Tim Holman has seven cameras on his front porch. Six capture different angles of Beechwood, a quiet street lined with renovated bungalows a few blocks from Belmont University. A seventh faces out like a doorbell. Six more cover the side of his house and backyard.
On Saturday, April 1, residents on Beechwood, Ashwood, Linden, Cedar and other pockets of the Belmont-Hillsboro neighborhood woke up to plastic sandwich bags on their front lawns. They were filled with dried corn kernels and antisemitic propaganda, tossed into yards from a car late the night before. Holman got the make and model (a 2023 Hyundai Santa Fe) and the plate (XH7-D6T, registered in Missouri).
“The problem with tossing trash like this in people’s yards is that sometimes you drive past a house with really good cameras,” Holman wrote on Nextdoor, a social media platform that hosts neighborhood message boards. He stitched together three angles and posted surveillance footage to YouTube.
Holman passed the same information to the police. An officer told him that the vehicle had been rented.
“They know who rented the vehicle,” Holman tells the Scene. “I’m hoping they follow up on that and see who these guys are.”
The case is now in the hands of MNPD’s Specialized Investigations Division, headed by Officer Michael Buchanan.
The propaganda in Belmont-Hillsboro follows an outbreak of public displays of white supremacy and antisemitism across Nashville. In early March, a banner hung on Chestnut Street near Fort Negley praised Gov. Bill Lee for signing legislation blocking gender-affirming care for trans youth; it was marked with a swastika and featured a slogan common among white supremacist organizations.
According to an MNPD spokesperson, detectives “were unable to examine the banner for possible leads and no one turned it in.” In a statement to the Scene, the department said the case is open, but stalled. “If new information presents itself, the investigation will proceed,” says MNPD public affairs officer Brooke Reese.
Two weeks later, police had exactly four pages of documents related to the banner drop: an incident report naming two onlookers, Kyle and Rachael Trask, as “Suspect 1” and “Suspect 2.” It goes on to state that they are not believed to be responsible for the incident, based in part on Kyle’s shirt, which according to the report, “displayed on Anti-Fascist type statement.”
“Everyone was talking about the banner, and I said, ‘I’ll gladly take it down,’” Kyle Trask tells the Scene. “It had already been removed when we got there. When we were leaving, a police officer tapped on our car window and took our licenses. I’m just learning now that we got written up. The cops told me they had cameras at the intersection — hopefully they are actively seeking out who is responsible. It’s a shame that this happened in Nashville, though I’m not surprised, in light of what’s going on.”
Kyle Trask says that, on the day the banner was spotted, his shirt read, “Ban the fascists, save the books.” A year ago, Mt. Juliet pastor Greg Locke — an avowed supporter of former President Donald Trump and the attempt to overthrow the United States government on Jan. 6, 2021 — organized mass burnings of texts like Harry Potter and Twilight, which he deemed anti-Christian. The burning was a response to a wave of book bans across Tennessee over the past couple of years, renewed energy to censor and control information in libraries and school districts buoyed by vocal support from politicians and conservative media. These efforts broadly target writing on race, white supremacy, Black history, gender diversity and sexual orientation, at times attempting to legally categorize such material as obscene.
In the fall, Nashville became the flashpoint for attacks on health care for transgender people when conservative commentator Matt Walsh aimed a camera at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Walsh works at The Daily Wire, which relocated to Nashville from Los Angeles two years ago. Walsh used the hospital’s small clinic for transgender health — and the nuances of gender-affirming medical care — to foment a national outrage complete with rallies, death threats and, a few months later, legislative action restricting gender-affirming medical care for young people, against the recommendations of the medical establishment. The Human Rights Campaign has tracked record levels of violence against trans people in 2021 and 2022.
Two weeks after the banner drop, homes in Sylvan Park were vandalized with swastikas and racist slurs. Residents quickly gathered to clean up the hate speech, recalls Barbara Dab, a Sylvan Park resident and spokesperson for the Jewish Federation of Greater Nashville.
“I think certain rhetoric has become normalized, and it has emboldened people to take action,” Dab tells the Scene. “And when something like this happens, you shudder to think what could happen next. As a community, we have been anxious, unhappy and uneasy. We have a very tight community and a very close relationship with our neighbors and allies outside the Jewish community. We have a lot of support and we are not going anywhere.”
Signs that read “Hate Has No Home in Sylvan Park,” have since sprouted up across the neighborhood.
Nashville has endured several public displays of white supremacy through March and early April. The banner drop hit the first week in March, followed by vandalism and hate speech in Sylvan Park. Belmont-Hillsboro got flyered the Friday after the mass shooting at the Covenant School in Green Hills. The same weekend, Justin Kanew, an activist who runs liberal media outlet the Tennessee Holler, released a statement saying that his home in Williamson County’s College Grove had been shot at multiple times on April 2. Spray-painted swastikas appeared around East Nashville sometime in mid-March. In early April, a neighbor identified the flag of a white supremacist hate group flying in front of a house near Eighth Avenue in the Wedgewood-Houston area.
On Cedar Lane, Janet Wolf remembers picking up the little blue pamphlet on the morning of April 1. She had spent the week participating in demonstrations at the state Capitol calling for tighter gun laws. A Black Lives Matter sign in Wolf’s front yard had been cut in half — by high winds or a discontented passerby, she doesn’t know for sure.
“The culture of violence in our city is escalating,” says Wolf. “It feels like it’s coming from all directions. It’s all the more important for the community to respond quickly and strongly. I have hope for this next generation because of what we’re seeing, and in some ways, I think these incidents are a backlash from people who feel like they’re losing power. They are a response to what’s coming. The good stuff that’s coming.”
