White supremacist flyers crop up in Kentucky communities. It’s happened several times
.jpg "A flyer promoting the Ku Klux Klan was spread around multiple Mt. Sterling, Ky., neighborhoods recently, police say.")
Flyers seemingly from a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan have been distributed recently in three Kentucky communities, including Mt. Sterling, Paris and Winchester, according to local police and social media accounts.
Though shocking for residents who found the flyers placed on their cars, it’s only the latest in a string of similar events in recent years. What some Kentuckians are seeing in their communities corresponds with what’s happening throughout the U.S. — a rise in organized white supremacist propaganda.
A recent report by the Anti-Defamation League found a 102% increase in these types of events in 2022 over the previous year.
It was part of a general rise in antisemitic events that year: 3,697 in all. That amounts to a 36% increase from 2021, and according to the ADL, is the highest number on record since it began tracking in 1979.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, flyering is a common tactic hate groups use to not only recruit new members, but to make the organizations appear larger and more active than they are.
The white nationalist group Patriot Front has spread the largest amount of hateful propaganda using this method. Other groups, such as the antisemitic Goyim Defense League and the neo-Nazi group NatSoc Florida, have hung banners over freeways or used high-powered projectors to beam antisemitic messages onto buildings, according to the ADL.
Here’s a look at some of the most recent white supremacist activity in Kentucky since 2019.
White supremacist activity in Kentucky
Jun 11, 2023: Residents in several Mt. Sterling neighborhoods found white supremacist flyers placed on their cars the night before. The flyers appear to be from a local chapter of the KKK and advertise a “neighborhood watch,” stating, “You can sleep sound tonight. The Klan is awake!”
The flyers encourage residents to “report crime and drug dealers” to a given email address. Similar flyers are also found in Winchester and Paris, which are roughly 20 and 30 minutes away, respectively.
April 12 and April 13, 2021: Flyers bearing a swastika and promoting “white pride” turn up in about a dozen lawns in a neighborhood north of Georgetown. The flyers also name the Black Lives Matter movement and state, “The entire country is tired of your s****. Sick of the lawlessness, sick of the riots, sick of the threats and demands.”
Among the images included on the flyers are that of a white girl next to the words: “Explain why she should be a minority in her own country.”
The flyers purport to be from the 14First Foundation, which also distributed similar material in Central Kentucky and Lexington in 2020.
November 2020: White supremacist flyers taking aim at Jews and Black people and calling on white people to “fight back” are distributed in Lexington neighborhoods.
The notices repeated antisemitic tropes, including that Jews are responsible for “every anti white post” in the news and on social media. The flyers also said “Hitler was right.”
August 2020: Flyers bearing the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” and calling on “Aryan men and women” to “stand up,” are posted around Central Kentucky, including in Versailles and Scott County.
Local Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, who directs the Chabad of the Bluegrass, receives a profanity-laced phone call from a man who claimed to be responsible after the rabbi spoke out on social media and to the press.
“We are not intimidated,” Litvin said at the time.
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