birth!
Ring out, oh golden word!
There’s no valley, no hill,
No water, no beach more dear to me.
Than this northern homeland
Dear land of our fathers!
Off topic: I’m still around, though I am deeply stressed out. There’s work being done in my apartment building again. They’re building a new elevator/lift for the building which means that there are building noises from around 8 am until 4 pm. I’m pretty much confined in my apartment now during the day, but I try to go out in the sunshine after 4 pm. The days are about to become longer than the nights, so that’s a good thing. Plus, the roads around here are slowly becoming free from snow and ice thanks to the temperatures becoming a bit more manageable. Oh, and I should probably mention that I may be getting a bit of translation work. I may be translating a book on autism into Finnish, for an autism support group that’s helping me out with my Asperger’s Syndrome and the attendant issues (hence why I can’t function while I’m stressed). Wish me luck! 🙂
Good luck!
Last baseball game I went to, the Jays came down to play the Twins. Twins won. It was a good time. I should go more often.
It seems like Bluejay fans travel a lot? Cause there were a ton of their fans there.
And good luck, Monzach
WWTH, the Blue Jays TV broadcast team (Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler) frequently comment on how many Jays fans they meet at road games. Of course in some places they see more than others. Games in Seattle often seem more like Jays home games than Mariner games because of all the Jays fans who come down from Vancouver.
It’s definitely more involved than this. I’ve seen the claims before that if your language doesn’t have a word for a color you can’t distinguish that color. That’s not true at all. The study that’s referencing showed a better correct recollection of color if the language has a word for it. That’s an example of what’s going on here. It’s easier to remember things if you have words for them. But it’s not the only component. And not having a way of communicating a concept doesn’t make you unable to grasp the concept. So you can still lie if you don’t have a word for it (We wouldn’t need to invent a word for it if it didn’t first exist!). You might be less likely to think up the concept on your own if it wasn’t a thing in your culture, though!
Re anthems: remembering the past is essential; preserving it is not always (Confederate statues, anyone?).
Re alt-right problems: in addition to the subject of this post, plus Southern (& McCarthy?) being barred from the UK (there’s also some chat that the paperwork she shared could be fake), there’s been a blow-up around another alt-right person that honestly I’d never heard of until now.
CW: while some of this story is just horribly, hilariously awful, there’s a lot of disturbing and nasty detail, too.
e.g. of the hilariously awful: Gariepy apparently said he’d be a great stay-at-home dad because he’d worked with lab monkeys at university
Good luck, and good translating, Monzach!
Definitive different opinions thanks.
I still think that other problems are more important. (equal pay to name one that was in the news)
I don’t think there is a big movement to tackle either topic:
Bank or National Anathem.
Thanks for LittleLurker who did voice it better than I did.
Can we have another discusion instead of the one that I had with my mother today why the sentence “Islam is not part of Germany” was bad/wrong.
i know i’m a bit late to this party but re: anthems: in a recent facebook discussion a bunch of friends of mine came to the not-entirely-sarcastic conclusion that paul simon’s “american tune” should replace our current u.s. national anthem. (a quick google of the lyrics, if you’re unfamiliar with them, will give you a bit of insight into the particular level of cynicsm my friends and i harbor. also, the melody is drawn directly from bach’s st matthew passion, and it’s gorgeous.)
@Hippodameia
Maybe. It’s not like there’s a shortage of assholes in the world. Y*d doesn’t seem to be here to have a conversation, either way.