Traditionalist Youth Network

History

TYN was established in May 2013 by Matthew Heimbach and Matt Parrott. Heimbach has been a white supremacist activist since fall 2011, when he formed a group at Towson University in Maryland and invited the white supremacist Jared Taylor to speak at Towson's campus. The following year, Heimbach founded a "White Student Union" on campus, adopting racist and antisemitic views. In spring 2013, upon graduation, Heimbach established TYN in partnership with Parrot, who founded a white supremacist group, Hoosier Nation, in Indiana around 2009. Parrot is also a white supremacist. The group eventually became a chapter of American Third Position (later known as the American Freedom Party).

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks extremist groups, has written of Heimbach: "Considered by many to be the face of a new generation of white nationalists.... Since graduating in the spring of 2013, he has entrenched himself further in the white nationalist movement and become a regular speaker on the radical-right lecture circuit.". The SPLC has also described it as a "hate group".

Ideology

Heimbach and his group advocate for white separatism, and the group adheres to a white nationalist and white supremacist ideology. The group specifically promotes a white supremacist interpretation of Christianity, recruiting members to battle what it terms "anti-Christian degeneracy." The SPLC describes TYN's ideology as "virulently racist and anti-Semitic." Both the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League note that the group is modeled after the European Identitarian movement. TYN proclaims to be "against modernism, individualism, globalism and Marxism," as well as "decadence." In 2016, Heimbach hailed the British vote to leave the European Union as "the greatest European nationalist victory since 1933," the year of the Nazi rise to power in Germany.

Organization and activities

The TYN is reported to be small in size. TYN's only active university chapter is at the Indiana University Bloomington; this group is led by a white-supremacist activist Thomas Buhls, who has been affiliated with the Harrison, Arkansas-based Knights Party, a Klan group.

In August 2013 the group protested a leftist bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana; in October 2013, the group held rallies protesting campus speeches by anti-racist educator Tim Wise.

In September 2013 the TYN held an event in Corunna, Michigan in support of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's government. The group initially planned as a "Koran BBQ" that would feature the burning of copies of the Qur'an and pictures of Muhammad to show "Islamic immigrants and citizens alike that they are not welcome here in Michigan", but changed to a pro-Assad protest after the U.S. government announced its plans to support Syrian rebels. Heimbach told MLive that he did not regret the group's original plan and that the group supported Islam "when it's in its own home in the Middle East."

In 2014 the group filed an amicus brief in a federal court in Michigan in the case of DeBoer v. Snyder. In its brief, the group took a stance against same-sex marriage, which Parrott described as part of "the Leftists [sic] social engineering campaign to destroy every last vestige of Western civilization." Later the same year, the group filed a second amicus brief in a case in Maryland challenging a law prohibiting assault weapons; in a four-page filing, the TYN stated that it opposed "the enemy of freedom—the Culture Distorter—in its sights and wishes to shoot down unconstitutional legislation that disarms our people".

In July 2015 the group called for the filing of hate-crime charges in connection with the beating of a white man in Fountain Square, Cincinnati. The local prosecutor, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, stated that there was no evidence of ethnic intimidation in the crime.

Associated groups

In January 2015 the TYN established the Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP) as its political-party offshoot in preparation for the 2016 elections, and a small group of candidates from the far right announced plans to run under its banner. The party states that it stands against "economic exploitation, federal tyranny, and anti-Christian degeneracy". The group's strategy differs from that of the American Freedom Party (AFP), a different fringe group: while the AFP "has long run presidential candidates with no hope of success" in order to "exploit the election cycle as a way to raise money and generate publicity for their racist positions, TWP actually hopes to win by running for local offices in small communities."

The TYN promotes "Avalonian societies" with an "Avalonian identity" featuring Arthurian culture, "symphonic monarchism", Eastern Orthodoxy and small dedicated groups of "legionaries" of "English-speaking White Americans who've returned to their pre-schismatic Christian roots".