- 135Shares
Some Coralville residents found flyers with white supremacist messages thrown onto their lawns and driveways on Wednesday. The adhesive-backed flyers from the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group, were wrapped around copies of the Muscatine Parks & Recreation newsletter.
Muscatine Parks & Rec, of course, has nothing to do with the National Alliance, but in addition to having unfounded delusions about themselves as superior to other people, members of the group are apparently either cheap or broke. They routinely take large numbers of free publications and use them to give heft to their flyers, which they toss onto lawns in residential areas at times they are unlikely to be seen doing so.
The National Alliance is an explicitly racist and anti-Semitic group that has repeatedly called for the elimination of 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 2019, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described the National Alliance as “a mostly defunct white supremacist group with deeply anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant beliefs.”
The flyers found in Coralville on Wednesday try to disguise homophobic and racist propaganda as health advice. It’s the second time the National Alliance has used such flyers recently. In June, the groups distributed racist propaganda Iowa City, North Liberty, Cedar Rapids and Davenport labeled “National Alliance health warning #3.” It purported to offer COVID-19 information the “government won’t tell you.”
This time it’s “NA Health Warning #2,” and it claims to provide information about preventing HIV. “The media won’t tell you, but the National Alliance will,” its message concludes.
There appears to one active member of the group in the Quad Cities area, who was arrested in January 2018 while putting National Alliance flyers on cars parked at high school sports facility in Davenport. The flyer 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.
Since then, the National Alliance has used old copies of Little Village on several occasions to add weight to its flyers and stickers.
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.
- 135Shares
