I saw it as soon as I walked out of the office Tuesday evening – a sticker affixed to a traffic-light pole at Harwood and Jackson streets behind The Dallas Morning News offices. The top it read, “A WHITE NATIONALIST WAS HERE” — the text in red, except, of course, for the “WHITE.” Beneath it was a website address and a logo consisting, in part, of red and white stripes made to look like the American flag.
I am not naming the group to deprive it of the publicity for which it surely hoped by sticking that little piece of hate behind a newspaper’s building. Or maybe the group wanted to scare us — who knows, who cares.
It wasn’t exactly the New Year’s greeting I was hoping for on the first day of Rosh Hashana, especially after a morning spent navigating newly constructed walls, fences and checkpoints just to get to my seat in synagogue. Two years ago Nazis showed at Hillcrest Road and Northwest Highway waving swastikas and antisemitic slogans. So now we celebrate our holiest of holidays in a fortress. Just like the old days. Or the Old Testament days. But I digress.
I’m not sure how long that white-nationalist sticker had been outside the office. But I saw another Wednesday morning as I walked into work, where colleagues were working on stories about the shooting at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Stemmons Freeway. At the press conference, federal officials refused to acknowledge that one detainee had been slain by a madman’s bullet and that two more, including a Mexican national, had been critically injured. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson instead said we were “a country and a city that needs prayer.”
Times like this I’m not sure we have one — a prayer, I mean.
A white-nationalist sticker affixed to a traffic-light pole near Harwood and Jackson streets behind The Dallas Morning News offices photographed on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025.
Robert Wilonsky / Staff
Another sticker had been affixed to the street-light pole on the same corner behind our office, this one demanding “WHITE UNITY.” It belonged to the same group, which describes itself as “a non-profit organization that serves as a network for Americans to safely engage with a national community of pro-White families, activists, organizers, artists, employers, and professionals.”
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A colleague and I went downstairs to remove the stickers, which have also been popping up of late on the University of North Texas campus. A Reddit thread from Denton warned of razors beneath the adhesives, “to cut anyone who tries to remove them.” Fortunately we walked away with our extremities intact.
I’ve seen worse — like those North Dallas flag-wavers in 2023, or that time in 2017 when someone slapped a handmade swastika outside the AT&T Performing Arts Center as Temple Shalom was honoring the Rev. Neil Cazares-Thomas, of the LGBTQ Cathedral of Hope, with its Shalom Award.
In years past, whenever hate seeped into the headlines, I’d call a Holocaust survivor (usually Max Glauben) or my rabbi, seeking a little wisdom and reassurance, words of reason and sanity, some modicum of calm amid what has seemingly turned into never-ending chaos.
But Max, God rest his soul, doesn’t have to put up with this sh … this stuff anymore. And my rabbi, bless him, deserves some alone time during these Days of Awe.
So instead I called a pastor.
A white-nationalist sticker affixed to a junction box at Colorado and Zang boulevards near Lake Cliff.
Eric Folkerth / Courtesy
“No pressure,” said Eric Folkerth, lead pastor of Kessler Park United Methodist Church, when I finally reached him Wednesday afternoon and told him who he was filling in for.
I’ve known Folkerth for a while through the Faith Commons coalition that includes religious leaders across all denominations. It wasn’t easy reaching him Wednesday. He’d spent much of the day doing interviews and issuing statements about leading weekly prayer vigils outside Dallas’ ICE office since the spring. He was there Monday, too, as always, alongside dozens more – praying, not protesting.
Just before we spoke, he was doing an interview with KXAS-TV (NBC5), during which Folkerth said he hoped “we can move forward as a nation in a way that builds trust, doesn’t rip it apart.” From his lips to God’s ears.
I mentioned the stickers outside our office, at which point Folkerth told me he also had photos on his phone of some white-supremacist garbage stickered to a junction box at Colorado and Zang boulevards near Lake Cliff. This one belonged to an infamous group whose motto reads, “For the Nation Against the State.”
He texted me the photo as we spoke. I sighed and said something about losing faith and hope. He said I wasn’t the first journalist to use that word on Wednesday: hopeless. Then he delivered one of those little sermons he probably gives 100 times a day just to get someone through the night, about how the only way to stave off the feeling of hopelessness and emptiness is to do … something. Something helpful, something rewarding, something kind.
“We are missing the basic humanity between us,” he said. “I’ve been hopeless a lot of the time, too, but I’m reminded of something I once heard: People who have no hope will steal yours. I’ve been thinking about that a lot today. We have a lot of very hopeless people out there. Desperate people. But true hope is not believing everything is OK but believing you have options — and a strategy — for doing what you can to make a difference.”
Because better to do something good than to lose everything.