Editor’s note: This story includes bigoted and misogynistic quotations.
The story spread quickly online and by word of mouth on Oct. 20, after a member of the Humboldt Foodies Facebook group posted screenshots from Smalls Fusion Comfort restaurant owner Scott Boone’s personal page, one dated March 19, reading, “This is what you fucktards on the left want. Fuck you and fuck Islam.” The other, undated, refers to a protesting woman in an embedded video as an “old liberal cunt” and a “stupid bitch,” and is shared from right wing extremist Christian minister Kaden Pody’s Facebook page, where it first appears a little more than two weeks ago.
Humboldt Foodies, its rules explain, “is about celebrating the food scene in Humboldt.” So, following its policy against negative posts, administrators removed the screenshots as they say they have done previously for Smalls and other restaurants. But some members had already seen the posts. Community members online and off have responded with anger, disappointment, concern for restaurant employees, shrugging dismissal and speedy forgiveness. Boone himself has moved between defiance and vowing self-improvement. In an economic climate where restaurants are already operating on slim margins, Boone’s online declarations may have alienated enough customers to leave his business teetering on a knife’s edge.
In a response to the negative feedback via the Smalls Facebook page, Boone focuses blame on the anonymous poster of the screenshots, a “coward” out to “discredit” him with photos of his comments, the authenticity of which he doesn’t dispute. He also lambasts the Humboldt Foodies administrators, saying they “should be ashamed.” He insists he is not a bigot, that the posts “have nothing to do with my restaurant” and that he hates politics. He asks the public not to let “people without evidence” (beyond the screenshots, one assumes) stop them from dining at the restaurant.
Humboldt Foodies isn’t a group Boone frequents, he says. “I’m sure I have been in there in the beginning to get the word out [when Smalls opened], but I lose interest really fast,” and he hasn’t looked at it in a long time. When asked about having been banned from the group, he says, “I think I was posting too much and that was the end of it, but no one ever told me I was banned.”
However, when the Journal checked in with the group’s administrators, they confirmed they warned Boone about posting too much in July of 2025 and that they banned him this year on Sept. 11 for breaking the group’s no politics rule.
In a later post on the Smalls page, Boone takes a softer tone than the first, apologizing for “saying things that were hurtful and disrespectful.” He writes that he knows stress is “not an excuse” and that he’s trying to improve. “I’m genuinely sorry to those I offended, and I hope that, in time, my actions will show that I mean that.” He goes on to say, “one of the things I’ve always loved most about [the restaurant business] is being around different people, experiencing different foods, and learning about life and different cultures.”
Answering the phone at Smalls the following day, Boone has shifted his tone. “It’s embarrassing and upsetting, and it’s just a new thing for me as well,” he says. His strident, defensive response, as well as the screenshotted posts, he begins, are due to the stress of running a restaurant. “This place is just on me all the time,” he explains. “We all have stresses in life — it’s not easy running a restaurant these days. … It took a long time for us to get a foothold here … my schedule is quite demanding,” he says, lamenting the increase of gas and grocery prices.
Asked what the struggles of restaurant ownership have to do with women protesters or Muslims, Boone admits it’s totally unrelated. “It’s not connected to my restaurant. That’s my problem with all this. It’s my personal page,” he insists, and therefore irrelevant and should not be held against his restaurant. Later, he says he’s an un-savvy social media user and only meant to share his misogynistic and anti-Muslim statements with Facebook “friends,” but it was actually public. This is also, he says, “the first time it’s ever affected my business like this,” initially referring to “being trolled,” before having the term clarified by the Journal. He then states, “Somebody took a picture of a post on my personal page and shared it on Humboldt Foodies.”
While he is unable to recall the specific incident that led to the post calling a protester the C-word, Boone admits to losing his temper, but not to misogyny. “I was having a bad day, and something ticked me off or whatever,” he says, unable to recall a specific incident, “and I responded in a way that I should not have.” Similarly, he says, the post clearly attacking the religion of Islam was driven by stress, not Islamophobia, which “doesn’t square at all” with his purported love of other cultures.
“It doesn’t make sense because that’s not who I am,” says Boone, and, he adds, not who he’s ever been, though he admits he can see how that might appear disingenuous given his anti-Muslim post. He says, “I’ve never not accepted anyone in my restaurant,” which, if such a refusal of service was based on religion, for example, would be illegal.
He points to his cooking as an example of his embrace of other cultures, saying, “My food shows that — I have a fusion restaurant.” But fusion cuisine provides shaky cover, given its reputation for cultural appropriation by white chefs who too often cherry-pick flavors and techniques from non-Western cultures, severing them from their contexts and using them to add superficial “ethnic” novelty to European and American dishes. As personally enriching as appreciating myriad cuisines can be, it’s hardly a safeguard or proof against bigotry. It calls to mind the oft-repeated phrase in discussions of Black arts and culture in the white American mainstream: “They love everything about us except us.”
For Boone, who came to Eureka after closing Café on Main in Weaverville, the stakes are high. “I have nothing else,” he says. “If this restaurant fails, I have nothing else. I’ll probably end up on the street.” The loss of the previous business left him “bitter,” he says, and “I came as close as I’ve ever come to having nothing when we first came here.”
Politics, he says, haven’t been an issue for him in the past. “I have no general politics. I detest all politics,” Boone says, “The entire situation is bad.” But when pressed about what one might find if they went back through his Facebook posts, he changes his answer. There won’t be anything misogynist or bigoted, he promises, but, “In my past, I have been a person who has very strong opinions. In my recent past [few months], I have a girlfriend who is very different,” and now, “I don’t hate anybody. … I got caught in the middle of my change.”
In fact, further screenshots from 2025 and as far back as 2020 obtained by the Journal reveal more anti-Muslim sentiment and harsh, sometimes vitriolic criticisms of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. There is also a repost outrageously equating the sexual abuse in the Epstein files to trans women using women’s bathrooms.
“I don’t expect people to just believe me and drop everything,” Boone says. “I’ll put in the work.” That work, he explains, “is me controlling myself … convincing people through time that this is a great place and everyone is welcome here.” He says, “If my restaurant fails because I’m an idiot and didn’t control my temper, then I guess that’s how it is. For doing something we all do.” But spouting and posting misogyny and Islamophobia aren’t things “we all do.” And the consequences aren’t limited to a damaged reputation, lost customers or even a lost business.
Exposure to online hate has been shown to normalize prejudice and contribute to violence. Transgender people, often maligned as threats to safety, are in fact far more likely to be victims of violence — four times more likely than their cisgender counterparts, according to the University of California at Los Angeles Williams Institute. Anti-Muslim racism and fearmongering have ramped up since the first Trump administration and the war in Gaza, and the Islamophobic attacks on Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race and the attempt to deport Minnesota Congressmember Ilhan Omar have heightened fear in communities around the country. Local signs of hate are a reminder to Muslim people who call Humboldt home of the places they are still not welcome or safe. Likewise, violence against women is hardly new, but it’s been a rough month in the news with a seemingly constant influx of terrifying attacks, and responses from men, media and institutions that are nearly as unsettling. One more denigrating voice only adds to the chorus.
Boone says he understands some people can’t forgive, and that he was probably one of them once, but he’s had a lot of support over the past couple days. When asked to consider how much it’s asking a marginalized person, for example — to believe that the posts have nothing to do with the restaurant, where they’ll be spending their money and trusting him to feed them, that the hateful sentiments don’t represent who he is, at least not anymore because he’s changing, and he’s going to make tremendous effort to not be terrible from now on — he says he can understand it.
As for refraining from being terrible, he asks, “Isn’t that the goal?”
If people could just give others opportunities like that, he says, the world would be “beautiful.” But can he see how extending that opportunity can be a risk for a marginalized person?
After a pause, he replies, “I don’t know what you mean by that. It sounds very dark. I have hope. I have hope for all of us. I have hope for myself.”
A day later, speaking again at Boone’s request, he says he was unable to get out of bed in the morning and was too worn out to open the restaurant. He says he’s been looking back on a pattern of hostility toward “anyone who I felt was not on my side of the aisle,” an attitude he attributes to his upbringing with a military father. “I’m trying to figure out how it got to that point,” he says, adding he’s working to communicate better and be less combative.
“I really do understand how my words affected them,” says Boone. Though minutes later, when asked about the other screenshots that have been hidden by the Humboldt Foodies admins, he still says he doesn’t know why someone would post offensive comments from his personal page. “I don’t know why people do what they do.”
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106 or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky and Instagram @JFumikoCahill.
This article appears in ‘Crash Course’ A Halloween Comic by Liz Valasco and Collin Yeo.
