Chapter 3. Keri Smith loves the alt-right
Everyone who hates me is OK in her eyes. I am the ultimate evil. April 2021-June 2021.
If you haven’t read Chapter 1 yet, start here.
Then read Chapter 2 here.
Then, come back.
A funny thing happened yesterday (December 5, 2022): I was doing a stream on my channel to watch white identitarian and anti-semite Nick Fuentes thoughts on Kanye’s West’s disastrous interview on Infowars with Alex Jones.
Yes, I do really believe Nick is both of those things. No, I don’t believe everyone on the political right are those things…but he is and he’s embraced by many.
When Nick’s fans discovered I was streaming him, they brigaded my stream (that means they took over my chat to harass me) and they also utilized the chat on Nick’s streaming service Cozy to send me messages (the chat function is real-time, even if the video we’re watching is recorded).
One of the messages they repeatedly sent was that Mike Harlow is a friend of their movement.
Their movement being anti-semitism and Christian nationalism, and (to a lessor extent) white identitarianism.
Mike Harlow is Keri Smith’s best friend.
As they say, there are no coincidences.
Chapter 3 of our story, which took place in mid-2021, also involved another set of white identitarians, and Keri Smith siding with them because they were opposing me.
But first, I need to explain my political evolution.
My journey to joining the Libertarian Party, and specifically the timeline it happened, begins to become relevant in this chapter.
Bear with me, the timeline is a bit long, but it is very important to the overall story to understand precisely when and how this happened, and it will come up several times throughout the rest of our journey together.
In our last chapter, I discussed how I had joined the Republican party to troll alt-right lunatic Launren Witzke on March 3, 2021.
I also discussed how the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus had come to recruit me in late March 2021.
Here’s how it all went down.
I had been keeping an eye on the Libertarian Party all through 2020 when I was politically homeless. There was never a time when I considered myself to be a conservative, which I was always honest about when I was touring with the #WalkAway campaign.
Even when I joined the party to troll Lauren Witzke, I felt dirty when I handed in the paperwork. It just didn’t feel right. I saw myself as someone who didn’t really care how other people lived their lives as long as they didn’t force that on me. That, to me, was the essence of being a Libertarian.
Sadly, at that point, the party did not match up, especially given the statements of the previous LP presidential candidate:
I perceived the Libertarian party to be woke…and thus it was not something I could support even though I didn’t fit it on the left or the right.
But then I discovered the Mises Caucus and was shown a whole new world of non-woke Libertarians just weeks after I had joined the GOP.
It started with Nick Sarwark was NOTAed.
Nick Sarwark was a former chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, the person in charge of the entire party. He’s the person who dragged the Libertarian party to the left so that he could raise more money and be invited to cocktail hours in Washington DC.
Nick eventually ended up moving to New Hampshire (where I live) and tried to get involved with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. He ran for state treasurer unopposed…and the state party hated him so much that they decided to vote for “None of the Above” (NOTA) rather than vote for him.
This was documented by Reason, along with the LPNH coup (an interesting story that I was also involved in, but not something I’ll get into with any depth here).
Getting NOTAed is about the most embarrassing thing that can happen in the LP, a sign of your social exile from the community.
When all this was going on, I was working on lobbying for the anti-CRT bill in New Hampshire. This was the first time that type of legislation had been introduced at the state level.
Here is the testimony that I gave to the house committee on it in February 2021 and another stream where I was lobbying support for it, also in February 2021. I even went on Glenn Beck’s show to talk about it:
Because of this, I was in touch with a lot of state representatives. One of them, Michael Yakubovich, messaged me to share the news that Nick had been NOTAed as a sign that the Libertarian Party was moving in the right direction (although Michael is a Republican, he is a Liberty Republican, basically a Libertarian registered as a Republican to be able to get elected).
Michael Heise is the founder of the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus. This was the first time I had heard of it.
A week later, I was having drinks with Erik and Ben:
They gave me a pamphlet and explained the platform of the Mises Caucus, which was strictly zero identity politics. These were the first non-woke Libertarians I had ever met. I took their information and started researching them on my own, watching videos of Dave Smith, one of the lead influencers of the Mises Caucus.
About a month later, on April 24, 2021, I spoke at an anti-CRT rally to support the bill I had spent so much time supporting for the last few months. This was organized by another Liberty Republican, Lily Tang Williams.
And in that speech, I took Republican Governor Chris Sununu to task for watering down and destroying the beautiful anti-CRT bill that the liberty Republicans had introduced. Here’s a clip:
I also wrote about this on substack.
When I gave this speech, I was looking out on the crowd and it dawned on me that they were mostly Libertarians, not Republicans. The Republicans were trying to destroy something I deeply cared about. The Libertarians were the ones showing up and fighting.
I later recounted this moment of realization on a live stream:
The evening of that really in Concord, I went to a meeting with the New Hampshire Mises Caucus and came home with a new hoodie I proudly sported on Twitter.
I had also met the organizers of Porcfest - Carla Gericke and Dennis Pratt - at the rally and at the Mises Caucus meet up that night, respectively. They both invited me to speak at Porcfest, the annual festival celebrating the Free State Project. The next morning, I bought tickets to Porcfest 2021:
A few weeks later, I paid dues into the Libertarian National Party, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. I also became a monthly donor to the Mises Caucus PAC to support Michael Heise’s work in taking over the Libertarian Party.
Here’s receipts for all of those, with date stamps:
All of this is to say that I have a well-documented history of being involved with the LPNH, The Mises Caucus, the Free State Project, and the Libertarian National party dating back to March of 2021 when I met with their recruiters, joining in April 2021 unofficially, paying dues in May 2021, and all because of policy and activism reasons.
Keri and her friends love to peddle this story that I was “kicked out” of the conservative right and that’s why I joined the LP. But that’s not true. I joined the LP…and then I was canceled viciously by the conservative right over and over and over again. You’ll see one of those cancelations in this chapter.
I love the Libertarian party. I really do. It’s where I fit in, where I belong. Not only do I align closest with them politically than I do with either the Democrats or Republicans, but they’re also my friends.
I’ve never regretted joining the LP and I’ve never looked back, which is something that Keri would try to punish them for later.
But we’re not there yet. Now you know the timeline. Let’s continue with Keri’s smear campaign.
Back to Keri’s bullshit.
April and May 2021 were shockingly quiet months in the land of Keri’s smear campaign.
Sure, Keri would do weird things like this, casually carrying on conversations with the person stalking me with the slightly misspelled Twitter handle like they’re best friends…
(Note: Keri’s profile image in the screenshots changes based on when the screenshots are taken.)
…but for the most part she kept my name out of her mouth.
She started back up again when I got into a beef with Helen Pluckrose on Twitter, where Helen basically misunderstood something I said and then insulted me aggressively (again, another story for another day, but you can watch my video on it here). She then blocked me.
Keri, of course, swooped in to insert herself into the situation even though NO ONE HAD MENTIONED HER.
Then, Keri started subtweeting me. And I’d had enough. This had been going on for seven months at this point.
She kept going, the same smears she had been peddling for months. So, I hit back.
As promised, I posted this video explaining the situation to my paid supporters in Locals. You can watch the full video here, which was recorded on May 30, 2021. This is the first time I’ve publicly released it, and you’re welcome to compare it to what I’ve told you about the story up until this point (spoiler: it’s all the same).
And of course, Keri’s fans told her about it.
Up to this point, I have documented months of Keri’s attacks against me, to which I never really responded publicly because I was focusing on my life and my work. But Keri pretends none of that happened and continues to play the victim.
Keri continued to interact with the account stalking me as if it was her BFF, and calling me Single White Female.
At the same time that this is happening, psycho Lauren Witzke continues to come at me from a different Twitter account (since her personal one got banned).
Remember, Lauren Witzke is best friends with Cassandra Fairbanks, who is also friends with Keri Smith. This is relevant for what happened next.
A few weeks after this, actors on the alt-right aligned with Lauren Witzke formed a cancel mob against me. Their gripe was that I refused to say that critical race theory is “anti-white” because the people pushing that language and that narrative are very bad actors.
This set off a firestorm that I will do my best to make sense of. It was the worst cancelation I’ve ever experienced by far, and it was all because I refused to bend the knee and say the talking points the legitimate alt-right wanted me to say.
It was spurred on by two of the biggest alt-right grifters, Ian Miles Cheong and Cassandra Fairbanks, sending their mobs at me. Cassandra’s supporters also starting bullying anyone that agreed with me:
Now, I want you to notice something about this screengrab: This was in June. Based on the timeline we’ve already covered, I joined the LP two months prior to this.
I had already left the GOP.
Cassandra either didn’t know that because she wasn’t bothering to look at the Libertarian stuff that was all over my timeline, or she didn’t care because she was smearing me to get her followers to attack me. Either way, it’s not a good look for someone who claims to be a journalist. I documented more of Cassandra’s role in all of this here.
The alt-right racists started brigading my channel and all of my streams:
I later found out it all led back to this guy (who is friends with Lauren Witzke):
You can watch the stream where I started figuring out who Jason was here. It all happened live on the internet, in full public view.
I cannot adequately express the onslaught of hate that I experienced during this cancelation in a single article. There were THOUSANDS of people inundating me from every possible direction, demanding I use the language they wanted me to use.
Eventually, I just started blocking all of them. I blocked over 4,000 people from my YouTube channel alone, a move I still have no regrets about. They were posting my address all over my channel. I was legitimately terrified - these are dangerous people. They are the reason we have guns in the house today.
Chris Rufo came out and had my back because he’s a stand-up guy…
And he got mobbed viciously for it:
I was even threatened on stream by these people. This is just one example of several I could choose from, but it’s probably the most chilling:
They also ended up pushing hit pieces on Rufo and me in the alt-right press:
This mobbing lasted for about three weeks. By the end of it, I had blocked thousands of people and was more traumatized by what I had discovered than I can adequately express.
And, of course, Keri had to get involved.
Note: Cassandra Fairbanks deletes all her tweets after a certain time period, which is why they don’t show up now.
Keri didn't bother to look at what was going on. She didn’t bother to look to see that I was being attacked by thousands of the worst people on the internet. Or maybe she did, and she just didn’t care. She inserted herself to smear me to take advantage of the mob already attacking me to further her narrative.
Notice how in this one, Keri advances the talking point that I’m a plant. I had LEFT the GOP two months prior to this, didn’t make a big thing of it, and was very happy with the Libertarians. But somehow, in Keri’s mind, I’m still pretending to be a conservative (even though I’ve literally never called myself a conservative).
It’s a fantasy, nothing more. She invents the story she needs to smear and then presents it as fact with no proof, and people just believe it.
The part where Keri questioned if I was the victim of rape was particularly thrilling for me. I had been raped in my early 20s. When I was thrown out on the side of a dark street while on sleeping medication in the hotel incident, I had to go to trauma therapy for months because it brought back all the memories of helplessness I had when I was raped.
Keri uses it as a punchline.
June 2021 was my breaking point with the GOP.
The cancelation by the white identitarians left me deeply traumatized. Even writing this chapter and revisiting it was difficult. But what was worse was that it also showed the true colors of the GOP, and of the conservative influencers so many people look towards for leadership.
They are not good people.
They do not support good things.
This was not what I had signed up for.
I had left quietly, become a Libertarian, was involved with the party…and I was canceled for it. And Keri was right there the entire time, taking advantage of the mob.
I went to Porcfest 2021, smoked a lot of weed in the woods with the Libertarians, and knew I could never go back to the political right after what they had put me through.
