White nationalist to launch lecture series at University of Tennessee

Rachel Ohm | Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel

Show Caption Hide Caption Former Trump supporter has 'no regrets' regarding 2016 campaign incident Matthew Heimbach, a white nationalist, says Donald Trump 'deputized crowd' to help provide security against protesters.

A white nationalist group is planning to launch a lecture series at the University of Tennessee later this month, although the university said the group misrepresented its intent when setting up reservations.

Matthew Heimbach, co-founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, is planning to launch the lecture series "National Socialism or Death!" on Feb. 17.

The talk has been promoted on Gab, a social networking platform among the alt-right; Stormfront, a white supremacist and Neo-Nazi website; and a website for the Traditionalist Worker Party Tennessee, but a university spokesman said Friday officials were taken by surprise to learn of it.

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Someone called the university last month to reserve space at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture using the name of a local church as the host, said Vice Chancellor of Communications Ryan Robinson.

After making the initial reservation, the requester called back to change the name of the contact person to that of an out-of-state resident with ties to a racial separatist group.

The name of the person was not immediately available, but Robinson said it was not Heimbach.

"Since then, we have learned that the church did not reserve the space, was entirely unaware of the event and has no affiliation with the person who made the request," Robinson said in an email.

"We have serious concerns that this group misrepresented the nature of the event and their affiliations. To our knowledge, no one at the University of Tennessee invited this group to campus."

The talk follows an increase in white nationalist activity on campus including several instances of hate speech on the Rock, a boulder that serves as a campus message board.

The Stormfront post criticized Chancellor Beverly Davenport for a statement she made last week condemning hate speech and calling on the campus to do more to speak out against it.

"(The) University of Tennessee has been declaring the term 'white pride', which has appeared on The Rock, along with other pro-white and Traditional messages, as 'hate speech,'" a user under the name Confederate 28 posted on Thursday, along with the information about Heimbach's speech.

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"UT's Chancellor has been crying about TWP's activism on campus since September, and has started her anti-white clamoring afresh last week."

Robinson said the chancellor stands by her comments and he was not sure why Heimbach would want to hold the event on the UT campus.

It has not been determined yet if the event will be open to the public, and Robinson said the university is working with law enforcement to evaluate the situation.

He said he was not sure whether the university could legally do anything to change or prevent the talk from happening, even if administrators don't agree with the content.

Who is Matthew Heimbach?

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an authority on hate groups in the U.S., says Heimbach is "considered by many as the face of a new generation of white nationalists."

Last summer, he helped organize the far-right protests around a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned deadly.

He also led a group of white nationalists who protested the Knoxville Women's March 2.0 last month.

Although there was no violence at the women's march, Heimbach's presence led police to set up security checkpoints and take extra precautions around the event.

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“We have a very strong local unit here in Knoxville, and we want to show the majority of people aren’t represented by the radical feminist agenda,” Heimbach said at the time.

He could not be reached for comment Friday.

A report released this week from the Anti-Defamation League, a group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, found that instances of white supremacist propaganda on college campuses more than tripled in 2017.

“White supremacists are targeting college campuses like never before,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a news release. “They see campuses as a fertile recruiting ground, as evident by the unprecedented volume of propagandist activity designed to recruit young people to support their vile ideology.”

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The release specifically mentioned a case at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro this week in which the white supremacist group Vanguard America covered Black History Month flyers with flyers that read "Protect White Families."

It also said the rising presence of supremacists on campus doesn't end with propaganda like flyers and written messages.

Prominent racist Richard Spencer has held a number of speaking engagements at public campuses over the last year, many of which have lead to protests and astronomical security costs that other schools have cited as a reason to deny his requests to speak.

Recently, Michigan State University agreed to let Spencer speak in March after settling a First Amendment lawsuit brought by a supporter against the university.

“While campuses must respect and protect free speech, administrators must also address the need to counter hate groups’ messages and show these bigoted beliefs belong in the darkest shadows, not in our bright halls of learning,” Greenblatt said. “There is a moral obligation to respond clearly and forcefully to constitutionally protected hate speech.”