Outrage as neo-Nazi 'It's alright to be white' fliers resurface on college campus
A southern Illinois community college has been littered with neo-Nazi fliers for the second time in about seven months, and school officials are denouncing both the message and the hate group suspected of circulating the propaganda.
About 100 fliers reading “It’s alright to be white” along with messages including “Save the white race” and “You have no reason to say ‘sorry’ because you’re nature’s finest” were discovered on the campus of John A. Logan College (JALC) last week. They bear the logo of The Creativity Alliance, otherwise known as the Church of Creativity, a white nationalist group that’s been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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As soon as the fliers were reported, they were removed by campus police, said Steve O’Keefe of JALC’s college relations department to The Southern Illinoisan. “We just want to be clear: We don’t condone it,” he said. “We don’t tolerate it.”
The first time the neo-Nazi posters appeared at JALC was on the windshields of on-campus vehicles in September 2018, according to the Daily Egyptian. At the time, the messages were deemed an attempt at recruitment by the white supremacist group.
O’Keefe released a statement soon after that read, “John A. Logan College prohibits the dissemination of fliers of any kind on automobile windshields. Fliers that were placed on a limited number of cars on Tuesday, Sept. 18 were promptly removed by campus police. The fliers from an outside group have no connection to the college.”
The Daily Egyptian also reached out to the Church of Creativity at the time to ask whether they distributed the fliers on campus themselves, or ordered others to do it.
“Why would the person who put the flier out need to be taking orders?” the Church of Creativity responded. “Perhaps the person did it because he (or she) wanted to? It is good to see somebody at least trying to spread pro-white thinking. Have any laws been broken?”
JALC is not the only campus that has been on the receiving end of the unwanted fliers. In January, Southeastern Illinois College (SIC) was targeted with the same neo-Nazi posters.
“We were kind of surprised they came all the way out here to do that,” said Angela Wilson, executive director of marketing and public relations for SIC, to The Southern Illinoisan on Monday.
Wilson said the fliers were one of several reasons SIC decided to instate its civility pledge, which challenged students and faculty to refrain from using language that “stereotypes or denigrates others with different viewpoints,” according to The Southern Illinoisan, in an effort to “disagree without being disagreeable.”
In a statement to Yahoo Lifestyle, the Carbondale Racial Justice Coalition, an activist group, said, “By the 1980s groups like this were generally treated as a joke. Around here we liked to repeat that line from The Blues Brothers: ‘I HATE Illinois Nazis.'” But they kept coming back. And they keep coming back, using both low-tech (windshield flyers) and high-tech (internet) recruiting tactics. The joke was never funny, and it’s even less so now. We are not safe.”
According to its website, the Church of Creativity’s mission is “to educate and awaken white Europeans and people of European descent everywhere, to the possibilities currently being kept from them by the tripartite oppression of the alien Judeo-Christian religion, multiculturalism and political correctness” and “to build a whiter and brighter world.”
The former leader of The Creativity Alliance, Matt Hale, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2005 for soliciting the murder of a federal judge, according to the Southern Law Poverty Center. At the time, the group was called the World Church of the Creator, and Hale had accused the judge of “seeking to have the presiding judge in that case, U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, killed and of attempting to influence her decisions corruptly and by force.”
Yahoo Lifestyle has reached out to the Church of Creativity for comment and to John A. Logan College for an update on its investigation.
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