Scotia, CA – Last night, two kids found a flyer promoting anti-Semitic views in the small former company town of Scotia between 10:10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. By the time they finished picking up after the person or persons who spread the hate packets, they had found between 30 and 40 of the plastic baggies stuffed with anti-Jewish literature on porches throughout the tiny hamlet, reports the mom of one of boys who wishes to be anonymous for fear of retaliation.
The kids brought the plastic bag to show the woman. “It had a flyer and oatmeal or peanuts to weigh it down,” she told us. “It was anti Jewish propaganda.”
The woman told us that when she saw the flyers, “I was pretty shocked. I didn’t think what I was looking at…was what I was looking at.” She said she felt dread. “What else is going to happen now?” she worries. “What next steps are they going to take.”
After the mom explained to the kids how it was literature that was designed to stir up hatred for the Jewish people, her kids and a friend of theirs went out to see if there were more in the town. “They spent probably close to an hour picking them up from 2nd and Sixth [Streets] off people’s porches and throwing them away…My oldest guesstimated they found 30 to 40 in just Scotia.”
She explained, “We don’t want this to be something everyone sees and emboldens people to act out in hate. It is a shitty thing to come out on your porch and see.”
She added, “And you don’t want other people to come out on their porch and say there are others like me and want to do more… Seeing this kind of stuff and making it broadcast that there are other people on that spectrum, they might join forces and really ramp everything up….We have enough of [hate] here; we don’t need it spreading.”
The woman told us, “While [the kids] were walking around, I went to the FBI site and reported it and the Sheriff’s site and reported it.” She said asked a woman she knew who had RING doorbell to look at who had done it. “[The image] was really grainy
,” she said. But she suggested that other people might have better images.
“Then we drove around town through Rio,” She told us. “We saw one of the Rio Dell cops and told him as well.”
The woman worries that telling the media might be problematic. “It’s a Catch 22. If you talk about it, that might embolden people.” But, she said that she wanted to “make people aware that this shit is going on. ”
