Jason Kessler, the organizer of the infamous 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, accused another alt-right propagandist of plagiarizing “research” Kessler posted on his Twitter feed. Kessler’s research appears to be little more than pulling up excerpts from a 2018 lawsuit that is easily accessible using typical web search sites.
In this latest spat, Kessler’s fury is directed at the prolific alt-right propagandist Joseph Jordan. In May, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified Jordan as the man behind the “Eric Striker” persona at white nationalist Michael “Enoch” Peinovich’s The Right Stuff podcast network. In recent months, Jordan has taken to role-playing as a “journalist,” authoring articles for an extreme-right website called “National Justice.”
Kessler accused Jordan of plagiarism yesterday after Jordan published an article rehashing allegations the organization Life After Hate made in a 2018 lawsuit against Christian Picciolini, a former extremist turned de-radicalization activist. Prior to Jordan’s article, Kessler had looked up the court documents related to the lawsuit and posted a link to them in his Twitter feed—information that Jordan said he had “uncovered” by himself.
“Now, I feel like I’m the victim of a more pernicious plagiarism because the people who are stealing the content have an agenda of trying to silence me and ostracize me,” Kessler said in a Periscope stream. “When somebody takes the product of my labor and puts it on their Twitter feed as if it is their own again and again, that’s bullshit,” he added.
“Mike Enoch’s right-hand man, Eric Striker, is fucking ripping me off for that website that he’s doing,” Kessler said.
This is not the first time that Kessler claims to have been plagiarized. Rebel Media issued an apology in 2017 after Jack Posobiec, a Claremont Institute fellow and political commentator for One America News Network, was caught plagiarizing Kessler nearly verbatim in a video he produced for Rebel Media’s YouTube channel.
Prior to organizing what was possibly the largest white supremacist gathering of the decade, Kessler promoted white nationalist causes in Virginia and authored three articles for The Daily Caller. After his rally prompted chaos in the streets of Charlottesville and resulted in the murder of a counterprotester, Kessler was subjected to numerous lawsuits related the rally, but that did not deter him from continuing to associate with fascists like Daniel McMahon, who was arrested on federal cyberstalking and threat charges last month, and from organizing another Unite the Right rally in Washington, D.C., in 2018.
