White Supremacist ‘Creativity Church’ on Recruiting Mission with Flyer, Sticker Drive
A Twitter user Tuesday posted an image of a “Creativity Church” flyer that was found stuck to a windshield in front of an Austin, Texas Hobby Lobby. The flyer, adorned with anti-Semitic and white supremacist graphics, suggests some reading and a website for people interested in making racism a religion.
What’s now known as the “Creativity Movement” is hardly new, but it looks like the unholy group is capitalizing on the global surge of white supremacist sentiment and “domestic” terrorism.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it was founded in 1973 as the Church of the Creator under Ben Klassen, who committed suicide 20 years later. The “church” was then taken over by neo-Nazi Matt Hale and renamed the World Church of the Creator. Hale is doing a 40-year sentence in a Colorado prison for a plot to kill U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow in Chicago. The hit was planned in retaliation for her ruling in a trademark case. Apparently, “World Church of the Creator” was already in use by an Oregon church organization.
Hale made headlines again from inside the prison walls when he endorsed Republican Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama Senate race, because of course he did.
The “Creativity Movement” has made a religion of white supremacy since 1973 and adherents are on a mission to recruit more believers and radicals with a flyer and sticker driver throughout November 2021. (Image courtesy of SPLC)
SPLC still lists Hale as the leader of the racist group, but a look at the website given on the flyer indicates a new iteration of the church was founded in 2003 under Rev. Hardy Lloyd as “The Church of Ben Klassen.” A post on their site dated Tuesday explains that the hate propaganda found at Hobby Lobby is part of a “November Flier Drive” — yes, they spelled it “flier” — in Pittsburgh, Austin, Cleveland, Salt Lake and Seattle. Lloyd, described as the Grand High Priest, wrote that the flyers and stickers are “messages of hope and love for White folks battling an insane world of paedophiles, drag queens, black supremacists and anti-White bigots.”
The page is dripping with all the standard white supremacist imagery and rhetoric you’d expect, with a hardy dash of anti-vax ranting.
The “church” claims to hold weekly services, a radio show and “monthly activism.” It’s hard to tell how many chapters there are at this point, but the website claims they have 6,544 subscribers. A quick jaunt over to Lloyd’s separate website shows a Tuesday post with the transcript of Adolf Hitler’s Oct. 15, 1940 speech. That site is decidedly more tuned into anti-Semite Nazi pride.
It’s easy to dismiss the Creativity Movement folks as a desperate sect of basement-dwelling bitter white men, but the beliefs they espouse are increasingly seeping into mainstream society. A good chunk of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were seen wearing shirts and hats with a lot of the same hate symbols the “church” stickers and flyers promote. These are the people FBI Director Chris Wray says are now as much, if not more, a threat than ISIS. The last thing this country needs is more radicalized recruits to do bidding for the racist church.
If you have friends and family in any of their target areas, give them a heads up about the flyers and stickers popping up over the month. And, as long as it’s safe to do so, encourage them to rip that nasty crap down before it has a chance to infect impressionable minds.
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