“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.” — Frederick Douglass

WASHINGTON, DC–In 2018, Matthew Heimbach had a stint in the National Socialist Movement (NSM), but this was short-lived as the then-NSM leader Jeff Scheop and current leader Burt Collucci expelled him charging him with being a communist. Heimbach pushed back on that saying he was actually a Strasserist, which is a form of Nazism that, similar to the efforts of Sunday’s rally organizers, works to incorporate socialist position within a fascist framework. “Communism is international socialism by its very ideological texts, Strasserism is a national form of socialism,” Heimbach said.

As this has been an ideology he has maintained, it stands to reason that he would indeed find common ground with the so-called “Rage Against the War Machine” rally put on at the Lincoln Memorial by those who have proclaimed themselves as leading a coalition of the left and right against government globalists but in truth have been comprised primarily of far-right activists, pro-Putin figures and conspiracy theorists. Ironically, many of those who participated despise the band whose name they stole for this event, some calling them corporate globalists.

Heimbach was there with a new organization called the Patriot Socialist Front (PSF), which, according to It’s Going Down, also includes Shandon Simpson, a onetime Ohio National Guardsman who represented the neo-fascist Vanguard America at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and was pictured alongside James Alex Fields, who would later drive his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, injuring several people and killing one, 34-year-old Heather Heyer. He said in a recent PSF podcast that he intended to table there while the PSF leader, who is only known as “Andrew” said they planned to fly the Soviet Union flag, the so-called “National Bolshevik” flag and also the Russian Empire flag at the same time. Indeed, when they appeared, Heimbach was holding the flag of the Soviet Union while their shirts were emblazoned with the PSF logo which was the logo of Heimbach’s old Traditionalist Worker’s Party with the pitchfork in the center replaced with a hammer and sickle.

On their Telegram channel today in their first post from Washington, DC, they touted themselves as the “Only Duginist group in America,” a reference to neo-fascist Aleksandr Dugin, who founded the National Bolshevik Party in Russia and is an advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In August his daughter, journalist Darya Dugina, who shared and promoted his positions was killed in a car bomb while driving her father’s car.

This isn’t the first time that Heimbach has been associated with these particular circles. In 2021, a series of rallies under the banner “Medicare 4 All” were to be held across the country and Heimbach was listed as one of the speakers for the Muncie, Indiana rally using the name “Matt H. Bach” on their graphics promoting the event. The blowback from this on social media resulted in the entire Muncie rally being canceled, its promoters denying that he was even booked and that a neo-Nazi “infiltrated” their graphics department, prompting even more scrutiny after critics noted the announcement was on the group’s own social media networks.

Heimbach is a well-known face amongst hate circles, helping to organize the 2017 Charlottesville rally under the banner of the Nationalist Front (NF) an umbrella organization comprised of Heimbach’s Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP), the National Socialist Movement (NSM), White Lives Matter, the League of the South, Aryan Strikeforce, Vanguard America – members of which would later break off to form Patriot Front – and a number of Klan groups. He however, began to see a downturn after his arrest in 2018 when he reportedly attacked his wife Brooke after she and her stepfather, TWP co-founder Matthew Parrot, caught Heimbach and Parrot’s wife Jessica having sex and Heimbach attacked Parrot at a local Wal-Mart. This incident effectively ended the TWP while antifascists made light of it all jokingly calling it “The Night of the Wrong Wives.” Heimbach pleaded guilty to battery and served 38 days in prison for violating the probation he received after harassing a black protester at a 2016 Trump campaign rally and declared he was done with politics for good and his wife filed for divorce which was finalized in May 2019.

Heimbach briefly attempted to paint himself as a reformed neo-Nazi and began to work with the Light Upon Light but as was the case with his onetime colleague Jeff Scheop, who also worked with Light Upon Light and also painting himself as a reformed neo-Nazi, doubts were raised about his sincerity. By 2021, Heimbach began touting himself as a “National Bolshevik” and went back to neo-Nazi politics.

While Heimbach was not a speaker, the event itself still boasted dubious individuals representing Oathkeepers and disciples of neo-fascist Lyndon LaRouche. In addition, author, pundit and former Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter was also scheduled to speak but had been taken off the bill and instead gave his speech on his Twitter account. In 2011, he was convicted of a number of charges stemming from attempting to solicit sex from a person he was told was 15 but turned out to be a police decoy, including unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communications facility, corruption of minors, indecent exposure, possessing instruments of crime, and criminal attempt. He was paroled in 2014. Despite not speaking in person at the rally, Ritter still planned to host an after part at an area Hilton.

The figurehead for the event was comedian and podcaster Jimmy Dore and when spoke, he sarcastically suggested that America doesn’t take care of its Nazis the way it does Ukrainian Nazis, a reference to the Azov Battalion in Ukraine, which is what Russian officials and supporters of their aggression against Ukraine use to justify their assault on the country, ironically ignoring fascists in their land such as Dugin. “Why are we sending that money to Nazi’s in Ukraine when we could be funding Nazi’s here in America struggling to buy eggs?” he said. “Isn’t that just like our government to neglect all the Nazi’s we have here in America?” Dore however, also took issue with the opposition to the rally and did his usual dismissal of concerns of racism and fascism amongst the far right figures he has been working with as irrelevant, saying that it should not prevent working across the proverbial aisle, often citing historical Black figures and misrepresenting their words and work in the process. At the rally for example, he noted that the Black Panther Party marched “hand in hand” with the Ku Klux Klan for welfare benefits, referencing an anecdote he regularly uses about a protest that was supposed to have happened in Las Vegas.

This has backfired recently. The family of Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton had taken issue with this misappropriation and when they publicly made their objection known, Dore, who had often cited Hampton, despite his father being a Chicago police officer at the time Hampton was murdered by Chicago Police in 1969. Also, as Jacqueline Luqman of the Black Agenda Report noted, there did not seem to be any real outreach to members of the Black community from rally organizers.  “There’s the fact that if the Libertarian Party and anyone else who sponsored and organized this event were serious about building the ‘anti-war movement,’ why didn’t they reach out to the very visible and very active Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led anti-imperialist organizations and invite their representatives to speak?” she wrote, coining the hashtag #AntiWarSoWhite and noting that it might be because of who is currently in control of the Libertarian Party, the primary sponsor of the event.

Last year, the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus took over the party, much to the concerns of party members who have called out its far right and racist leanings. In a since-deleted tweet the New Hampshire Libertarian Party, which is a major segment of the Mises Caucus, declared on Martin Luther King Day last year, “Black people in America get special access to essential drugs, receive special federal funding due to race, and are first-in-line for every college and every job. America isn’t in debt to black people. If anything it’s the other way around.” Jeremy Kauffman of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party also had a since-deleted tweet from 2021 declaring that “if 1,000 transpeople were murdered every year but there were no taxes, we’d live in a substantially more moral world for reference about 40 people transgender people are murdered in the US per year(sic)”. The Mises Caucus have proclaimed they are continuing the “Ron Paul Revolution”, which is particularly apt as Former congressman Paul, who was among the speakers at the rally, has come under fire over the years for a newsletter that he published in the 1990s where it was claimed that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced underage girls and boys’’ black activists were ridiculed by suggesting that New York be named “Zooville” or “Lazyopolis” the 1992 Los Angeles riots ended “when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks,’’ and that “Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.”

The rally’s turnout was a disappointment to organizers who instead of looking at aversion to the neo-fascist, far right and pro-Putin elements that made up the event, chose to blame leftists for suppressing the numbers.