What did Heimbach or Spencer expect from talking to this guy, or legions of other reporters for that matter? Are they so naïve that they thought they would get good press? I can’t imagine any neutral party reading Tenold’s book and coming away with a more positive vision of White Nationalism. Why then did Heimbach and Spencer help Tenold create it? Heimbach’s long-simmering hatred of Spencer is well-known, so the rest seems rather bizarre.īut let’s just pretend that this whole book is a pack of lies and distortions, as partisans of Spencer and Heimbach are likely to do. I laughed out loud at Spencer lines like “The movement needs an enigmatic, badass leader,” which is presumably how he fancies himself.Īccording to Tenold, Heimbach sees Spencer as a “cocktail-sipping asshole,” but spends the last half of the book pathetically chasing after Spencer’s attention and being repeatedly snubbed, even after showing up to help defend Spencer when he spoke at Auburn University. Tenold nails Spencer: “He wore tweed, drank tea, and mixed an air of affected intellectualism with the smug arrogance of every evil fraternity kid from 1980s college movies.” He also correctly observes Spencer’s penchant for lazy provocations rather than working out intellectually and morally defensible positions, his bizarre inability to take responsibility for any of his errors, such as the public relations disaster known as “hailgate,” and his grandiose self-image. All this is pretty much obvious to anyone who has followed Heimbach’s public career. In Tenold’s portrait, Heimbach is described as a physically repulsive, slovenly crank with a compulsion to embrace positions that are divisive and self-marginalizing even within the marginal far-Right subculture, like proclaiming Orthodox Christianity at a Klan rally. But these sorts of slips may simply be a function of Tenold’s laser-like focus on Heimbach and associates. For instance, Jared Taylor is called Richard Taylor, George Wallace was murdered, and Mike Enoch and TRS are grossly mischaracterized. But from what I know about Heimbach and Richard Spencer, Tenold’s portraits strike me as deadly accurate, which argues for the book’s overall veracity, even though it is filled with bizarre errors. I have not met most of the people Tenold profiles, so it would be foolish to take every detail of his account at face value. His book would have been much leaner and more honest if he had simply cast it as a political freak show for smug middle-class Leftist urbanites who find it entertaining and self-affirming to look down on the antics of “white trash.” Which means that Tenold’s whole po-faced, “deeply concerned” conceit is a fraud.
Obviously, these people might be a danger to themselves - or an occasional innocent bystander - but they pose no threat to the current regime. But he undercuts his thesis on every page with acidic portraits of an array of bumbling buffoons and self-marginalizing cranks and kooks. Tenold’s thesis - that he has to maintain to keep people slogging through almost three hundred pages of excruciating travelogues, including bathroom breaks - is that Heimbach and company are a threat to the global multicultural order. The result is basically a book about Matt Heimbach, whose grand strategy, at least in its first phase, is to create a coalition of skinhead, Klan, and National Socialist groups under the TWP banner. Vegas Tenold is a Norwegian Leftist journalist who has spent the last six years “embedded” with the National Socialist Movement, KKK groups, and the Traditionalist Workers Party. This is the most depressing book I’ve ever read. Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America
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