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In the video, the bearded white man wears a black shirt and a red baseball cap with the words “Make America Great Again.” He is yelling at a young black woman. He shoves her once, then again, screaming at her to leave. The crowd around him is agitated. Others push the woman as well. Many are yelling.
There had been clashes between supporters and protesters at Donald Trump rallies before, but this one in Louisville last month stood out. The racial imagery was jarring, the violence only barely contained. When video of the encounter went viral, most who saw it had no idea who the man was. But his followers knew. And so did his family. And so did the people who track hate groups and white-supremacist organizations, who consider him one of the country’s leading young proponents of racial acrimony.
The day after the rally, Matthew Heimbach, a 25-year-old white nationalist who grew up in an affluent Maryland community and now lives in rural Indiana, acknowledged online that he was the one in the video pushing the woman. The object of his fury, Kashiya Nwanguma, 21, a public health major at the University of Louisville, has joined two others in suing Trump in Jefferson County Circuit Court for allegedly inciting a riot. The suit also accuses Heimbach of assaulting Nwanguma.
In his post online, Heimbach described her as a member of the Black Lives Matter movement who had been disrupting the event for the better part of an hour. “White Americans are getting fed up and they’re learning that they must either push back or be pushed down,” he wrote.
In an interview, Nwanguma said she is not affiliated with any organization and attended the rally to peacefully protest Trump’s policies. “It’s hard for me to think about that day,” she said. And it’s hard for her to forget Heimbach. What stays with her, Nwanguma said, is “the blind rage and hatefulness and aggression” that she was met with as she was being shoved.
“It was a new side of humanity that I hadn’t quite seen before,” she said. “I know it looks like I’m smiling, but I was really in disbelief. I was like, ‘What is going on and why is this happening? There’s no way that people are acting like this.’?”
Heimbach’s supporters cheered his actions, praising him for standing up to the protesters. But for those who have been tracking his rise, the video raised new worries about Heimbach. Some compare him to David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and the country’s best-known white nationalist.
“I think Heimbach should be taken as seriously as David Duke,” said Ryan Lenz, the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog. He describes Heimbach as a media-savvy millennial who has forged relationships with Stormfront, the League of the South, the Aryan Terror Brigade, the National Socialist Movement and other white-supremacist organizations.
“He’s the affable, youthful face of hate in America,” Lenz said, “and, in many ways, he’s the grand connector between all of these groups.”
Heimbach doesn’t hide his extremism. He has had his picture taken at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington holding a sign that said: “6 million? More like 271,301.” In another photo, in front of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s grave site in Atlanta, he unfurled the first flag of the Confederacy. After terrorist attacks in Brussels last month, he tweeted, “Hey Brussels, how’s that multiculturalism working out for you?”
