Chapter 5: Keri Smith thinks I'm her abusive mother
She sent 106 tweets smearing me in a single month. December 2021.
If you haven’t read Chapter 1 yet, start here.
Then, read Chapter 2 here.
Then, read Chapter 3 here.
Then, read Chapter 4 here.
Then, come back. No, really, you need to start at the beginning. Trust me.
This is when it really starts to get bad.
In December 2021, Keri Smith sent 106 tweets about me, an average of more than three per day.
By this time, I just wanted to be left alone. I was being harassed nearly constantly by the people Keri was spinning up in her online mob. I hated being on the internet. I hated the world of political and cultural commentators. I found most of them to be nothing more than vapid shills who were more interested in maintaining their status and making money than they were in changing the world.
Anytime I tried to fight back and defend myself from what Keri was doing to me, people would tell me I was the problem, an obvious narcissist, that Keri was innocent, that she would never harass someone, and how dare I suggest it.
I would show them the receipts - “no, look what she’s doing!” To me, it was clear as day. But it was if they couldn’t see what I was showing them. It all seemed so pointless. The most people would say is “it’s not that bad, just ignore it!”
Ignore Keri doesn’t work. It only makes it worse.
I had people from Keri’s online horde harassing me every day. Every time I’d post something, they were there. Every time someone supported me, they were there to smear me. Every time I had any victory at all, they were there to punish me for it.
No one cared what the truth was. It seemed like no matter what I did, I would just get attacked. It had been going on for over a year.
At the beginning of December, I was going to what some might call a dark night of the soul. I was deeply depressed. I was crying all the time. And it just seemed like I was trapped in this hell. My choices were to give up fighting for what I believed in and quit entirely, or figure out a way to make it work.
So, I did the only thing I knew how to do, and I tried to engage more with spirituality for answers. I was not thinking in terms of politics at this point. I was thinking in terms of larger questions of life and our existence.
But even though I desperately wanted to escape the world of political commentary, Twitter wouldn’t allow me to do that. And so, when I participated in a two-hour spiritual conversation about morality, my answers were taken out of context and twisted to destroy me.
And destroy me they nearly did.
I do believe the things I tweeted.
I believe everyone, on a spiritual level, makes the choice when they’re born and when they die. I believe we make the choice about what type of life we want to live. And I do believe that everyone - EVERYONE - no matter how bad goes to heaven, because I don’t think that hell is a real place and that God loves us all unconditionally.
In the spiritual circles that I’m active in, these are not actually controversial ideas. You say stuff like this and no one bats an eyelash. But in the juvenile land of politics, they result in you getting attacked in every possible way because nuance and context do not exist.
Only the outrage mob matters, and everyone is beholden to it.
Keri Smith, of course, was there to pounce on all of it even though no one had mentioned her.
Notice here that Keri’s first tweet about the situation was not one of outrage or shock. She only feigned that later.
She was thrilled at the opportunity to attack. And attack she did.
This last post is particularly telling.
I have heard from multiple people that Keri privately messages people to talk about me and smear me out of the public eye. I don’t have receipts to show you, but here she’s suggesting that’s exactly what she’s doing.
And then Newsweek published a hit piece on me in which they quoted conservative grifter Ian Miles Cheong (the same person who had spun up a mob of legitimate racists and white identitarians to attack me just a few chapters ago) with a diagnosis on my mental health.
He has no mental health background and spends his days making money off of the alt-right on Twitter, but that didn’t stop them. “Journalism”.
Keri, of course, had a field day.
Of course, this isn’t my career. It’s never been my career. I host a community people pay $5/month to be a part of where I host private calls and activities for people looking for social connection. I’m also an organizational psychologist, a writer, and an activist.
But, of course, Keri is incapable of acknowledging any of that. She only knows how to lie. And she’s thrilled at what she believed was the end of my career (it wasn’t…but she and her horde still tell that lie to this day, a year later).
Yes, my experience of being mobbed and harassed for over a year at this point was exceptionally hard on Keri. Always remember who the real victim was.
I mentioned in one of our earlier chapters that Keri continues to tell people I have no friends and drive everyone away.
Remember, at this point, I had spoken to Keri privately less than 5 times in my life.
Keri didn’t know any of my real-life friends. And if members of my community ever tried to defend me in the replies, Keri would instantly block them.
She also managed to ignore that I had a successful marriage of a decade at this point (one her mob later tried to destroy…seriously).
It sounds trite to say that the only people who believe this nonsense aren’t really my friends, but believe me when I tell you that having thousands of people believe lies about you makes life very difficult.
We’re not talking about one or two people that Keri was convincing of these lies.
She has a platform that reaches tens of thousands of people.
Anyway, let’s continue with Keri’s tirade:
Keri is still selling this narrative that I “stole” my story and that I somehow bullied two people (who she never names or provides any evidence of) off of Instagram. The receipts that my story was real are still on my IG to this day (they’re also documented in chapter 1), and I wasn’t even really using IG at the time that Keri claims I bullied people off the platform. If anyone has any evidence of this happening, I’d love to see it.
Other people may have had a similar experience to me, but my story was mine. And it was real.
Also, speaking of the real story of workplace bullying at NHPR, why don’t you allow NHPR to tell you what really happened themselves (in an article Keri had available to her but never bothered to actually read).
In this one, Keri spins the tall tale that she quietly walked away.
Remember, Keri wasn’t the one who went quietly. We covered that in Chapter 1.
Keri is absolutely correct that she and I are not aligned in any way.
According to Keri, I’m literally the most evil person on the Internet.
And this is when she started saying that my community - the people who support my work - are in a cult. Later, my community would gravitate to this and now call themselves members of my cult. I suppose that’s a bright side.
Enter Kieran.
Kieran is going play a big role in our story moving forward. So, what really happened.
I met Kieran in July 2021, when the white identitarians were mobbing me (covered in chapter 3). We started talking and quickly became friends. He had spent two years infiltrating white supremacist groups - real ones - and he told me about who I was dealing with and watched out for them mentioning my name in their groups.
Kieran and I really got along and we started working on developing a business to combat woke culture. It was a really creative idea that I won’t go into here - Kieran was my creative partner. The brainstorming sessions we had were beautiful. I felt alive during them. You don’t find people like that every day, ones you could be purely creative with and it all just flows. We also worked on other projects together - he was the co-author of this article and my partner in the month of research it took to write it.
Kieran and I were spending a lot of time together - 6-10 hours per day, almost every day of the week, on zoom for 6 straight months.
We talked about everything - work, culture, life. We told each other extremely private things. We had inside jokes. When we weren’t on zoom, we were messaging back and forth…but the vast majority of our time was on zoom.
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Kieran lives outside of London. I was going to go on a trip to London, mostly because I was bored but also because my friend had told me he might like to go and hang out. I told him I needed to know if we were going because I needed to get vaccinated. Then it got to be about a month before the trip I just went and got vaccinated because if I waited much longer, I wouldn’t be able to go on the dates we discussed. And then he decided he didn’t want to go and I thought “well…I’m not wasting this vaccination!!!” and I decided to go anyway. I was bored, I liked traveling, and it would not be uncommon for me to take trips by myself (I used to go on vacation by myself all the time, or travel in conjunction with work and then take side trips - it wasn’t out of the ordinary for me to do at all).
So I said “fuck it.” Kieran lived there, it would be a good opportunity for us to meet in person, I wanted to make sure we weren’t going to kill each other if we moved forward with our business, which would have required a lot of fundraising and dedicated work. And I thought, worst come to worst, I can still go to London and go see royal things and great art, even if Kieran didn’t want to come.
But Kieran did want to and we planned to spend a lot of time together, even making sure we found a hotel with two separate sleeping areas that he could crash in if he wanted (but didn’t need to). He joked about how he was moving into my hotel room. He planned almost the entire trip’s worth of itineraries, and I was going to be there for a week.
And then Kieran told me he had feelings for me on one of our zoom calls. Sadly, those calls weren’t recorded…I could REALLY use that recording.
I cared for Kieran. I really did. We were spending so much time together. But I wanted to be direct with him and make sure he understood that I wasn’t going to leave my husband. But I also wanted to try to be as gentle about it as I could.
Let’s just say it didn’t go well. The last time I spoke to Kieran on zoom, I saw him have some sort of psychological snap right in front of me. He changed in an instant right before my very eyes and turned into someone I didn’t recognize. For the longest time, I wasn’t even sure what I’d seen.
Kieran declared he would not come to London and I told him that we couldn’t go into business together then because, seriously, how could that even be possible? And he got pissed and dug his heels in even more. I got on the plane having told him that if he didn’t get his ass to London, I would make sure people knew he was someone that couldn’t be trusted (being that he has since released a bunch of our private communication, and photoshopped a bunch of it to make it look like something it wasn’t, I think I was pretty on the nose with that one).
Even when I was in London, I hoped he would get it together and realize he was being an idiot. But he didn’t, and I was really upset. I had lost my creative partner. A project I had basically planned the next year around was gone. And I was really worried about him and his mental health.
I still am worried about him and his mental health. Since he joined Keri in her war against me in December 2021, he has physically deteriorated into someone I literally would not recognize if I walked by him on the street. The fact that he has been used by so many people, and what the visible cost to him has been, is mindblowing. But, we all make choices.
Anyway I sent a bunch of passive-aggressive tweets, but never mentioned his name. Kieran had tried to use my name for clout based on our work together and I was pissed.
And then the Hitler Twitter mob happened and Kieran saw an opportunity. Never let a good Twitter mob go to waste! He decided to release a statement denouncing our work and posting it on his Twitter.
Kieran just became Keri’s new best friend.
Keri didn’t know anything about our relationship. She didn’t know any of the inner workings of it. She didn’t know that his mental health had snapped in front of me and that I was desperately worried about his health, even if I was still pissed at him.
She didn’t know any of this. All she knew was that he hated me. And that was enough.
Keri started promoting Kieran’s tweets denouncing me. Because of course she would. I”m the most evil person in the world, so he was obviously a victim.
Note: Kieran’s Twitter account is private now (thank goodness for small favors) so the screenshots I’ll use for him come from an archive. His actions matter less for this story than hers do.
For this one, I’ll remind you that Nick Fuentes’ very anti-semitic movement claims Mike Harlow as one of their own. We say that in chapter 3, at the very top.
How did poor Keri get dragged into this!!! Keri’s audience is convinced that Keri never tweets about me. Remember, all of the tweets in this chapter are within a single month. They were all sent in December 2021. But, as always, Keri is the real victim here.
Ahhhh these are fun. These are when Keri proactively starts smearing me to anyone who might be tweeting about me.
Notice that the Mises Caucus didn’t mention Keri in their tweet. They only expressed support for me. But for Keri, that will not do. She has to swoop in to smear me again as if she hasn’t been tweeting about me repeatedly for a solid week to her friends and audience.
She did the same thing when Dave Rubin replied - swooped right in to smear me when no one mentioned her.
Mike Harlow (Keri’s best friend) had taken advantage of the Twitter mob to create a defamatory video about me where he took clips out of context and photoshopped private messages to EXPOSE me for clicks and money.
Of course, Keri just had to promote that.
And of course, other influencers jumped on the bandwagon to get their ounce of flesh. Outrage is all these people know or understand. Keri’s always right there to chime in, of course.
And then Keri wrote an essay about how I’m her abusive mother. Seriously.
People don’t believe me when I say that Keri wrote an essay about me being her abusive mother…but this is real. It’s still on her substack to this day (here’s the archived link in case she deletes it).
Never letting an opportunity to smear me go to waste, Keri coordinated with him to release an essay comparing me to her abusive mother. Here’s the introduction.
And suddenly, it all started to make sense.
For some reason, Keri had associated me with her abusive mother. On a deeply subconscious level, I truly believe that Keri believes her abusive mother and I are the same person. And that every single time she attacks me, she’s attacking the person who caused her trauma in childhood.
Because Keri Smith has an undiagnosed personality disorder that she is not managing. Instead, she’s taken it out on me live on the internet every day for two years.
I didn’t actually read this essay at the time. I heard something about it but decided to follow the advice I got to ignore Keri, hoping she would just stop.
I didn’t get around to reading it until February. We’ll get to that in our next chapter. We’ve still got a ways to go in December.
However, Keri THOUGHT for sure I would read it (it was probably to get my attention since I had been trying to ignore her) and she pre-emptively left the following comments on the essay:
Keri’s fans, of course, ate all this up in the replies:
Keri, of course, started running with her essay all over the internet.
The ironic thing about this essay is that I’m not talked about all that much. Keri basically introduces me at the beginning and says “Karlyn is a horrible person” without providing any evidence. Then she talks about her abusive mother and other life experiences. She barely talked about me at all, as if she didn’t even need to prove her premise.
But still, in Keri’s world with her fanbase, this was considered proof of me being psychotic. Here are just a few snippets.
And so it continued.
This is one of the more bizarre stories.
Keri tries to sell people this idea that people escape from my cult and then go to Keri to be nursed back to health from the psychological trauma they endured.
In this case, what happened is four people who I was planning a project with stabbed me in the back and tried to steal my work out from under me. Later on, I called them out in my Locals here.
At this time, Kieran (sensing there was an opportunity to gain the clout that I had taken away from him when I told him I wouldn’t help him and that he couldn’t use my name) starting posting our private communications.
Keri was always there to amplify those communications.
Kieran, of course, always selected things he could twist out of context, never provided the full breadth of the communications, and never mentioned that he and I talked for between 6-10 hours a day on zoom almost every day for six months prior to this, conversations he almost always initiated.
And that never mattered to Keri. She had an opportunity to DESTROY me and she was going to take it.
Reminder: Kieran’s account is private at this point, which is why you can’t see his messages. But you can see the account that’s being shared. I also have some screenshots from the archives.
This is a fun one. I had gone with the LPNH to protest at a school board meeting where a school covered up for teachers who were sexually molesting students. We planned to yell “we know where you live” at the meeting and were talking about it on Twitter afterward.
The Quartering (who had no idea what was happening, doesn’t live in New Hampshire, and didn’t know that the guy who owns Odysee was the person to come up with the “Make Tyrants Afraid Again” plan) decided to jump on the mob bandwagon to attack me.
Of course, Keri was right there to jump in.
Keri literally sided with a school that was covering up for teachers sexually molesting students because I’m obviously more evil than that.
I documented everything in this article about Katie Herzog’s shitty journalism (Keri was one of her sources. Seriously).
Kieran had made a meme to annoy Keri (and I’m sorry, but it was funny) and we had posted it six months prior on Twitter to needle them.
Keri obviously still harbored resentment about it several months after the fact, because she went on a whole tirade about that.
As always, Keri is the one true victim in this situation. Because I’ve never experienced the backlash of thousands of people that she had been spinning up against me for over a year at this point.
I’m the real villain for posting a single meme that Keri didn’t like.
Sure.
Let’s continue.
For the record, Britt Marie is a mentally unwell woman that joined my community. She came to our zoom calls to use them as therapy for deep trauma. Members of my community offered to pay for her to go to a real therapist. She refused. She instead would message me incessantly, demanding I call her. Eventually, I had to block her. She’s still obsessed with me to this day, posting about me all the time even though I haven’t spoken about her in over a year.
But Keri took her in to heal her back to health after my toxic abuse.
Sure.
Let’s keep going.
Can Keri sue me? No. Because if she ever tried, I would file a massive defamation lawsuit against her and she would lose and I would own everything Keri has. We haven’t even gotten to the part where she accuses me of being a pedophile yet - that comes months after this.
A note on this one: I can show you DMs with Kieran where I asked him if he was ok with me posting it and he said yes. I will if it’s necessary to. But I don’t believe in posting private communications so he was free to lie and she (of course) believed he was the victim.
Remember how Keri swooped in to smear to the Mises Caucus and Dave Rubin when no one mentioned her?
She did the same thing again to Zuby. He replied to me ina polite dialogue and Keri was right there to tell him who I really was:
(I still disagree with Zuby on this point. People can be whoever they want online and everyone is multi-faceted.)
So, do I think I chose Keri Smith to stalk and harass me in this lifetime?
Yes, I do.
Taking responsibility for your experiences means taking responsibility. There is some deep subconscious reason I chose this living hell.
Maybe I don’t tell worthy of love.
Maybe I’m reliving my childhood with my emotionally abusive parents.
Maybe Keri has been my worst enemy in multiple lives.
I don’t know what the reason is. I’ve tried to meditate on it to work it out, but it’s so painful for me to think about it so I’m probably not ready yet.
But just because I don’t know the reason, or just because it’s a nightmare to deal with, doesn’t mean I don’t accept responsibility.
I have to believe there’s a purpose to this, and I have to believe there’s something I’m supposed to learn and do with this experience. Perhaps even documenting it like this, so that others can find it if something similar happens to them and maybe feel a little less alone for a moment.