The Traditional Worker’s Party is, or rather was, one of America’s most visible Nazi groups. The group and its leader, Matthew Heimbach, was part of the racist rally at Charlottesville that ended in the death of Heather Heyer. And now the group has essentially ceased to exist amid one of the strangest scandals you will ever read — involving assault, a white nationalist group’s entire website and its membership rolls being deleted, and an adultery scandal.
- Before we begin, we want to make two points: The first is that stereotypes are bad. The second is that everything we are about to discuss was thoroughly documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors domestic terrorist groups, with police reports and on-the-record statements of those involved, as difficult as that may be to believe.
- It starts with four members of the neo-Nazi group, all related: Matthew Heimbach and his wife Brooke Heimbach largely led the Traditional Worker’s Party, with Brooke Heimbach’s stepfather David Parrott as webmaster and spokesperson, and Parrot’s wife Jessica Parrott also as spokesperson. They lived close together in an Indiana trailer park that served as the headquarters of the organization.
- Matthew Heimbach was apparently sleeping with Jessica Parrott: Yes, legally speaking, this is incest. Apparently, this had been going on for a while, but Heimbach and Parrott swore to Parrot’s husband that it was over. So Parrott’s husband and Heimbach’s wife decided to set up a “sting operation” by spying on a midnight meeting between Heimbach and Parrott. He chose to do this by perching on top of a box.
- David Parrott’s spying quickly came to an end when the box he was hiding on top of broke: Parrott, after giving away his position, ran up to Heimbach and demanded that Heimbach get off his property. This rapidly accelerated into a fistfight where Heimbach choked out Parrott. After Parrott woke up, and went back into his house, Heimbach entered the property again, Parrott threw a chair at him, and Heimbach choked Parrott unconscious again. All of this, according to the police report, happened in front of several children.
- Heimbach was arrested for domestic violence, and Parrott decided to get revenge by essentially deleting the entire neo-Nazi group: Parrott, calling the entire incident a “white trash circus” in a statement to the Southern Poverty Law Center, claims that he’s deleted every bit of data around the group as he expected otherwise the group’s membership rolls will be confiscated by the police as part of the investigation. That has yet to be confirmed, but somebody has taken the neo-Nazi group’s site offline, as of this writing.
It’s not clear, as of this writing, what will happen to Heimbach, who’s currently under arrest. And it’s worth remembering that this hasn’t yet been fully investigated by area police. There may be more to this story, or it could be greatly exaggerated. In short, as weird as this story of incest and fistfights sounds, it could very well get weirder.