Neo-Nazis have set up shop here. This is why.

A group of neo-Nazis here has a seemingly simple plan.

They’re organizing in Ohio and the surrounding states, on a mission to win the hearts and minds of poor white people.

They want a whites-only state. And to get it, members of a group called the Traditionalist Worker Party are preaching a time-tested strategy employed for decades by grassroots groups. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. It’s charity work, essentially.

Until it turns into something else.

That’s the plan, anyway. In reality, The Enquirer could find little evidence of the TWP’s charity work. And let’s be clear: While the party’s leadership says this is about white advocacy and helping the poor, it is also about a group of people who are anti-Semitic, anti-diversity and who do not want to live with anyone but white people.

Editor’s note: Why we are reporting on neo-Nazis in Ohio

The TWP is in turmoil after co-founder Matthew Heimbach was charged with battery on March 13. The party's website was disabled shortly after that happened, and it's unclear how the charges might affect the group's long-term goals. More on that later.

For now, here's what we know: The TWP is a political party and one of more than 100 neo-Nazi hate groups operating in the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Party leaders reject such labels, saying they are about helping white people, not hate. They typically call themselves white nationalists instead of neo-Nazis.

The TWP is a national group, but its members are concentrated in, and focused on, America’s middle, in states such as Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee.

They are targeting young people – particularly young, white men.

They are targeting the addicted and their families, bemoaning what they see as a piddly response to the opioid crisis.

And they are targeting Appalachia, where, they say, poor, white people are losing hope. There is no future for white people in America, said Heimbach, 26, who lives in Paoli, Indiana.

“We’ve been waiting for decades for the government, for companies, corporations, the Flying Spaghetti Monster to come and fix these things, but they’re not,” Heimbach said. “So the time is now for us to simply say, ‘We can’t count on anyone but ourselves.’”

In Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, TWP members were among white nationalists who marched with torches and chanted about “blood and soil,” a Hitler-era Nazi slogan that speaks to the importance of land and family.

“You will not replace us!” they chanted. “Jews will not replace us!”

Many Americans were shocked. Where is this coming from? Is it new? Has it been here all along?

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There are 954 total hate groups operating in the United States, according to the Southen Poverty Law Center, including neo-Nazi groups, anti- Muslim groups and anti-immigrant groups, to name a few. They are spread across the country, but there are some regions where they are more prevalent, said Carla Hill, an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The Midwest – where the TWP hopes to one day set up its whites-only state – is one of those regions.

There are 14 neo-Nazi groups and nine chapters of the KKK in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana alone, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Andrew Anglin, who founded the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, is from Worthington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus.

James Alex Fields Jr., the 20-year-old charged with murder after the Charlottesville rally, was raised in Northern Kentucky and most recently lived in northern Ohio.

The TWP is openly anti-Semitic. Members joke about being big, bad Nazis and toss around references to Hitler. In their proposed white homeland, all forms of Christianity would be supported, but Judaism would be banned. Pornography and homosexuality would be outlawed, too.

Still, party members scoff at the idea of being classified as a hate group. The label just doesn’t mean anything, said 29-year-old Tony Hovater, who lives near Columbus.

“If you have the same opinions as your grandma, you’re basically considered a hate group now,” said Hovater, one of the party’s eight original members. “Normal Trump supporters were already being called Nazis, so what’s the difference?”

And anyway, that’s not what the party is about, Hovater said. In the coming years, the TWP wants to run members for political office and open free medical clinics for people who can’t afford health care. For now, though, it is focused on coat and canned-food drives.

It’s part of a larger strategy, Hovater said. Fill basic needs now. Bring in politics later.

“They might not agree with us totally, but when it comes time to vote, they’re going to know we are the ones that were there to raise school supplies for the children,” he said. “We are the ones that were there to raise food for needy families.”

Heimbach said it’s a matter of being there for white people.

“If there’s an old lady that can’t get the snow out of her driveway in the winter, I want us to be able to be there,” he said. “It was important for white folks to actually have a political party just for us. One that we can build for us and by us.”

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But how much is the TWP actually doing? What are they actually building?

In December, Heimbach and a TWP member named Katherine made plans for The Enquirer to view a coat distribution in Kentucky – a chance to see the party’s charity work in action.

But the day of the distribution, plans changed.

“Hey, looks like Heimbach is wanting to reschedule,” Katherine wrote in a text shortly before 1 p.m. the day of the planned meetup. “I can contact you with the new date once he chooses it and sends me the info.”

In January, the day before protesting the Women’s March in Knoxville, Tennessee, the TWP was planning to spread fliers around the University of Tennessee campus. The group had some private meetings The Enquirer was not invited to attend, but the flier distribution was another chance to see the party’s outreach.

The night before, though, the party’s Tennessee coordinator canceled the meetup. “we have had some external issues arise, and we (aren’t) sure about our plans for Sat,” he texted. “… I apologize, but these issues are out of our hands … we just have to deal with em.”

Hill, the Anti-Defamation League researcher, said there is little evidence the TWP does anything more than talk. If Heimbach was doing all he claims, she said, he would show it.

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The TWP is focused here, in part, because this is where its founders live, and this region is already heavily white. America is about 62 percent white overall, but Ohio and Indiana are 80 percent white, according to 2016 census data. Kentucky is 85 percent white.

This region is generally more traditional and religious, said Hovater, the party member, so he finds it more open to the group’s ideas about race. In the 2016 presidential election, Ohio went to Donald Trump by 8 percentage points. “That’s not unimportant,” Hovater said, noting that Trump has been accused of being friendly to white nationalists, though Hovater doesn't necessarily agree with that claim.

Finally, people in this region – Appalachians in particular, Hovater said – are frustrated. They’re tired of being poor and unemployed. They feel forgotten and ignored, and they’re running out of patience.

They’re looking for something.

“The government doesn’t care what happens to those people,” Hovater said. “The corporations don’t care what happens to those people. There’s very little charity work being done in those areas, so why can’t we focus there?”

Shaunna Scott, a sociology professor and director of Appalachian Studies at the University of Kentucky, bristles at Hovater’s characterization of her region. It’s condescending to assume Appalachians are unable to help themselves, she said, and it’s a lie to say no one is working in Appalachia.

“I’m kind of shocked at the level of falsity in that statement,” she said, ticking off a long list of charities and groups at work in Appalachia, including the government’s Appalachian Regional Commission. Appalachia is the only region with such a commission, Scott said.

She doesn’t want to overlook a history of racism in Appalachia – it’s “as racist as the rest of the United States, which is pretty racist,” she said – but she doesn’t think this area is any more or less susceptible to white supremacist ideas.

“We’re a target of these groups because they think we will be a hospitable audience,” she said. “I think we’re a lot less hospitable than they believe we are.”

But Hovater said he gets plenty of support. He might run into some resistance in more urban areas, he said, but in rural or even suburban Ohio, for example, he finds people open to what he’s saying.

In late November, Hovater was featured in a New York Times article on white supremacy and hate. He and his wife lost their jobs after the article published, and they had to move after someone posted their Dayton-area address online.

But they also got tons of positive feedback, Hovater said.

There’s a website called GoyFundMe, a spoof of the popular GoFundMe site. “Goy” is a sometimes-derogatory term for a non-Jew, used here ironically.

On GoyFundMe, after the Times piece published, a fundraiser for Hovater and his wife hit $8,600 in just a few days.

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It may seem shocking that this is happening here, that this is where the TWP and other neo-Nazi groups are setting up camp. But in many ways, Ohio and the surrounding states are ripe for a movement such as this, said Christopher Phillips, a University of Cincinnati professor and a Civil War historian.

These states in the middle – caught on the line that separated slave states from free before the Civil War – were not staunchly abolitionist, like some of their more northern neighbors. But neither were they part of the Confederacy.

The history is murky here, Phillips said. It's not nearly as clean – north of the Ohio River versus south of the Ohio – as textbooks make it seem.

The civil rights movement was quieter here, too, Philips said. This is a place that, in some ways, never really reconciled the Civil War. Never reconciled race.

“Reconstruction didn’t occur here, and so no one was forced to change their behavior, whether it be in Kentucky or Ohio, with regard to race,” Phillips said. “In some sense, I think that race relations and civil rights kind of skipped a generation here.”

Cincinnati, in particular, has a long tradition of public politeness, said Carl B. Westmoreland, a historian at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. The city is not less prejudiced than anywhere else. It is just sometimes better at pretending.

“And that whole mindset,” Westmoreland said, “that whole style of behavior, has disguised its blatant racism.”

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In 2017, Heimbach pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after he was caught on video shoving a black woman who was protesting at a Trump rally in Louisville, Kentucky.

Heimbach was fined $145 and ordered to attend anger-management classes. He was also sentenced to 90 days in jail, but a judge waived that sentence on the condition Heimbach not re-offend within two years.

Then on March 13, Heimbach was arrested in Paoli, Indiana, where he lives, after he attacked his wife and his wife's stepfather, according to police and court documents.

The pair reportedly accused Heimbach of an affair with the stepfather's wife, and when they confronted Heimbach, he put the stepfather in a headlock and choked him twice to the point of unconsciousness.

Later, after his wife refused to dismiss police by saying everything was fine, Heimbach grabbed his wife's face and pushed her onto a bed, records show. The couple's young children were in the room at the time.

Heimbach was charged with battery and domestic battery committed in the presence of a child. It's unclear exactly how these new charges might affect his 2017 disorderly conduct case.

The stepfather, David Parrott, was a spokesman for the TWP, though he reportedly quit after the incident.

Heimbach says violence is not his aim and that the TWP will operate peacefully. But he typically follows up that stance with a promise to defend himself, his family and his people from liberals.

“We will always act in accordance with local laws to be defensive in our behavior, but we’re also not going to cower from them,” he said in December. “He who controls the streets controls the nation.”

Is violence inevitable, according to members of the TWP? Perhaps, they say, placing blame on the left.

“We want to do everything peacefully, and we try to do everything peacefully,” Hovater said. But “the only way you stop violence is with more violence, for the most part.”

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The Washington Post and ABC News conducted a scientific poll this past year, gathering Americans’ opinions on white supremacy, the Charlottesville rally and the White House’s response. The result: With a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points, 9 percent of the country said it is acceptable to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views.

But if this feels new, it’s not.

There is, perhaps, a new boldness in this era, said Tracy Teslow, a University of Cincinnati professor who studies the science of race in anthropology. There’s a new willingness to openly identify as a white nationalist or white supremacist.

But this idea of racism, Teslow said – this fear of the other and this fight over who deserves to be an American – has always been in this country.

It was here when colonialists encountered Native Americans and when slavery became a critical component of the U.S. economy.

It was here when the Ku Klux Klan was founded during Reconstruction and in the harsh resistance to desegregation in the 1950s, when people shut down schools rather than mix black and white students.

And it’s here in 2018, as Cincinnati deals with the fallout of children wearing blatantly racist basketball jerseys and Catholic school students chanting racial slurs at non-white players during a basketball game.

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In January, five and a half months after the Charlottesville rally, Heimbach and a small group of his supporters were in Knoxville to protest the Women’s March.

The TWP crowd of about 20 was dwarfed by the estimated 14,000-plus who showed up for the Women’s March. Hill, with the Anti-Defamation League, points to that small turnout as evidence the TWP is exaggerating its growth.

Heimbach says the group has about 2,000 members nationwide. Hill agrees the TWP is growing but says Heimbach is lying about how quickly. She estimates the group at 150, maybe 200.

“If you have 2,000 people in a group and you can only get 20 at an event,” she said, “then I’m not going to believe you actually have that many.”

In Knoxville, most of the Women’s March attendees ignored Heimbach’s crew. But a few dozen pressed up against the fence separating the sides, and they hurled insults back and forth for about an hour and a half.

Heimbach got into a few shouting matches, but for the most part, he stuck to his talking points: Femininity is being destroyed by feminism. Babies are being murdered through abortion. White men are being replaced.

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Some in the neo-Nazi movement are media-shy, either declining to speak with reporters or giving false names when they do. But as leaders of the TWP, Heimbach and Hovater are open about who they are and what they believe. They use their real names (Hovater’s legal first name is William, but he goes by his middle name, Tony), and they talk freely with the press.

Nationally, they align with a set of leaders who have become the public face of what is being called the alt-right. Leaders like Richard Spencer, who might give a talk at the University of Cincinnati later this year.

Those inside the movement, inside the TWP in particular, think this is their time. They think they’ve found their voice and audience. They think their plan will work and that it will work here.

The TWP coat distribution – the one initially slated for December – was never rescheduled. Heimbach said the coats were given out, anyway, through a connection with a local church in Kentucky, but he didn’t respond to a request for the name of the church.

Katherine, the TWP member who was helping organize the collection, has since quit the party. She joined because it was supposed to be all about helping rural areas, she said, but she never saw any of the promised charity work come to fruition.

“Unfortunately, I could not get Heimbach or anyone else in the party to help me with the charity drive,” she wrote in a text, adding that she has given some donations to families already and plans to take the rest to a Catholic church in Beattyville, Kentucky.

The coat drive was real, Katherine said, but most of the donations she got came from outside the TWP. From the party, the donations were modest, she said: three bags of clothing. And three coats.