By MAX SPARBER
If you posted online images of yourself dressed as a Nazi, or if you secretly operated a record company that featured racist and anti-Semitic records, it was a bad week for you in the Twin Cities.
On Aug. 15, two back-of-the-house employees at the Uptown Diner found themselves in hot water when pictures surfaces on social media of them dressed in Nazi garb.
The Uptown Diner posted a response on its Facebook page saying the employees were under review. “The Uptown Diner unequivocally repudiates the beliefs and ideals of neo-Nazis and white supremacy,” read the notice. It was quickly updated: “After a review, these individuals are no longer employed at the Uptown Diner.”
A more public instance was that of Aaron Davis, a partner at a Minneapolis law firm specializing in intellectual property law. Davis was featured in an exhaustive City Pages cover story detailing his record company, Behold Barbarity Records, which sold a catalogue of albums by artists whose material was often explicitly hateful.
Examples given in the article included the band Deathkey, whose albums include Hammer of Aryan Terror and Behead the Semite.
Shortly after the article came out, Davis’s law firm, Patterson Thuente, scrubbed their site of references to Davis and communicated to City Pages that his was on “administrative leave.” On Aug, 21, they communicated again with City pages, saying “Aaron Davis is no longer employed by Patterson Thuente Pedersen, P.A. Prior to the story, no one in the firm had any inclination regarding the allegations in the article.”
(American Jewish World, 8.25.17)
