In the week since a racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia ended with a counter-protester being murdered, the nation’s tolerance for hate and bigotry has sunk to a new low–and those on hand for the rally have learned it the hard way.
Some of the racists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis on hand for last week’s events have lost their jobs after being outed on social media. Others have been disowned by their families. Many of the Websites where they gather have been effectively blackholed. Daily Stormer, for instance, has had a hard time finding anyone willing to host their domain. It popped back on the open Internet on Friday even as its followers were bombarding the mother of Heather Heyer, the woman who died in the rally, with death threats. Early Sunday morning, however, Daily Stormer’s latest registrar, NameCheap, threw the site overboard due to numerous instances of “incitement to violence”–including one post that openly called for Jews to be thrown into ovens.
Well, the latest person to learn this hard lesson is the guy who organized the original “Unite the Right” rally, Jason Kessler. On Friday night, he got the bright idea to trash Heyer on Twitter. By Saturday afternoon, the backlash had forced him off Twitter altogether.
Initially, Kessler seemed to join the near-universal and bipartisan outrage over Heyer’s murder. Hours after her death, he said that the driver, James Fields, had done “the wrong thing”by plowing his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
But Kessler seemed to be singing a different tune late Friday night, when he fired off this.
The tweet included a link to Daily Stormer’s disgraceful trashing of Heyer–the post that turned out to be the first domino in a chain of events that led to Daily Stormer being chased to the dark web.
It came as no surprise that the criticism came in fast and hard. What was surprising, though, was that some alt-right bigshots joined in. Among them was alt-right eminence grise Richard Spencer.
I will no longer associate w/ Jason Kessler; no one should. Heyer's death was deeply saddening. "Payback" is a morally reprehensible idea. pic.twitter.com/MTVDL9Av3s
— Richard ? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) August 19, 2017
As did Baked Alaska.
https://twitter.com/bakedalaska/status/898776991188500484
Funny time for Baked Alaska to be concerned about “spewing actual racial hatred” when he was caught on tape yelling “Hail victory!”–the English translation of the Nazi chant “Sieg Heil!”
You are proclaiming 'Hail Victory!' (Sieg Heil) here, a Nazi call. pic.twitter.com/QSRArfWRNd
— The Big Raf (@arzenal) August 14, 2017
As they say, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
By sunrise on Saturday morning, Kessler had deleted the tweet and issued the classic excuse for such an outrageous statement–“I wuz hacked!”
Apparently that excuse didn’t fly either, because by later in the morning, Kessler changed his line again. He now claimed that a combination of stress and side effects from medicines caused him to snap.
Earlier in the week, Kessler said he’d been driven into hiding after getting bombarded with death threats. As appalling as those are, two wrongs don’t make a right.
By that afternoon, Kessler had deleted his Twitter account altogether. For now, this is the culmination of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad spring and summer for him. It started in April, when he agreed to contribute a number of freelance articles for The Daily Caller. One of them concerned a series of rallies in Charlottesville that took place in May to protest the planned removal of the Robert E. Lee statue, with Spencer as one of the headliners.
However, a few weeks later, ProPublica revealed that Kessler wasn’t just reporting on the rally, but was part of it. The Daily Caller tore up its contract with Kessler, but kept his articles on its site for the time being–even though executive editor Paul Conner said that “we pay writers for their journalism, not their opinions.”
Last Monday, as the smoke was still clearing from the events in Charlottesville, Media Matters asked The Daily Caller about its relationship with Kessler. Soon afterward, The Daily Caller scrubbed all of Kessler’s articles from its site.
And now it looks like he’s been driven off social media altogether. Perhaps he knows that with that early-morning tweet–drug-induced or not–he effectively committed career suicide. It was already clear that Kessler and other white nationalists had become super-radioactive in the wake of Charlottesville. But Kessler’s swipe at Heyer was too much even for Spencer and Baked Alaska. If you go too far even for neo-Nazis, you’re done.
(featured image: screenshot courtesy WCAV)
