LANCASTER, Ohio Matt Heimbach, the 26-year-old founder and head of the grandly named Traditionalist Worker Party, has been called, in a headline in the Washington Post , the next David Duke. He is a key figure in the new white nationalist movement that has riveted media attention over the past year, but unlike the former Ku Klux Klan leader, whose appeal was concentrated in the South, Heimbach is planting the seeds of his movement along the back roads of the rural Midwest, in the small cities that have been left behind by deindustrialization and devastated by opioids.

Unlike many of his comrades on the so-called alt-right, who generally prefer to advocate for white nationalism from behind the protective shields of computer screens and fake names, Heimbach understands the value of media optics. His ability to articulate even his most abhorrent and offensive views in a disarmingly benign-sounding way has attracted the attention of the national media and drawn warnings from groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Huffington Post , among others, named him as one of the key figures behind the inscrutable movement of racists supporting President Trump, and someone whose larger political ambitions should not go unnoticed.

During the 2016 presidential primaries, Heimbach was caught on video shoving a black woman at a campaign rally for Trump in Louisville, Ky. Similar stories surfaced a couple of months later, after a Sacramento, Calif., rally held by members of the TWP and their California-based affiliates the Golden State Skinheads erupted in violence, leaving 10 people injured. Though Heimbach wasnt at the event, national news outlets such as NBC News seized the opportunity to spotlight the white nationalist behind violent California rally, broadcasting Heimbachs own claim that he is not racist, but is merely calling for America to pay more attention to poor and working-class whites.