Jason Kessler, the far-right activist who organized last year’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counter-protester was killed, said that he thought people “need to separate the alt-right” from real-life events like his upcoming Unite the Right anniversary rally because those people “aren’t used to being out of the internet.”
It was reported yesterday that Kessler and other white nationalist and militia groups had signed consent decrees in which they agreed to discourage “paramilitary activity” in Charlottesville so that they could resolve a lawsuit stemming from last year’s rally. The same day, he also appeared on the alt-right podcast “The Public Space” hosted by white nationalist Jean-François Gariépy, to who Kessler suggested that many alt-right people are ill-equipped to behave properly at “in real life” events such as his rally because their activism largely takes place on the internet.
Gariépy asked Kessler to explain why he is “talking about collaborating with the police, collaborating with the secret services” for his “Unite the Right 2” anniversary rally in D.C., and whether he believed there was merit to accusations that he “encourages people to find themselves in situations where they will get doxed.”
“No,” Kessler said. “I believe what people need to do is they need to separate the alt-right from these [in real life] events. I don’t feel like they’re compatible. I think that if you go and do an event like we had last year, where people who aren’t used to being out of the internet or are going up and doing Sieg Heils and all kinds of crazy stuff like that, yes, there is a very big danger that you’re going to be doxed.”
He continued, “That’s why I’m sort of distancing myself from the alt-right. And some people are calling me a ‘cuck’–whatever. But that kind of neo-Nazi stuff is just not compatible with real-world stuff. So if you go to this event and you see people doing those salutes, you see somebody carrying a swastika flag, you tell them to put it away or get the hell away from them. Don’t just stand there and get photographed for all the world to see standing next to somebody who is probably a provocateur.”
