Jessy Hiatt was out walking along West Cottonwood Drive in Evergreen on Saturday night when he found a clear plastic bag containing several beans.

“I didn’t think anything of it at first,” Hiatt said. 

But then he read a flyer sitting among the beans that contained racist messages, Hiatt told the Daily Inter Lake. Canvassing the rest of the neighborhood, he estimated he collected 50 bags, all found at the ends of driveways. 

“I don’t really like people spreading hate,” Hiatt said. “I decided to go around and pick them up.” 

The flyers were printed on both sides with the phrase “White Lives Matter” and included links to White Lives Matter Montana social media channels. The night after Hiatt found the bags, a 22-second video was posted by the organization to one of its social media channels.  

The footage shows the hands of a person putting up stickers in various areas, including a gas pump. One sticker was a picture of Charlie Kirk, a right-wing political influencer who was shot and killed at a Utah college campus last week. It read “Honor his memory. America will never be the same.” 

Another sticker said, “White man zone.” A third sticker read “Regresa a tu pais,” which means “Return to your country” in Spanish.  

At the end of the video, the camera person throws clear plastic bags — similar to the ones found by Hiatt — out of a car at night while driving through a neighborhood.  

“That’s very standard,” said McKenzie Ball, Counter Extremism program coordinator for Catalyst Montana, a nonprofit advocacy group that tracks reports of hate crimes and the distribution of hate materials in the state.  

Putting rice and beans in bags with messages was commonly used by the Klu Klux Klan, Ball said.  

White Lives Matter Montana is a group that Ball is all too familiar with. Catalyst Montana tracked the distribution of propaganda and other hate materials from the group over the summer.  

“They’re pretty prolific, and they’re a very small group,” he said.  

There are one to two dozen active members of the group, Ball said, and they do something on a weekly basis. Last weekend, three activists from the organization flew banners over the interchange of 19th Avenue and Interstate 90 in Bozeman.  

There are five to seven known active members of White Lives Matter Montana in the Flathead Valley, Ball said.  

Propaganda materials spread by the group typically include stickers, flyers and baggie drops, and they’re often found in libraries, schools, gas pumps, stores and porta potties at national forests. Catalyst Montana averages five to 10 reports of hate crimes or material a month, Ball said.  

White Lives Matter Montana has been behind most of those reports.  

Earlier this year, white supremacist flyers were dropped off at a popular bookstore called Bookworks in Whitefish. Store manager Marti Brandt told Whitefish City Council in February the flyers were placed in books and the store windows.  

“We’re facing a horrible moment, nationally, right now,” Brandt told the council. “There’s a lot of hate speech. There’s a lot of hateful rhetoric happening and people feel emboldened by that.”   

To report a hate crime or hate material, visit catalystmt.org, and select “report hate” in the drop-down menu.  

Reporter Hannah Shields can be reached 758-4439 or [email protected].