A series of robocalls, allegedly by a neo-Nazi website, are targeting Iowa’s Hispanic community after the murder of college student Mollie Tibbetts.
Iowans this week received pre-recorded calls advocating for the murder of all Mexican immigrants, the Iowa Starting Line first reported. The calls claim to be from a neo-Nazi podcast that advocates genocide and has previously conducted robocalls for neo-Nazi congressional candidate Patrick Little. Tibbetts, who was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, has become a rallying cry for white supremacists, against the wishes of Tibbetts’ family who have condemned the racist attacks. The robocalls cruelly contradict the family’s wishes, using a female voice actor to pretend to be Tibbetts calling for genocide.
“Some relatives of Mollie Tibbetts are implying that despite having been murdered by a non-white, savage intruder, she would still support the invasion of America by a brown horde currently at a staggering 58 million,” said the robocall, which Iowans reported receiving on Tuesday. “But you know in your heart they are wrong.”
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The remarks are an attack on Tibbetts’ family, who have called for tolerance after the 20-year-old woman’s death in July.
“The Hispanic community are Iowans,” Tibbetts’ father Rob said at her Sunday funeral. “They have the same values as Iowans.”
Other family members condemned the politicization of Tibbett’s death, after the White House used the killing to justify anti-immigrant policies.
“Especially for those of you who did not know her in life, you do not get to usurp Mollie and her legacy for your racist, false narrative now that she is no longer with us,” one family member wrote in a widely shared Facebook post. “We hereby reclaim our Mollie.”
The racist robocall also took aim at Tibbetts.
“If after her life has now been brutally stolen from her, she could be brought back to life for just one moment and asked, ‘What do you think now?’” it said. “Mollie Tibbetts would say, ‘Kill them all,’” it added, using a woman’s voice to mimic Tibbetts.
The recording claimed the call was sponsored by a neo-Nazi website that uses its podcast to call for the expulsion or murder of black and Jewish people from the United States. The site previously conducted a series of robocall campaigns, including for for Little, a failed senate candidate from California who has called for the murder and torture of Jewish people. That set of robocalls, which targeted California residents, promised that Little would expel Jews from the country, and included audio from the Holocaust film Schindler’s List.
The Sandpoint Reader this year traced the podcast back to Sandpoint, Idaho resident Scott Rhodes, who has previously been accused of distributing anti-Semitic CDs and literature in his small town, and using robocalls to try gin up support for an all-white ethnostate in northern Idaho. Rhodes’ previously robocalls have targeted Virginia officials and his city’s mayor.
A black resident of Rhodes’ small town told the Reader that Rhodes had harassed him for months in person and via mailed letters with racial slurs.
