Matthew Heimbach (right) and a colleague. Photo: Gawker

CLEVELAND — Outside the Republican National Convention on Monday, Gawker ran into Matthew Heimbach, a podcast host for The Daily Stormer, who is encouraging delegates to write in the late George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, for president. Donald Trump, Heimbach said, doesn’t go far enough. “He needs to become an ethno-nationalist. He needs to understand that a people is the basis of a nation,” he said. “Specifically, white people.”



Heimbach is the chairman of the white separatist Traditionalist Worker Party, who has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “the face of a new generation of white nationalists.” The party, which hopes to recruit new members in Cleveland, is currently backing Rick Tyler’s congressional bid in Tennessee’s 3rd district.

“We need to take from the right nationalism without capitalism and from the left socialism without internationalism,” Heimbach said, quoting one of his favorite Nazis, Gergor Strasser. “We need to put our people and our nation first by rejecting both capitalism and communism and putting working families first,” he continued.

The Traditionalist Worker Party is not endorsing Donald Trump, or anyone else, because, Heimbach said, there are “no true nationalists in the presidential race.” This may come as a surprise, given Trump’s well-documented xenophobia and racism, but for Heimbach the presumptive Republican nominee’s “color-blind nationalism” is disqualifying.

The Traditionalist Worker Party, Heimbach said, supports balkanization. “Every ethnic group should be able to opt out of multiculturalism if it wants to,” Heimbach said. “Multiculturalism leads to violence. Multiculturalism leads to disunity,” he continued. “Different cultures want to live differently.”

“The idea of freedom is to be able to choose what system of government you live under,” Heimbach said. And it’s not just white people who think multiculturalism has failed, he added with a smirk.

As examples, he pointed to Native American reservations—“They’ve got land, where, if you’re not a member of the tribe, you can’t buy land there. You can’t own a business there. But we still pass through: We’re not at war with them”—and Chechnya. (Both Native Americans and Chechens might dispute this characterization of their ostensible sovereignty.)

Later on Monday, Heimbach told Gawker, the Traditionalist Worker Party would be holding a meeting with “a couple dozen” people in town for the convention—including some delegates—to discuss white separatist policy. The meeting is private, and he declined to identify the delegates who have said they would attend.