VIRGINIA CITY, Nev. (KOLO) – The people seen on camera in a viral TikTok from Hot August Nights in Virginia City have had their registration revoked permanently.

Organizers from Hot August Nights told KOLO 8 News Now the news Tuesday morning.

The incident got the attention of local police, prompting the Storey County Sheriff’s Office to initiate an investigation into the incident.

That investigation is now being handed over to the Storey County DA’s office.

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RENO, Nev. (AP) — A rural Nevada sheriff is investigating a potential hate crime after a Black man who was collecting signatures for a ballot measure recorded a confrontation with another man he said directed a racial slur at him and said “they have a hanging tree” for people like him.

“I’m still shaking every time I think about it,” Ricky Johnson told The Associated Press by phone Monday as he boarded a plane in northern Nevada back to his home in Houston, Texas.

Johnson posted part of the video of the Aug. 2 incident in Virginia City, Nevada, on social media, and the comments drew swift condemnation from local and state officials. Sponsors of the 10-day Hot August Nights class car event that was being held at the time said it revoked the registrations of those identified in the video confronting Johnson.

Storey County Undersheriff Eric Kern said Monday the office has completed interviews with Johnson and potential suspects and delivered the case to the district attorney for a decision on any charges.

“As far as a hate crime, it could be an element,” Kern told AP. “There is an enhancement we are looking at.”

Johnson, who can’t be seen on the video he posted to TikTok, said a white man called him a racial epithet and referenced the “hanging tree” before he started recording the encounter. In the recording, Johnson asks the man to repeat what he said.

A loud, profanity-filled argument on both sides followed before a woman told Johnson he was on her property and he repeatedly asks her not to touch him as they move the conversation into the street, the video shows.

Kern said Johnson provided the video to investigators. He said no one, whether suspect or victim, has been uncooperative in the investigation.

In a statement over the weekend, the sheriff’s office said it doesn’t condone racism, inequality or hate speech and wants to ensure the public it’s doing a thorough investigation.

“But I want to say that in general, in Virginia City, this is not something that happens here,” Kern said. “It’s really a sad thing but it’s an isolated incident. It’s has caused a lot of negative impacts on all sides because people are getting a negative opinion. People are calling businesses.”

Storey County District Attorney Anne Langer didn’t respond to an email request for comment Monday. A spokeswoman for her office referred calls to County Manager Austin Osborne. Osborne’s office said he wasn’t available.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, who is Black, offered his support Monday to the Storey County Sheriff’s Office in the investigation of what he said was a “hateful, racist incident” in one of Nevada’s most storied towns.

Virginia City attracts tens of thousands of tourists who walk its wood-planked sidewalks filled with old saloons and stores in the Virginia Range just east of the Sierra, about 30 minutes outside of Reno.

It was Nevada’s largest city in the mid-1800s when the discovery of the Comstock Lode brought thousands of silver miners there. Samuel Clemens got his start in the newspaper business and adopted his pen name, Mark Twain, there at the Territorial Enterprise.

Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo posted on social media saying he was concerned and disappointed by the incident.

“Racism and hate have no place in Nevada — this behavior must be condemned in the strongest terms possible,” he wrote on X.

The Virginia City Tourism Commission denounced the “hateful and racist” behavior as “abhorrent and inexcusable.”

Johnson was working for Advanced Micro Targeting Inc., a Texas-based company that provides voter outreach and get-out-the-vote services, to collect signatures for a proposed Nevada state ballot initiative aimed at capping fees that attorneys collect from clients in personal injury cases.

Johnson said he’s been the target of racial slurs before but the Virginia City incident was different.

“To be actually in the middle of that and you have no way out. you feel like you’re being surrounded by all these people. I felt closed in,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Ken Ritter contributed to this report from Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS — It’s a taxing question that might just tip the Silver State’s voting results in Donald Trump’s favor come Election Day.

Since the former president’s June 9 declaration of “No Tax on Tips” during a well-attended outdoor rally in Sin City, the idea has caught on with workers in several tip-reliant occupations, from brothels to beauty parlors.

Food and drink servers, unionized or not, also approve.

But it’s a long trip from the serving floor to the enactment of legislation. Despite an impressive lineup of backers — some of whom have no kind words for the ex-prez — the notion still faces formidable odds.

Among supporters are the Silver State’s two US Senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, who’ve signed on as the sole Democrat co-sponsors of the “No Tax on Tips Act” introduced in June by Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz.

In the House, Nevada Reps. Steven Horsford and Susie Lee are the only Democrats to co-sponsor Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) measure that mirrors the Cruz bill.

Progress appears slow: The Cruz bill, S. 4 621, was assigned in June to the Senate Finance committee. H.R. 8941, the Donalds bill, was sent to the House Ways and Means panel. But neither measure has been scheduled for hearings.

Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, would love to see the taxman barred from the tip jar.

Pappageorge told The Post that between 18,000 and 20,000 of his local’s 60,000 members are tipped employees.

“There’s no other concentration of tip earners that are actually represented by a union like this anywhere else” in the nation, he said.

Pappageorge said his members “never had a peep” from President Joe Biden or Trump during their terms in office, but the union executive applauded the ex-prez for having “got the conversation started.”

Of greater value to tipped workers, Pappageorge said, would be to eliminate the federal “sub-minimum wage” of $2.13, where tips make up the difference between that and the $7.25 regular minimum, and just pay the regular minimum instead. Also helpful would be more sanity on the part of the IRS when the tax agency develops the “tip allocation rate,” its estimate of what tipped employees get in gratuities on which “they charge you taxes accordingly.”

Instead of setting a fixed allocation rate, the tax collectors should view tips “differently than wages,” he said. “We’re not say not taxes, but we’re saying it’s different.”

Pappageorge said the dollar amount of tips collected by his union members is not constant: “It’s up and down.”

Karen Off is the owner-operator of bustling Fringe hair salon in Mesquite, some 90 miles northeast of Las Vegas. She and the independent contractor stylists there get tips on top of fees for specific services, and Off said the idea of “no tax on tips” is appealing. “They tax us enough,” she said.

She said a tip is “an extra bonus that you earn. Because I know if I get a good waitress, she gets more than if I get somebody who never checks on me. … I earn my tips by doing a good job.”

Yolanda Scott, a 32-year Culinary Local 226 member in Las Vegas, said because of IRS tip allocations, “I just get whatever I get, because of the IRS takes control of that, and then my tips are kept. I get my tips at the end of my shift, my work shift.”

She said no taxes on tips would be “a great thing,” particularly since “everything is so expensive. I mean, we have to survive. We want to live.”

Liz Hudson, another union member who’s worked at the New York, New York casino for 25 years delivering drinks to gamblers on the casino floor, said she “would definitely benefit” from tax-free tips.

The benefit would give her “probably triple what I’m making now.”

Hudson said it would even help when patrons forget to tip when served.

“When we get stiffed, we’re getting taxed on that drink that we just brought out, and we get nothing for it,” she said. “So at least if we got rid of getting taxed, it wouldn’t be as much of a pain to not get tipped.”

Away from the Las Vegas Strip, over at the Red Rocks Casino Resort & Spa, server Bridget Brooks supports tax-free tips.

“It would be great,” she said. “They tax us so much we barely get a paycheck. I understand that the money goes to the economy, but how about taking it in other ways so they’re not taxing us more than we make?”

Not everyone is delighted with the proposal, however.

“I’m not sure why we would not tax their earnings versus other people’s earnings,” said David Neumark, distinguished professor of economics at the University of California—Irvine, who has studied the earning of tipped workers. “Everyone should be treated the same.”

He said “wages might fall” if tips aren’t taxed: “If I cut the tax on your income by 30%, your after tax income might not go up by 30% because more people may choose to work and that will lower pay.”

One business owner enthusiastically supports exempting tip income from taxes—and Trump, whose rally comments sparked the current legislation.

Bella Cummins, the 74-year-old operator of Bella’s Hacienda Ranch, a legal brothel in Wells, Nevada, near Reno, said the move would help operators lower operating costs.

“The brothel’s sex workers also benefit,” she said in a statement. “Legal sex workers are independent contractors who pay out of pocket for their medical fees, sheriff cards, and other business essentials such as adult toys and lingerie. When workers receive untaxed tips, it allows them to set more competitive prices for their services, attract more clients, enhance their reputation, and expand their customer base.”