Several yards in west Enumclaw were littered with racist propaganda earlier this month.
Zip-loc bags weighed down with beans were scattered in the Garfield Street, McKinley Street, and Florence Street areas on Saturday, June 17. The Enumclaw Police Department responded to a call just after 3 p.m. and disposed of several of the bags, which featured a flier promoting a White Lives Matter group; others were dropped off at the Courier-Herald.
Additional WLM fliers were scattered in Carnation the same weekend, and Pride flags were stolen from local businesses.
The flier contained a link to a White Lives Matter Telegram page and a QR code for a film that advances the “Great Replacement Theory”, which falsely asserts that there is an on-going effort to “replace” white Americans with immigrants.
The Telegram page claims the White Lives Matter group is “peaceful”, but the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have labeled groups with that name as extremist and hateful. Some individuals who have been linked to a WLM group or its ideology have been violent, including Payton S. Gendron, the Buffalo, New York shooter who killed 10 Black people at a Tops grocery store in 2022.
The phrase “White Lives Matter” was a response to the Black Lives Matter movement that gained national attention in 2014.
“Everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity has essential value and worth,” Enumclaw Mayor Jan Molinaro said in an email interview about the incident. “We all are imago Dei. Any form of racism, superiority, discrimination or oppression is iniquity, and we must stand against all of these issues to achieve unity.”
Enumclaw is no stranger white nationalist propaganda. The Courier-Herald tallied more than 200 stickers, the vast majority promoting the racist Patriot Front group, were placed around Enumclaw between 2020 and 2022, and more stickers were put up in Black Diamond, Buckley, Bonney Lake, and Sumner.
Patriot Front activity on the Plateau appears to have evaporated after the arrest of former Ravensdale resident Colton Michael Brown, who was a local leader of the group. Brown was arrested in June 2022 when he and several other Patriot Front members allegedly planned to disrupt an LGBTQ+ Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; he was initially charged with criminal conspiracy and pled not guilty at his arraignment.
His trial is currently scheduled for July 31. He filed for an address change during his arraignment, but it is unclear where he currently lives.
