08/17/2026
Last night, a locally owned business on Main Street in Woodland was vandalized: anti-LGBTQ slurs scrawled on a window, another window smashed. The smashed window featured several pro-LGBTQ stickers, showing support for Woodland Pride, advertising the store as a Safe Place for LGBTQ+ patrons, and proclaiming “Hate has no business here.” This act of intimidation and bigotry followed days of derogatory messages and even death threats posted on social media and sent to the business owner.
This was not a spontaneous, out-of-the-blue act by a lone individual. The previous week, the business, Corner Drug Co, had been featured on the public social media of a Yolo County resident, widely known for her anti-LGBTQ views. This resident took video of the Pride Month display at the business, making inflammatory and baseless claims that repeat anti-trans disinformation. The comments on the post are similarly extreme, laced with slurs, calling the business “hateful,” and claiming it is “promoting crimes against humanity.”
The business owner has been trying to field these hateful messages and protect staff while also caring for a newborn baby at home.
This is not the first time we have seen a pattern like this in Yolo County. Most notably, in 2023 this same resident made several videos about the Davis Library and Davis schools, employing the same anti-LGBTQ language. Immediately following, librarians received death threats, law enforcement investigated several bomb threats to local schools—disrupting children’s school days and spreading fear—and educators were woken in the middle of the night due to bomb threats at their residences.
Other local businesses in Woodland and Davis have been similarly targeted and experienced the same deluge of threats, insults, and slurs, only after being featured on this resident’s social media.
All speech—including hate speech—is protected in the United States by the First Amendment, which bars the government (but not private businesses) from censoring speech. Exceptions include defamatory speech, libel, and incitement, but these exceptions are strictly limited and can be difficult to prove in a court of law.
In the age of social media, however, the ability to disperse hate speech, lies, and inflammatory disinformation to an audience of tens of thousands with a single click amplifies the harm a single person can create, triggering an exponential response to one individual’s discriminatory grievance. The usage of basic, easily accessible privacy tools such as VPNs makes holding those responsible for making threats of violence almost impossible, and therefore the link to the original, inciting incident also untraceable. The perpetrators therefore escape consequences for their actions again and again.
We are seeing, as a result, a growing frustration in our local community where the link between one resident targeting a business or a person on her social media and the hounding of that business or person afterwards seems obvious to the average person, but is often impossible to prove in a court of law. This is a dangerous state of affairs for any community.
We at the Davis Phoenix Coalition deeply appreciate the role that Corner Drug has maintained in the Woodland and Yolo County community for over 100 years. A family business, Corner Drug has responded to community needs by providing delivery services that many residents depend upon. Such a beloved pillar of Woodland’s business community should not have to suffer such base and cowardly attacks for being stalwart LGBTQ+ allies.
DPC holds that hateful violence is not limited to physical violence, but can be enacted through slurs, untrue and deliberately provocative propaganda, criminalization of people’s identities rather than actions, and policies that target marginalized groups for extra scrutiny or exclusion. Bigotry threatens the very fabric of a community, seeking to rend neighbors apart over identity differences.
These attacks also serve to pull people’s energy and time away from their work, whether business owners serving customers or nonprofit workers serving community members. But what the perpetrators of these acts want above all is for those of us who are LGBTQ+ and allies to the LGBTQ+ community to be afraid. The threats of physical violence, doxxing, and social media exposure are meant to force us back into closets, to shut up, sit down, and stop demanding our rights. In this goal, they are failing.
Every attack on community leaders, businesses, and service providers that stand up for LGBTQ+ people in Yolo County and nationwide only strengthens our resolve to be more out, yell louder, stand taller, and keep demanding our rights. The LGBTQ+ community has been stigmatized in the US with the same lies for decades, and not once has it been effective. History shows that being LGBTQ+ is simply part of the human experience—we show up consistently from the ancient world until today.
We call on our lawmakers to recognize these new social media tools and methods are putting ordinary Americans at risk in ways they never have before. One person should not be able to create such havoc across an entire county with her personal bigotry. Free speech is a right, but it is also a responsibility, and it is being abused to try to intimidate people and force us underground. Freedom of expression should allow all to live authentically. This can only be done when we hold each other accountable to when the line is crossed to endangering safety.
