Racist propaganda from a neo-Nazi group was distributed on Iowa City’s Northside on Tuesday, a resident reported on Reddit.
“Came home to find a 2019 edition of LV with this sticker on it in my driveway,” a poster on the Iowa City subreddit wrote on Tuesday night. “Found another in a driveway about a block away from me. What’s going on?”
The post has a photo of a sticker from the National Alliance wrapped around a five-year-old issue of Little Village. The sticker attempts to disguise a message intended to stoke fears of Black men as a “Health Warning.” It also lists a mailing address for the National Alliance, and the url of its website.
It should go without saying that Little Village has no connection with the National Alliance, beyond reporting on the hate group. This isn’t the first time the National Alliance used copies of Little Village or other magazines that are distributed for free to add heft to their flyers and stickers so that they can be tossed onto lawns and driveways. The last time this sort of incident was reported was in July 2021, when racist flyers from the National Alliance were wrapped around old copies of Little Village and thrown onto lawns and driveways in Davenport.
It’s not known where the racists are getting large numbers of old issues of Little Village.
Incidents of this sort have happened periodically since January 2018, when racist flyers from the National Alliance were distributed in Iowa City’s Weatherby Park neighborhood. On that occasion, the flyers were wrapped around copies of the Davenport-based River City Reader, a free monthly newspaper.
Two weeks after the Wetherby Park incident in 2018, a man was arrested in Davenport as he was putting those same flyers on cars at a high school sports facility. James Lee Mathias, a resident of Davenport in his 50s, wasn’t arrested for distributing the flyers — the National Alliance’s message is repulsive, but isn’t illegal — but because he was carrying a gun on school property.
There have been at least 17 other incidents of the National Alliance using Little Village and other free newspapers and magazines to distribute their racist propaganda in eastern Iowa since the first time they littered the Wetherby Park neighborhood with it. In 2020, there was even an attempt to disguise some of the racist messages as COVID-19 prevention advice. That time the phony health warning was aimed at stoking fears about immigrants.
Whoever is distributing the National Alliance material in eastern Iowa always chooses publications that can be picked up for free from public locations. It’s an indication of the threadbare status of the National Alliance.
The white supremacist group was founded in West Virginia in 1970. Explicitly racist and antisemitic, it has repeatedly called for the elimination of both Jews and racial minorities in America, and the establishment of an all-white homeland.
The National Alliance has lost most of its members since its founder died in 2002. Further disputes over the group’s finances and leadership fights have rendered it “almost irrelevant” among far-right organizations. In September 2019, when National Alliance members helped organize a pro-Trump rally in Dahlonega, Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called it “a mostly defunct white supremacist group with deeply antisemitic and anti-immigrant beliefs.”
The National Alliance is now largely a mail-order and online retailer selling white supremacist books and related paraphernalia — including stickers — to the few adherents it still has.
