Matthew Heimbach, widely viewed as an emerging leader in the white nationalist movement, has been fired by the State of Indiana where he was hired as a family case worker by the Department of Child Services

His firing came a month ago after “his response to a [training] question suggested violence against a client,” a spokeswoman for the state told Hatewatch on Thursday, confirming Heimbach’s termination.

The state agency says its mission is to protect “children who are victims of abuse or neglect” in addition to overseeing child support, child protection, adoption and foster care. One of the agency’s seven core values, according to its web site, is:  “Every person has value, worth and dignity.”

Given that, it’s not clear why or how someone with Heimbach’s widely documented history of racism and bigotry would be hired for such a position with a public agency, supported by taxpayers.

Officials with Indiana’s Department of Child Services referred inquiries about Heimbach’s hiring and firing to the state’s personnel office.

Ashley Emswell Hungate, director of communications for the Indiana State Personnel Department, confirmed to Hatewatch that Heimbach had been fired.

The story, scheduled for broadcast at 11 p.m. on Thursday, was first reported by Kara Kenney with WRTV in Indianapolis. Heimbach told Hatewatch, however, that his firing was political in nature. “They fired me for my politics and tried to justify it after the fact,” Heimbach said. “I had proof for all the trainings that I had taken that I had passed, including a diversity training, up until the day I was fired.”

State of Indiana officials confirmed Heimbach has been fired after working for the state child protection agency for about three weeks.

“Matthew Heimbach was employed with DCS from Jan. 11 to Jan. 28, 2016, as a family case manager trainee,” Hungate said in a brief email response. “His probationary working test was terminated on Jan. 28.

When pressed, the agency spokeswoman said Heimbach “was dismissed for his behavior at work.”
“His behavior in training was disruptive of the workplace, incompatible with public service, and not protected speech. For example, what I’ve been told is that, while in training, his response to a question suggested violence against a client,” Hungate told Hatewatch.

The spokeswoman for the state personnel office did not say if public complaints about his racist activities also were involved in Heimbach’s termination.

Heimbach was hired for a child protective services caseworker position that deals with people of various racial and cultural backgrounds.

His hiring, Hungate said, came after he cleared background checks by the Indiana State Police and the state’s sex offender registry. The process also includes driver’s license verification, tax payments with the Department of Revenue, fingerprinting, pre-employment drug screening, past employment and educational verification and a Child Protective Services check.

Heimbach’s racial legacy is just a computer click away, however.

He founded a campus chapter of Youth for Western Civilization at Towson University in Maryland before starting the White Student Union, which later evolved into a new white nationalist organization called the Traditionalist Youth Network.

“No longer will the homosexual, Muslim, and black supremacist groups be allowed to hijack our campus,” Heimbach said in a 2012 Youth for Western Civilization blog post.

Upon graduation in 2013, Heimbach assumed a leadership role in the neo-Confederate League of the South as the hate group’s training director.

In that same year, he said his goal was “creating a new homeland for whites around the entire world.”
“This is our home and our kith and kin,” Heimbach said in 2013. “Borders matter, identity matters, blood matters, libertarians and their capitalism can move to Somalia if they want to live without rules, in the West we must have standards and enforce them. The ‘freedom’ for other races to move freely into white nations is nonexistent. Stay in your own nations, we don’t want you here.”

He also has made homophobic statements. “I do not care if you are a man who ‘loves’ another man, you do not have the right, privilege, or ability to marry him and carry on in a degenerate relationship,” Heimbach said in 2013.

“In any healthy society you would be dragged off to therapy to help you cope with your mental illness, not given glitter and assless chaps to parade down the street. A society helps the mentally ill; it doesn’t parade them around as normal."

He also has made anti-Semitic statements.
“We are not separate peoples fighting alone,” he said in 2014. “We are all comrades in the struggle against International Jewry and the Zionist State.”

He said white nationalists in the United States must stand with and support those in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon “who struggle against the Zionist State and International Jewry.”

“We face the exact same enemy, one who doesn’t care if they kill our women, children, and elderly,” Heimbach said. “We are facing a truly Satanic enemy, one that cannot be understood except through the lens of Christianity and Christian prophecy.”