The Daily Stormer was practically driven offline for insulting Heather Heyer, the woman who was murdered at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville who drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of Antifa and anti-racist protestors. But that didn’t deter Jason Kessler, the man who organized the rally, from continuing to disparage the victim of his demonstration, taking to Twitter to further denigrate Heyer and describe her death as “payback time.”
He has been deleting tweets since the controversy began to swirl, but the internet is quick to screen cap and has a very long memory. “Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting Communist. Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time,” he wrote. He also linked to the Daily Stormer article that sent the white supremacist site scrambling for webspace after numerous domains and hosting companies refused to give their hateful rhetoric a platform.
However, Kessler first tried to claim that the tweet was sent out by a hacker, though he has since deleted that tweet, too. His latest excuse is that the Heyer tweet was the result of a cocktail of alcohol and drugs that had Kessler sleep-tweeting. “I’m taking ambien, xanax and I had been drinking last night. I sometimes wake up having done strange things I don’t remember,” he wrote. He also sought sympathy for the attention his Heyer tweet wrought, explaining “I’ve been under a crushing amount of stress & death threats.”
Strange. He tweeted a couple hours ago that he was hacked, and Weev took credit for hacking him, but now it's gone. https://t.co/k6TSutDSVn pic.twitter.com/GQnWZnj13o
— Matt Pearce 🦅🇺🇸 (@mattdpearce) August 19, 2017
The passive language Kessler uses to describe what happened, saying the Heyer tweet “was sent from my account last night,” could be an attempt to distance himself rhetorically from the “heinous tweet.” It also plays into at least one of the unlikely and unproven conspiracy theories now forming in white supremacist chat rooms, with one attention-seeker claiming to have hacked Kessler’s account to post the Heyer tweet.
Whatever the reasoning, Kessler isn’t getting much sympathy from even some of the most prominent members of the white supremacist and Nazi communities who attended Unite the Right. Richard Spencer, who himself has organized a Nazi rally, disavowed Kessler and tweeted that he “will no longer associate” with him. “No one should,” he added. “Heyer’s death was deeply saddening.”
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
Even Baked Alaska, aka Tim Gionet, who will be speaking at today’s white supremacist rally in Boston, drew the line at disparaging Heyer. He tweeted “This is terribly wrong and vile. We should not rejoice at the people who died in Charlottesville just because we disagree with them.”
https://twitter.com/bakedalaska/status/898770942439997441
Kessler spoke with Fox News about his life following the Virginia rally, noting that he is in “hiding” and has been receiving death threats for his role in the gathering. He also reported that he did not know James Alex Fields and had no comment on Heather Heyer at the time. He also claimed innocence, noting that he had not been contacted by the authorities at this point.