Some residents of Iowa City and Cedar Rapids woke up on Monday to find adhesive-backed fliers from a white supremacist group on their lawns and driveways. The anti-immigrant messages found on both the westside of Iowa City and in southwest Cedar Rapids were wrapped around rolled-up old copies of Little Village magazine.
The fliers, which call for the expulsion of immigrants because “They can’t make white babies,” were produced by the National Alliance, an explicitly racist and anti-Semitic group that has repeatedly called for the elimination of both Jews and racial minorities in America, and the establishment of an all-white homeland. For 30 years after it was founded in West Virginia in 1970, until the death of its original leader in 2002, the National Alliance was considered a very dangerous group, and was implicated in many crimes, including murder. But after the death of its founder in 2002, the group largely fell apart.
Its new leaders fought among themselves, accusing each other embezzlement and threatening lawsuits. Membership dwindled. Currently, the group does little beyond selling white supremacist books and paraphernalia to its few remaining supporters. In September, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described the National Alliance as “a mostly defunct white supremacist group with deeply anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant beliefs.”
There appears to one active member of the group in the Quad Cities area, who was arrested in January 2018 while putting National Alliance fliers on cars parked at high school sports facility in Davenport. The flier he was sliding under windshield wipers was one that had been distributed in Iowa City’s Wetherby Park neighborhood two weeks earlier. That time, it was wrapped around copies of the Davenport-based River Cities Reader, a free monthly newspaper.
The same fliers were thrown onto lawns on Iowa City’s north side in June 2019. On that occasion, they were wrapped around old copies of Little Village. Since then, whoever is distributing National Alliance propaganda has used old copies on Little Village on several occasions in various cities in eastern Iowa.
It should go without saying that neither River Cities’ Reader nor Little Village has any connection to the National Alliance, beyond reporting on the hate group. But both are available for free, and add enough weight to allow single-page fliers to be easily tossed into people’s yards.
