LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The concession stand area at Loeb Stadium and other spots in Lafayette’s Columbian park were papered over Saturday with fliers touting Nazi symbols and the rhetoric of a white nationalist group.

Tobi Beck, a Democrat from Avon running for the 4th District seat in Congress, said she was at the park in central Lafayette for a Labor Day weekend event when Cindy Shriner, a Lafayette resident walking to the park Saturday morning, came up to her with a flier and asked what she should do with it.

“My whole team and I went and scoured the area looking for these things,” Beck said.

Beck said they found a handful of fliers – one that featured a swastika and read, “Satanism is for the weak, and the weak will be crushed” – taped to the walls of the concession stand at Loeb Stadium and on posts in other parts of the park.

The fliers included the web address of the National Socialist Legion, a spinoff of Vanguard America, a white nationalist group – then known as American Vanguard – that has distributed posters and propaganda in the past two years at Purdue University.

The group’s site includes a page of posters, including the ones found in Columbian Park, ready to download and print out. The posters include a number of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli messages, calls to defend the white race and tributes to Adolf Hitler.

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“You don’t know if you have a large group or if you have just five kids putting these up,” said Beck, who faces Republican state Rep. Jim Baird in the November election. “But all it takes is a small number to spread a vile message that isn’t welcome in this community. We have to stamp it out every time.”

Beck said the fliers pulled down by her campaign team were pitched into the trash. She said she let parks officials know about the incident.

The Lafayette Police Department did not have reports Saturday about the fliers found in Columbian Park or elsewhere.

According to its website, the National Socialist Legion is “dedicated to protecting the white European race” and performs “both activism and readiness for the coming racial holy war” and “to protect our people from the ‘browning’ of America.”

A June 2018 report from the Washington-based Anti-Defamation League said the National Socialist Legion recently split from Vanguard America. In November 2016, posters designed by Vanguard America – complete with images and rhetoric that recalled Nazi-era Germany propaganda – were found on kiosks and in classrooms at Purdue. Posters from the National Socialist Legion collection online were found under wiper blades on windshields at a Purdue parking garage in recent months.

The Anti-Defamation League report stated that reports of white nationalist activity were up 77 percent on college campuses between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years. The report referenced reports of propaganda that included “veiled white supremacist language to explicitly racist images and words, often includes a recruitment element, and frequently attacks minority groups including Jews, Blacks, Muslims, non-white immigrants and the LGBT community.”

There have been other fliers and threats tied to white supremacists found in Greater Lafayette in the past 18 months. Among them:

► In May 2017, West Lafayette police received numerous complaints about fliers rolled up and delivered on doors and in driveways near campus with unsigned, uncredited death threats to singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, with warnings to residents: “Hey, you p---- college liberal’s (sic), its Trump time now, shut your mouth or pay the consequences!! Just like this (piece of crap)!!” Police investigated but did not report arrests.

► On Jan. 12, business and drivers in downtown Lafayette found Ku Klux Klan recruiting pamphlets on their doors and under windshield wipers. Those fliers, distributed just ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, read: "Why you should become a Klansman.” Police took a handful of reports about those fliers, which listed the phone number of a group calling itself Soldiers of Christ, American Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Moselle, Mississippi. A J&C review of video surveillance footage from downtown Lafayette security cameras showed a lone man distributing the fliers, but no one took credit or was identified.

► On Jan. 21, someone tied bedsheet-sized banners on a fence outside the Unitarian Universalist Church, 333 Meridian St. in West Lafayette, with slurs about gays and lesbians, African Americans, Hispanics and – again – Jackson Browne. Those banners included threats, referencing a mass shooting in at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas that killed 58 and injured more than 500 more people. West Lafayette police, assisted by federal law enforcement, investigated but made no arrests. A rally at the church a few nights later drew an overflow crowd of church members, city officials and clergy from other congregations.

Shriner said she was walking to the park from her home for the Labor Day event. She said that as she walked on a sidewalk between Loeb Stadium and Tropicanoe Cove, a Columbian Park water park, she found the first flier on a stadium wall.

“I was surprised and then angry,” Shriner said. “My first reaction was to remove it so that children wouldn’t see it. I then folded it up and took it on to where the Labor Day celebration was happening. I made a snide comment that apparently the Nazis had shown up and showed the paper to some friends. Then Tobi joined the conversation and took it from there.”

Shriner said she found a few more as she left the park on the same sidewalk. This time, they were in trees lining the edge of Tropicanoe Cove.

“I threw those in the barrel at the end of the sidewalk near Main Street,” Shriner said. “It makes me sick.”

Beck said she was disgusted by the fliers.

“This was clearly someone looking to stir the pot,” Beck said. “This is a community that has no use and no interest in any of that.”

Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.