Vice’s Documentary: “Here Comes the White-Power Safety Patrol”

It’s June 19th, a.k.a. Juneteenth — the holiday that celebrates the liberation of people who had been held as slaves in the United States. Even centuries later, it’s still downplayed by too many people, but not here on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. I’m marking the day with an article that shows that we’ve still got some distance to travel before things are well and truly set right.

Back in March, I wrote about Scott Terry, who made a name for himself at the CPAC conference by suggesting that slavery wasn’t that bad and that Frederick Douglass should’ve thanked his former slave master for feeding and clothing him, wondered aloud why segregation couldn’t come back and told ThinkProgress that he’d be fine with a situation where African-Americans were subservient to whites. Here’s the charming fella, caught on video:

Terry was reported to be a member of the Towson University White Student Union, a group whose raison d’etre is to fight back against “inherent anti-white bias in academia and mainstream society”.

Vice recently went to Towson University, located near Baltimore, Maryland, to find out more about the White Student Union. One of the end results is a fascinating article titled Here Comes the White-Power Safety Patrol, in which they profile founder Matthew Heimbach and follow the “night patrol” he founded. The patrol is made up of Matthew and other members of the White Student Union who walk the campus at night looking for “black predators” whom he says come to the campus to attack the disadvantaged white people.

The other end result is a 22-minute documentary of Heimbach, the White Student Union and his safety patrol. Here’s a very telling moment, in which they note that it’s the 148th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Among reasonable people, including Captain Kirk, Lincoln is a hero. Among the White Student Union campus patrol, he’s something else entirely:

(Oddly enough, this isn’t a “race mixing is communism” fable that racists tell themselves — Karl Marx did write a letter to Lincoln congratulating him on his re-election, sending it via a U.S. Ambassador. Getting one single letter from Marx doesn’t make one a communist, but considering that these guys consider him to be a traitor to both the nation and the race, I don’t think any amount of working through the logic will ever make them see Honest Abe in a non-negative light.)

The nightly patrols were purportedly organized to counter a wave of black-on-white violence on campus and likely meant to engender Fear of the Other in white students, intimidate the students of colour, and provide a “community service” cover to their new-school racism. Heimbach wrote that one such case was when an African man waved both a knife and his penis at a white couple who were engaged in sex in a parking garage. While white people are supposedly being threatened when doing the nasty in public, the local police tell a different story: they say that Towson is the safest public university in the state of Maryland. At a rate of 6 crimes per 1,000 students, they report that the crime rate is at a 17-year low.

Heimback is always careful not to use racial epithets or say “Heil Hitler”. He is, as the author of the article observes, the face of a possible future of organized racism in America. He doesn’t wear a white sheet or a hood, nor does he wear Nazi imagery. In fact, he looks down on the KKK and neo-Nazis, thinking of them as “low-rent thugs” and “an embarrassment”. However, for all the care they put into their image, the truth does come out late in the video:

Here’s an excerpt from the article, in which the author asks “Paddy” about the ethno-state that he was talking about:

“What would the criteria of citizenship be for this ethno-state?” I asked.

“I’m just going to come out and say it,” Paddy said. “The criteria of citizenship would be based on race. It would be based on [being] white. Absolutely. One hundred percent.”

I turned to Matthew. In the spiritedness of the moment, the group seemed to be dropping its restrained tone. And Matthew was worked up, too.

“If there are white people… who want to remain in this multicultural cesspool,” he said, “let them. We don’t want them. Let us mind our own business. Let us stand up for our own people, and create our own nation and new homeland for Europeans around the entire globe. So give us a homeland, and if you want to sell yourself and your children down the river of multiculturalism, you can do so.”

At the conclusion of the patrol, the group finally encountered a crime in progress: a drug deal in which all the participants were white. The author noted that while Heimbach shook his head and observed that a crime was in progress, not a single person in the group intervened.

Here’s the documentary. Watch, and be appalled:

Thanks to Ashe Dryden, from whom I found out about the article and documentary!