In public they sell organic vegetables. In private they join white supremacist groups. Now activists are pushing back. At Bloomington, Indiana’s weekend farmers' market, shoppers can stock up on kale, fresh eggs, homemade jams—and anti-Nazi accessories.
“Don’t Buy Veggies From Nazis,” read a pile of colorful buttons at a recent Saturday farmers’ market.
The buttons were a jab at Sarah Dye and Douglas Mackey, proprietors of Schooner Creek Farm, a vegetable farm. Like other unassuming stallholders at the market, Dye and Mackey sell eggs and seasonal vegetables.
But online, Dye is “Volkmom,” an active member of the white supremacist group Identity Evropa, according to leaked chat logs. “Volk” is a nod to the Nazis’ back-to-the-land völkisch movement.
“Any Whites who have spent time living in a neighborhood or attending a school with a non-white majority know the strife that Whites endure,” Dye wrote in an Identity Evropa chat in January. “I can attest to it myself.” She also wrote of trying to win over a family member by showing videos from a white supremacist channel.
After the couple’s connections came to light, Bloomington locals campaigned to oust the couple from their weekend stall at the city’s farmers’ market.
The farmers’ market face-off isn’t not the first of its kind. From Chicago to Sweden, farmers’ markets have become a surprising battleground between the far right and its opponents. The far right’s love of the markets plays into a larger fascist talking point that idealizes pastoral life and demonizes “degenerate” urban living. The contrast attempts to cast white supremacy as a purer alternative.
“A bunch of us have been passing out flyers at the farmers’ market to say ‘don’t put your money in white supremacy,’” Abby Ang, a Bloomington community organizer, told The Daily Beast.
Across hundreds of posts in chat rooms for Identity Evropa and other far-right groups, Dye discussed her dislike for living in areas that were not majority-white, and her search for “non-PC history books” to read to her homeschooled children, including a “history of the White race” by a former leader of a neo-Nazi group. Many of the posts were in a private chat room specifically for Identity Evropa members who have passed a vetting process.
Dye and Mackey did not return a request for comment, and have not spoken to media since Dye’s posts came to light, although they put out a fundraising call on their website. “We have recently been the target of radical leftists/extremists in their attempt to destroy our livelihood and reputation,” they claimed.
The couple has made contact with a pair of alleged extremists—but not on the left.
Last summer, another Indiana couple spray-painted Nazi flags on the side of a local synagogue and lit a fire nearby. (They originally planned to use Drano bombs to burn the entire building, prosecutors allege.) The couple were Nolan Brewer and his then-underage wife, dues-paying members of Identity Evropa, Brewer told an FBI agent in an interview. Brewer was recently convicted and sentenced in the incident.
Brewer told investigators that in the weeks after vandalizing the synagogue, he and his wife had dinner with other Identity Evropa members. Brewer only identified three by name: Mackey, Dye (whom he also identified as Volkmom), and someone named Steve.
“They’re extremely nice,” Brewer said of Dye and Mackey, according to the FBI.
White supremacists don’t always dress in Klan robes or jackboots. Some, like the set that orbits Identity Evropa (now renamed the American Identity Movement, likely to distance itself from involvement in 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally), try to break into the mainstream with more wholesome outward appearances.
At least one prominent YouTuber who made videos about farming recently announced himself as a white supremacist.
“I've been far-right ethno-nationalist since about 2014,” ChuckE2009, told his more than 500,000 followers in a recent video, where he praised the man accused of murdering 51 people in a New Zealand mosque.
The phenomenon is international. Speaking to the New York Times about neo-Nazi recruitment in Sweden last year, scholar Helene Loow said Nordic Nazis make organic eating a cornerstone of their ideology.
Poster Comment:
The author is Jewish. Daily Beast is owned by Barry Diller, also a Jew. The Identity Europa mini-movement no longer exists.