Residents in the Country Club neighborhood of Denver at Marion Street and 1st St. were greeted with a rude awakening on the morning of Jan. 23 when they discovered their block had been targeted overnight with a flyer drop by the so-called “Goyim Defense League” — a neo-Nazi organization who has been waging a disinformation war across the country for several months. A night later, similar flyers were reportedly distributed in Miami Beach and Surfside neighborhoods in Florida and along Union Street, Pacific Avenue and Divisadero Street in San Francisco.
Denver Police Department provided this statement through their Public Information Office: “On January 23, 2022, the Denver Police Department received reports of flyers containing Anti-Semitic language, which were distributed in the Country Club Neighborhood. These flyers are being investigated by DPD’s Bias Motivated Crime Unit. Anyone with information on this incident should contact Crime Stoppers at 720-913-STOP (7867).”
This is part of an ongoing propaganda attack aimed squarely at American Jews across the country, and has happened before in the Denver Metro Area. Most recently, similar flyers were distributed the weekend before Christmas in Denver. That drop appeared to be part of a coordinated nationwide effort that also included residential areas in Alabama, California, Idaho, Illinois, North Carolina, Texas and Vermont as well.
According to the Anti Defmation League, the “Goyim Defense League (GDL) is a small network of virulently antisemitic provocateurs led by Jon Minadeo II of Petaluma, California.” They routinely participate in stunts aimed at harassing Jews and encouraging antisemitism. And they’re reportedly most active in California, Florida, New York, and Colorado.
“Minadeo, who has been active for several years, first posted his antisemitic stunts on platforms such as YouTube, DLive and BitChute. After being de-platformed in May 2020, he and Dominic Di Giorgio, also known as Ned Flanders, of Port St Lucie, Florida, launched GoyimTV, a video streaming platform focused mainly on antisemitic content. Minadeo regularly uses the platform to post his podcasts and videos of his antisemitic exploits and homophobic rants. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, other GDL devotees began to do the same.”
The Goyim.TV (a URL which redirects to GoyimTV.TV) website is hosted by Cloudflare, which has found themselves embroiled in controversy regarding manners of hate speech online on multiple occasions. One such example concerned neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, for whom Cloudflare provided DNS routing services until 2017. After a firestorm of backlash, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had The Daily Stormer removed from their services after they posted material mocking the murder of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was killed when a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd protesting the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017.
The flyers the GDL has been distributing are mainly focused on perpetuating a conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was orchestrated by “the Jews.”
“During a December 2020 podcast,” the Anti-Defamation League says, “Minadeo, who refers to the virus as ‘Jew flu,’ said, ‘They’re coming to do major torturing genocide. It’s the truth…These fucking kikes are going to try to put a fucking needle in your arm!’ In August 2020, a GDL group led by Minadeo drove through Santa Monica and Venice, California, shouting at pedestrians who were wearing face masks. As part of the group’s effort to ‘mask shame the sheep’ they called pedestrians ‘yarmulke slaves’ and told them to take off their ‘Jewish face yarmulkes.’
And, in December 2020, Colorado GDL members Vincent Bertinelli and Joseph Bounds hung a banner from a Denver overpass that read, ‘COVID-19 IS A LIE. IT’S NOT ABOUT HEALTH. IT’S ABOUT CONTROL. While touring Austin, Texas, in October 2021, GDL members harassed a woman at a COVID-19 testing site and hung a banner from an overpass that read “VAX THE JEWS.”
Meanwhile, Colorado’s own U.S. Representative from the Third Congressional District, Lauren Boebert, has been involved in her own antisemitic dust-up over the last week as well. Last Thursday, Jan. 20, a group of Jews was touring the U.S. Capitol. According to Buzzfeed News, “members of the group, which was meeting with Rep. Tom Suozzi, were wearing yarmulkes, and the person coordinating the group is Orthodox, with a traditional beard. One witness said the group, along with other members of Congress, was waiting for an elevator. When the doors opened, Boebert stepped out of the elevator and looked the group of visitors ‘from head to toe,’ the witness said. Boebert then asked if they were there to conduct ‘reconnaissance.’” This occurred just days after the hostage siege of four Jews at Beth-Israel Synagogue in Colleyville, Texas.
Antisemitism sure had a busy week.
