Who's Zooming Who?

The March for Medicare for All is an organization attempting to organize marches in cities across the country, in support of Medicare for All. Sounds good, right? Overall, not a terrible idea. A few weeks ago though, a chapter in Indiana caught holy hell when they posted the speakers they were planning on having at their march. On the photo, one of them was tagged with the name "M. Heim." It just so happened that a whole lot of us who are familiar with the fuckery of the far right immediately recognized "M. Heim" as Matthew Heimbach, founder of the now defunct Traditionalist Worker Party, a Neo-Nazi group. Heimbach was also one of the four or five primary organizers of Unite the Right in 2017. The Traditionalist Worker Party came to an end when Heimbach was arrest over a domestic assault, after his wife and her stepfather (the other cofounder of the TWP) caught Heimbach having sex with his mother in law. No, I'm not making that up. It's not hyperbole. It is what it is. Classy guy. After the TWP crumbled, Heimbach was sent packing after attempts to join the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) chapter nearest to him. 

Now, an immediate dogfight erupted online when it was pointed out this M4A march was going to feature a Neo-Nazi. Heimbach has made some noises as if he had renounced his white supremacist beliefs, so there was no small amount of pushback against him being removed. It was essentially along the lines of, "How long do people have to pay for their mistakes?" and again, I'm not being hyperbolic, "But he attended an anti-racism training," along with the now tired, "Well how are we supposed to get anything done if we don't work with people we disagree with?" 

Today, Newsy published a piece, containing some contents of an interview with Heimbach, who is right back on his bullshit. Often, I will not link to articles containing anything like an interview with these chuds. There are ideas anti-racists and antifascists have tried to hammer home for a good long time already. These last few weeks of Heimbach's antics bring those into stark clarity. 

First and foremost is that if you are in any way involved in any kind of organizing or any kind of political organization, you have to be familiar with the strategies, tactics and faces of the far right. Heimbach's picture doesn't end up on the national M4A March Instagram page if anyone in that chain of information has even as passing familiarity with the most prominent fascist organizers of the last five or ten years. The national group has stated they have disavowed the Indiana group, and that they were basically taken advantage of. It doesn't really pass the smell test, for me. If you have been involved in any kind of organizing or political organization or action in the last ten years, you should know who these people are. From a self preservation standpoint, you don't want it to be possible for them to pull shit like this and make you look like a bunch of rubes, From a moral, ethical and decency standpoint, you don't want to accidentally introduce a whole slew of people in your organization or who follow your organizations lead to a Neo-Nazi as if he's a good guy. If his name had appeared on a list as "M. Heim," he might have slipped through. The reason someone like Heimbach wants access to the kind of crowd a M4A march is going to draw is recruiting. 

He's going to get up on a stage like that and he's going to outline the very real grievances created by the healthcare system in the United States. He's going to find fault with elites and the wealthy. Sounds great, right? Well, the thing is, when Heimbach starts talking about elites and the wealthy, he's not talking about the wealthy as an actual measurable economic demographic, but he's not going to say that right away. He's going to wait until he's siphoned off a sizable enough group of people, and he's systematically cut them off from the rest of the M4A folks, stoked their anger and fear, and then he's going to tell them what he really thinks. When he's talking about the "elites and the wealthy" he's talking about Jews, and he's going to tell them he has the solution to the problems of our healthcare system and economic inequality, and whatever else they have grievances about. 

Even if he doesn't get quite that far, by getting on a stage like that, he definitely gets a lot of people leaving that event and saying, "That guy had some good things to say." Later, when it turns out he's a Neo-Nazi, suddenly there's even more reason to "work with people with disagree with," even if he's a Neo-Nazi, because, "Hey, we agree on this much, don't we?" 

This leads to the second thing... Someone like Matt Heimbach targets something like the M4A March because he knows there is a legitimate set of grievances he can exploit. He's not going to tell you that for him, Medicare for All, doesn't mean Black people or Brown people or immigrants or LGBTQ people. Medicare 4 All white people probably sounds great to Matt Heimbach, and he wants you to help him get it for them, so he can ascend in status. On top of that, these will tell you anything you want to hear, because the goal is to recruit from among your ranks and to cause enough chaos to render your organization totally useless. 

What needs to be understood is the far right figures who are good at this are going to manipulate the good will and self interest of anyone they need to, in whatever way they need to. They are going to leverage those things for every penny or inch of status they can secure. This is yet another reason it is imperative to understand their strategies and their rhetorical tricks. This is why it gets dangerous to start wading into the "we should be able to at least have a conversation with people we disagree with." The overwhelming majority of this country is utterly, shamefully ill equipped for those conversations with far right extremists who have even half a brain. Our current political environment is all the evidence you should need to understand this. 

The thorniest part of all of this is dealing with people who are actually former members of extremist groups. Heimbach was never a "former Neo-Nazi". He claimed to be, but kept seeking platforms and kept seeking attention. The people who are genuinely "former" are not going to do that. The chances are those people are going to be dealing with a level of trauma which precludes this for a good while. I may hate their beliefs, but I recognize they've lost the only communities they've had, they are dealing with well earned guilt and shame, and considering how many of these groups operate, the chances they're going to have PTSD are high. They're going to need support and understanding, and support and understanding doesn't look like propping them up to be the "go to" for your anti-extremist activities or organizations, until they've had a chance to process what they need to. It can take years before they're genuinely ready for anything like that, if you're actually interested in their well being. Many of them have helped form some of the understanding we have today about how these groups recruit and how they infiltrate other spaces. 

This conversation often gets entangled with discussions about what I would refer to as a "soft radicalization." There is a large group of white Americans who have experienced this. We've seen tons of copy dedicated to them. There have been dozens of pieces written about people losing family members and long time friends, after they've become consumed by far right ideologies and conspiracy theories. The overwhelming majority of these people aren't going to go out and join some group openly dedicated to the goals of far right extremists. They are unknowingly repeating far right talking points and rhetoric, as the information environment they tend to exist in has become increasingly infiltrated and influenced by the far right. They might not even consider themselves far right. They've been part of the drift of mainstream politics to the right, and they are unaware of any drift to the right, because the information environments they engage with are overwhelmed with messaging suggesting they are the majority, and what has changed is the country is sliding into socialism and communism. Part of the problem here being the mainstream of conservatism is evincing a near total overlap between its goals and those of these same far right extremists. I've extensively detailed the failures of our most far reaching media institutions to deal with this problem responsibly, you can find that in a number of my previous posts. For the average person, who believes they are going to "connect" with erstwhile family members, friends or acquaintances who have become consumed with extremist beliefs, the only path is through understanding exactly what the process and strategy is to encourage people to begin to engage with an environment which isn't wholly dominated by these extremist beliefs. 

If you can't get Aunt Jenny and Uncle Joe to start paying attention to something outside of Fox News and Facebook groups dedicated to further inculcating them to extremism, you're wasting your time. Whatever progress you may think you've made in your sympathetic heart to heart, is going to be erased within five minutes of them plugging themselves back in. There is no process of de-radicalization which can be done quickly. This 30% of Americans (roughly) who now hold extremists beliefs and espouse extremist rhetoric, didn't get to this point overnight. This has been a 40 years process, beginning with the end of the Fairness Doctrine, and culminating in the formation of "The Tea Party." The end of the Fairness Doctrine allowed for people to begin to whittle their information environments down to exclude anything outside of their already established belief systems. Conservative media boomed, and as a result, in part because of capitalism, in part because of human behavior and in part because extremists have had a home around the fringes of conservatism for all of American history, those environments became more and more extreme. With the advent of The Tea Party, it went a step further. At that point, the base of the conservative movement was moved into fully and functionally extremist rhetoric and beliefs. The War on Terror set the stage, with its xenophobia and nationalist roar, but it was The Tea Party movement which came to make full use of that stage. 

It's often suggested the appearance of Black Lives Matter and the movement for police accountability, and other socially conscious movements are responsible for the extremist shift of conservatism. This is a willful ignorance of even recent history. The election of Barack Obama was the true inciting moment. It's well documented that Obama's election coincided with an explosion in membership in extremist groups and a new influx of ready recruits to extremist websites and message boards. If you're looking for some way to understand how so many people could continue to espouse the idea that there's been some grand conspiracy to "steal" the election from Donald Trump, look no further than the idea that a covert Kenyan Muslim was somehow allowed to ascend to the presidency because of a shadowy cabal of "deep state" actors. In this way, the entire election conspiracy theory is just recycled. It's only real new aspect is the direct assault on the idea of election counts being factually represented. 

You may feel it is your responsibility, your aspect of the work to make a better tomorrow, to make the country a better place, by attempting to help pull people out of the death cult which is now American conservatism. It's a laudable goal. Do not underestimate the degree to which the people who have worked to achieve it are counting on your good will, and the self interest you have in trying to retrieve loved ones. Do not think this is a process which is going to be completed with a handful of heartfelt conversations. Do the homework. Understand the process and the strategies, understand the strategies used to help instill these extremist beliefs in people. Do not go into it thinking that because you've been reading the NYT, The Atlantic or any of the major news outlets, you are prepared. You're not. If you do, you may end up at some point repeating the classic Aretha Franklin refrain, "Who's zooming who?"