A "MAGA Mom" hat lies on the ground as Kristi Noem testifies before a House committee. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
A College Republicans United group was turned away by a Republican-owned print shop because the owner says the group's leader tried to hoodwink him into printing divisive hate speech calling to "Protect White Americans.”
Kevin Decuyper, a leader of what The Arizona Republic on Wednesday called a “right-wing extremist student group,” ordered about 16 of the signs from Mesa Sign Shop, according to an invoice cited by the newspaper.
The shop’s owner, Jim Torgeson, a Republican on the Gilbert town council who lost his reelection race in July, told the newspaper that he refused to print them.
Torgeson said Decuyper rushed to pay for the order and sent him the design after paying.
“I’m not gonna be part of something that is meant to divide and incite people,” Torgeson told the newspaper. “This is hate speech. It’s very thinly veiled. And I don’t want anything to do with it.”
The signs would have shown a man and a woman cradling a baby on 4-by-8-foot posterboard, and the Republic said all three people pictured appeared to be white.
Decuyper accused the shop of having “reneged” on the order, the Republic reported.
“You know what?” Torgeson said. “Sue me.”
Torgeson also told the paper that Decuyper is a “known troublemaker” in Republican circles.
The trouble on record is Decuyper's pro-Nazi rhetoric about Jews. His past remarks included disparaging “the J’s” and musing about how to carry out “the final solution,” the Nazi policy to exterminate Jewish people, in a “clean and effective” way, the report said.
He has since distanced himself from the remarks in media interviews, according to the newspaper, but declined to comment on the record for its latest story.
The local College Republicans leader also works as an aide to Joe Arpaio, 94, a former Maricopa County Sheriff who is known for harsh treatment of immigrants and a relationship with President Donald Trump that earned him a pardon. The Republic reported that the former sheriff's name appears on accounts that targeted the sign shop.
Arpaio’s official Facebook account, which has more than 600,000 followers, wrote Sept. 30 that it was “sad to see this shop’s conduct with their customers,” according to the newspaper.
Arpaio was convicted in 2017 of criminal contempt, the crime of defying a court, after his office kept up racial profiling that a judge had ordered stopped before Trump pardoned him.
“Stay FAR away from Mesa Sign Shop,” a Google account under the name Sheriff Joe Arpaio wrote in an October review. “You will get burned by ordering from them. Also, I don’t appreciate the owner’s hostility and dehumanizing language against me.”
But when the Republic called, Arpaio said he was “not making any comments,” expressed confusion, and hung up. Torgeson said the review came from a “fake account,” and his company called the user a “bot” online.
“He is weaponizing things like Yelp and Google to harm a small business and to intimidate me,” Torgeson said of Decuyper.
The group’s own Google review faulted the shop for working with a transgender candidate who ran for mayor of Fountain Hills while refusing its signs, the Republic reported.
“Bizarre politics at work here,” the group wrote, according to a screenshot. “No integrity.”
“If you don’t see that your art would put people in danger, then I’m sorry,” the Mesa Sign Shop account responded, adding that the candidate “had no hate on her signs.”
“There’s no winner when somebody’s trying to incite division,” Torgeson said. “I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on.”
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