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In December 2021, the Arizona chapter of the Anti-Defamation League released their end-of-year report showing antisemitic and hate incidents had risen in the state by 26% since the previous year. The southern city of Tucson saw a noticeable wave of neo-nazi hate incidents. Last June, local synagogue, Chabad on River, had their doors vandalized with a swastika and antisemitic slur. Thirty year-old Nathan Beaver was later arrested for the vandalism, but faced no hate crime charges as Arizona fails to have a hate crime statute, despite the increasing reports of hate incidents. Less than a month earlier another Tucson synagogue, Congregation Chaverim, was also vandalized and had a rock thrown through their door.
More recently, neighborhoods throughout Tucson were targeted by neo-nazi flyers and graffiti. LCRW has identified some of the culprits.
On the morning of March 1, Jessica* went out to walk her dog and ended up finding a baggie wrapped with a red rubber band on her driveway in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills neighborhood. She unraveled the flyer inside and discovered antisemitic neo-nazi propaganda reading “Let’s Go Brandon: Every single aspect of the Biden administration is Jewish.” The bottom was an advertisement for the antisemitic streaming platform, Goyim TV, which is operated by Bay Area neo-nazi Jon Minadeo. As she walked down her street, Jessica noticed the neighbors around her also received the baggy with a red rubber band.
The Goyim TV streaming website being advertised in the baggies is mostly dedicated to members and fans of Minadeo’s loosely-affiliated white supremacist network Goyim Defense League (GDL). But others who managed to get banned from the usual alt-tech streaming platforms (Rumble, DLive) also make Goyim TV their home. The GDL obsessively hates Jewish people and the content on Goyim TV is almost entirely dedicated to antisemitic conspiracies, podcasts, and filmed antics. Leaders and followers engage in anti-Jewish harassment and stunts, which Goyim TV broadcasts. Sightings of GDL’s antisemitic propaganda has already been reported in 19 other states since the beginning of the year. In Austin, TX, a group of GDL members, several in swastika shirts, dropped a banner on an overpass reading “Vax the Jews.”
Before Jessica had even found the flier in her yard, the culprits had already identified themselves online. The same day, a video appeared on Goyim TV’s Telegram channel showing that her entire Tucson neighborhood was targeted too. The short video opens with the words “White Power” flashing then shows a map highlighting streets in the Catalina Foothills. It then cuts to footage of someone(s) driving around the neighborhood late at night and throwing flyers on driveways. A hand with a distinguishable tattoo throws a whole bag worth of nazi leaflets from house-to-house. Later, another video appeared on Goyim TV mocking Jewish Tucson representative Alma Hernandez’s recent statement condemning the flyers that appeared in Catalina Foothills. The same video appeared on a personal Telegram account based out of the city called “Tucson Alerts,” plus a confession of their antisemitic flyering.
Tucson neo-nazi Tyler Wentzel was the easiest to identify thanks to his failure to cover his very noticeable tattoos. Wentzel lives near the Catalina Foothills area, graduating from Catalina Foothills High School, and regularly associates with Tucson militia groups and other neo-nazis. In an SPLC article examining the intersecting racist vigilantes and hate groups at the US-MX border, Wentzel is featured anonymously under his own political party—United People of America (UPA). He’s also been documented coordinating with conspiratorial, anti-immigrant militia Veterans on Patrol and posting recruitment calls on the neo-nazi forum Stormfront.
Wentzel already has a habit of pinning flyers for his UPA party around Tucson. Attempting to shield the most vile aspects of his ideology, the UPA flyers avoids the overt antisemitism and racism in it’s messaging. However, a video by former KKK Grand Wizard and Louisiana representative (1989 -1992) David Duke is pinned to the top of the UPA website. Wentzel’s UPA logo, an upside-down “T” with a “3” at each point, flies on a flagpole outside his Tucson home.
Credited as the “technology specialist” and website operator for UPA is another Tucson neo-nazi named Sean Gugerty. Gugerty also runs a separate “Tucson Alerts” Telegram account that mocked Rep. Hernandez’s recent comments and confessed to being involved in the antisemitic flyers. The day Catalina Foothills was targeted, the Arizona House’s small Jewish caucus stood behind Rep. Hernandez as she spoke out against the hateful propaganda. On March 9th, a little over a week after Hernandez’s comments, an edited video appeared on Tucson Alerts, forwarded under Sean Gugerty’s real name.
The video opens with an Americanized swastika flag then cuts to Hernandez’s speech. After she says that a neighborhood in the Catalina Foothills “was vandalized with nazi propaganda,” the video cuts to a crudely drawn cartoon that shows a man in a “fuck Jews” hat laughing in front of a burning synagogue while Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration” plays. A man then begins speaking over the video threatening to sue Hernandez, claiming what he did wasn’t “vandalism,” as she described. It then flashes the exact flier that was left in front of people’s homes.
Later, the Tucson Alerts Telegram account posted a screenshot of an email he sent to Rep. Hernandez demanding she retract her statement about “vandalism,” signing his name “Sean Gugerty.” Gugerty’s personal Gab account, which links back to the same Telegram, also shared the same videos of Hernandez, the video of the flyer drop, and a video of him printing out the flyers that would later appear in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood. Another video on his Gab shows Gugerty wearing a Goyim TV hat while he vapes and gives a nazi salute.
Left Coast Right Watch has requested police records on this matter and will continue to update this ongoing story when we find out more.