The Indiana anti-immigration organization that drew fewer than 100 people to a rented tent in the rain Saturday night devotes a module of its volunteer training curriculum to Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist who became the Nazi Party’s leading jurist — without telling recruits who he was.
The group, Save Heritage Indiana, is endorsed by Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and at least two Republican state legislators.
The lesson is one of 111 modules in a training curriculum the group runs on Command, an online organizing platform. Divided into 13 categories, the courses are self-paced and each closes with a four-question quiz; the platform records which modules a supporter has finished and the score. Full access is tied to paid membership — $10 a month or $100 a year — which the organization says also brings “priority invitations to events and huddles” and a vote in internal matters. The introductory module tells recruits they will emerge “ready to recruit, train, and deploy alongside other Hoosiers.”
Module 51 of that curriculum applies Schmitt’s “friend-enemy distinction” to immigration, teaching supporters that open-border policies serve migrants, employers and foreign governments at the expense of “the historic American people.” Defending that community, the module concludes, “is not extremism. It is the normal duty of citizenship and stewardship.”
The five-minute lesson identifies Schmitt only as “a German political theorist.” It does not mention that he joined the Nazi Party in the spring of 1933, took over as editor-in-chief of the party’s journal for lawyers, and in its Aug. 1, 1934, issue published an article defending the Night of the Long Knives killings as lawful. The piece was titled “Der Führer schützt das Recht” — “The Führer Protects the Law.”
Two years later, Schmitt convened and chaired a Berlin conference titled “Das Judentum in der Rechtswissenschaft” — “Judaism in Legal Scholarship” — devoted to identifying and removing Jewish influence from German law.
Schmitt is not an outlier in the curriculum.
“Blood, faith, and shared history”
Save Heritage Indiana, the Indianapolis-based nonprofit that organized the Aug. 1 “Mass Deportation Rally,” launched in October 2025. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies it as an anti-immigrant hate group. Indy Politics reviewed more than 100 of its training modules.
The curriculum’s fifth module, “What We Mean by ‘Heritage,'” defines the term the organization is named for. Heritage “is not merely a collection of buildings or abstract customs; it is a people,” it says — “the blood, faith, and shared history that binds us together as a distinct people.” The module calls for “ethno-cultural continuity” so that “our descendants remain the masters of their own destiny.” One of its three action items is headed “Reject replacement.”
The module also rejects the framing the group uses publicly. “Some attempt to frame interest in heritage as merely ‘civic,'” it says, before arguing that civic goods such as social trust and functioning schools “are not accidents” but “the products of a specific culture and a cohesive, like-minded people.”
That module is marked “Public” on the organization’s training platform and can be read by anyone without a login.
The definition offered on Save Heritage Indiana’s own public website is different. Asked in a FAQ what it means by heritage, the group answers: “the way of life Hoosiers built over generations” — small towns, local schools, “Friday night basketball, Fourth of July parades, County Fairs, and potlucks after church.” Ancestry is not mentioned.
The organization’s founders foreground their own. Poynter, a conservative artificial intelligence consultant, and Roberts, a Turning Point Action field representative, both claim descent from Mayflower passengers, according to The Indiana Citizen; Poynter says he descends from Patrick Henry and Roberts from settlers of Jamestown.
The endorsements
Save Heritage Indiana’s website features endorsements from Beckwith, identified there as lieutenant governor and pastor at Life Church in Noblesville, and from two sitting Republican legislators.
Beckwith’s testimonial says most people have no idea “that our culture is being stolen right out from underneath our eyes.” Rep. Zach Payne of House District 66 says he supports the group’s mission “to stop and reverse mass migration to preserve our heritage.” Rep. Chris Jeter of House District 88 calls it “a proven team that has built a successful grassroots movement before.”
Beckwith and Attorney General Todd Rokita both contributed pre-recorded remarks to Saturday’s rally, played to the crowd from a laptop onto a television mounted on a truss frame.
The endorsements page also carries statements from Wells County Councilman Brandon Harnish and a Huntington County farmer, and displays a quotation from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller about immigration as a political weapon. The Miller quotation is not presented as an endorsement of the organization.
Jeter represents Fishers, where the rally was advertised for more than two weeks before organizers moved it. The Indiana Citizen reported July 13 that Jeter, fellow Hamilton County Republican Rep. Danny Lopez and Democratic Rep. Victoria Garcia Wilburn did not respond to its questions about the event by deadline. Payne’s district — portions of Clark, Jefferson and Scott counties — is roughly two hours south of Fishers.
Scripture and kinship
A second module marked public recasts the Parable of the Good Samaritan as an argument for ethnic solidarity. “The Parable of the Good Samaritan: A Case for Kinship” argues that the priest, the Levite, the victim and the Samaritan were “fellow countrymen” sharing “a unified ethnic origin,” and that the story is “a scathing divine corrective on the failure of brothers to care for their own kin.”
Reading it as a duty toward outsiders, the module says, “completely inverts Christ’s lesson.”
It is one of nine modules in a “Faith & Culture” category that also includes “The Biblical Case for Borders and Nationhood,” “Christian Myths About Immigration,” and “Mass Immigration: A Violation of the 2nd Greatest [Commandment].”
Christian interpretation of the parable across denominations holds the opposite — that Jesus deliberately cast a despised Samaritan as the hero in answer to a lawyer’s question about the limits of neighborly obligation, widening rather than narrowing the category.
Public language, internal premises
Other modules instruct volunteers on how to discuss those premises outside the organization.
Module 43, “Demographic Change: Reading the Numbers,” describes itself as teaching supporters to interpret population data and describe “ethnic composition trends” using “civic, non-racial framing.” It tracks the declining share of Indiana’s population it identifies as “European or heritage American,” then directs supporters to “stay civic” and avoid “inflammatory language.”
A module on media relations tells volunteers to “use civic language” with reporters, keep answers short, and redirect or end conversations that “drift into sensitive areas.” Volunteers are told to notify leadership after any contact with a journalist and to refer national or “hostile” outlets to leadership immediately.
Those instructions were in force Saturday. The organization never disclosed the rally site publicly, emailed staging directions to ticketholders the day of the event, and granted access to two news outlets it declined to name. Poynter told the Indiana Capital Chronicle the two had exclusive access. Current, which asked for transcripts and photographs, reported it could not independently confirm the event had left Fishers.
Another module is titled “Purity Spirals and LARPing: Two Ways Movements Fail.”
The organization
Save Heritage Indiana launched Oct. 23, 2025. Its website has credited Nathan Roberts and Daniel Poynter as founders and claims more than 2,100 pledge signers and 197 volunteers across 87 of Indiana’s 92 counties. Its footer states that Save Heritage Indiana, Inc. is incorporated in Indiana with 501(c)(3) status “pending,” and tells donors contributions “may become tax-deductible retroactively once approved.”
Roberts left the organization on July 31, the day before the rally. He announced his departure publicly, citing a difference in strategy, after the group attacked U.S. Sen. Jim Banks online for declining to tape video remarks for the event.
The training platform runs on Command, organizing software marketed to conservative groups nationally. According to Command’s website, the platform was built by Poynter “while operating Save Heritage Indiana.” Command’s terms of service identify its operator as Infinite Game Ventures Inc., an Indiana entity.
The group circulated a petition to amend the Indiana Republican Party’s proposed 2026 platform on immigration. The amendment’s named movant was Harnish, who is also a Save Heritage Indiana board member and founder of a group called the Pat Buchanan Society, according to The Indiana Citizen.
The rally
The Aug. 1 event, promoted as the first mass deportation rally in American history, was advertised for Fishers from mid-July but never publicly located; the group said on X it was withholding the venue because of harassment and threats. Ticketholders were directed to a parking area in Greenfield by 6 p.m., where they showed identification before proceeding to the site in small groups. The rally was held under a rented pole tent on private property in Clinton County, in the rain, before a crowd that photographs from inside indicate numbered well under 100.
Tickets ran $50, with a $500 VIP gathering in Carmel the night before. Poynter declined to release ticket sales figures ahead of the event, telling The Indiana Citizen last month that organizers expected a packed house.
The keynote speaker was Greg Bovino, the former U.S. Border Patrol commander-at-large who became the public face of the Trump administration’s deportation sweeps before retiring this spring amid backlash over two fatal shootings.
Hamilton County Republican Chairman Mario Massillamany told The Indiana Citizen that Save Heritage Indiana is not affiliated with the county party, that he had not heard of the organization or of Roberts and Poynter before being asked about them, and that neither man had taken part in a county GOP event.
Several hours before the rally, a counter-demonstration organized by Fishers Resists drew more than 1,000 people to a march from Holland Park to the Fishers Municipal Center.
