Is this horribly offensive, white-supremacist, Trump-supporting, Christian housewife a hoax?
LatestJennifer Mayers is a 44-year-old housewife and mother of two who lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her blog is devoted to “spreading positivity through Jesus Christ.” She is also a prolific tweeter, with outrageous opinions: she believes that Hillary Clinton is Satan; that Alton Sterling, a black man selling CDs outside of a convenience store who was recently killed by police, was “an entitled black thug parading his criminal activity around in public;” and that Texan gun advocate Christy Sheats was a “martyr” for shooting and killing her two daughters. Mayers says she is of Guatemalan descent and that she loves Diet Mountain Dew, her husband’s smile, the beach, and #Trump2016.
She is also almost certainly a fake.
The reason I preach #Christianity. My daughters represent the right. Taylor Swift’s vagina represents the left. pic.twitter.com/4blQ5FrTJo
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) June 16, 2016
Black dogs are the most commonly euthanized ones and least adopted at shelters. Ponder that while you cash out your EBT cards. #science
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) July 5, 2016
Mayers’ Twitter feed and blog are among the most bigoted, hateful things you will ever read on the internet. They are so toxic that it is hard to comprehend that it could be anything other than parody. After police in Minnesota shot and killed Philando Castile this week after pulling him and his girlfriend over for a broken tail light, she tweeted this:
Or maybe not act like thugs and think there will be no consequences? Obama is enabling the black “thug” mentality. https://t.co/XMvDCjO8s7
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) July 7, 2016
Oh isn’t it lovely that she had time to take out her phone and film it for Facebook. Blacks CRAVE attention. Desperate. #PhilandoCastile
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) July 7, 2016
And in response to Alton Sterling’s death in her hometown, she tweeted:
Gee all I have to do is be black and get shot and complete strangers will give me hundreds of thousands of dollars? #AltonSterling Garbage.
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) July 7, 2016
Mayers issues one over-the-top preposterous statement after another: in one tweet stream she can denounce Elizabeth Warren as a “homosexual” and then brag about how much rich she is. To read Mayer’s social media flow is to question the very nature of reality. How could someone like her possibly exist?
Elizabeth Warren is a homosexual who thinks that by slandering President Trump that America will not see her depravity. I SEE YOU LESBIAN!
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) June 27, 2016
I have so much jewelry I’m like the Elizabeth Taylor of Baton Rouge. #blessed I should put some in a deposit box or a safe.
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) June 27, 2016
I needed to know whether Mayers was really a shockingly candid, religious mom in Louisiana or just a brilliant troll. So I decided to do some sleuthing.
Mayers has been sharing her offensive thoughts on Twitter since last year, but it was last month after she began tweeting and blogging about Christy Sheats that she began to attract significant attention. In June, Sheats fatally shot her two daughters, which police have theorized was an effort to make her soon-to-be ex-husband suffer. Mayers, though, suggested that Sheats really shot her daughters to keep them from sleeping around with black men. This, she argued, is what any loving mother would do. “She was brave enough to stand up and say ENOUGH! Not in MY house! ” Mayer writes. “And she should be lauded.”
America’s Martyr: NO Race Mixing https://t.co/tanFjNlO38 via @southern_mayers
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) June 27, 2016
The modern media encourages innocent white girls to see out black boys. It is IMMORAL. #NoRaceMixing pic.twitter.com/nlmWKWwFbw
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) June 27, 2016
A glass of tea and a few almonds certainly do hit the spot on a humid Louisiana evening. Twitter haters are out in force, friends.
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) June 28, 2016
Outside of Twitter and her WordPress blog, Mayers the 44-year-old Baton Rouge resident, seems to have virtually no online footprint. A Lexis Nexis search revealed several other women with the name Jennifer Mayers in Louisiana, but the oldest one was 38. On Facebook, just one Jenn Mayers comes up in the Baton Rouge area, but she is a meditation-and-peace-loving marketing consultant, not a racist mom. Mayers, if she is real, doesn’t seem to have much of an online life outside of Twitter.
I tried tweeting at Mayers several times to try and get to the bottom of this. After a few attempts, she eventually responded twice before going silent:
@kristenvbrown what is there to question? I’m real and I stand by everything. You are free to write as you wish. Free speech is for all.
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) July 8, 2016
@kristenvbrown would you like a DNA sample dear? A vial of blood?
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) July 8, 2016
Clues from her Twitter profile also suggested she is a fraud. A reverse Google image search on her profile photo to see whether it was lifted from someone else came up empty. The photo though, was obviously photoshopped, potentially to obscure locating its origins. And as Mayers’ popularity grew, she changed the image, flipping it and turning it into a cube with an overlay of a heart and a cross to make its origins even more difficult to source.
A reverse image search on the header image revealed that it was screengrabbed from this swamp adventure travel company. Things Mayers has tweeted have raised suspicions, too. For example, that photo of the Taylor Swift sandwich that went so viral seems to have previously circulated on 4Chan, not traditionally a hangout for Southern moms. A reverse image search of it through TinEye found it has been used 92 different times online, dating as far back as March 2015.
Real or not, Mayers seems to have taken great care to make her identity difficult to uncover. And she seems confident no one will be able to. When one Twitter user tweeted that he planned to reveal her identity, she taunted them to go ahead and try.
@femividual @KikesburgDavid @IFeelLikeTwit I invite you to give it your best effort. I’ll wait. *leans forward*
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) July 7, 2016
With an online footprint that is non-existent before her Twitter account was started in April 2015, it seems likely that Mayers is not in fact a Baton Rouge housewife but a clever troll with a knack for getting under people’s skin. It’s unclear what the motivation would be for creating the fake account, beyond the joy of a prank that upsets people. And maybe some monetary profit:
If I authored a small ebook would anyone be interested?
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) July 6, 2016
Whether Mayers’ brand of fundamentalism is real or faked, though, doesn’t really matter. Online, it can be impossible to distinguish between the two. Mayers’ tweets and posts rack up dozens of comments, mostly from people horrified by her bigotry. But they receive many sincere likes and retweets, too. Her posts about Sheats spawned other blog posts regurgitating her unfounded theory that Sheats shot her daughters for having interracial dalliances, even though it was an idea Mayers clearly pulled out of thin air. Her tweets may be a “pornography of hate,” but they are spreading real-life hate, too. Parody, removed enough times from its source, can become reality and convince others that their terrible bigotry is socially acceptable.
@ethan_christoph thank you hon
— Jennifer Mayers (@southern_mayers) July 7, 2016
Mayers might really be a Louisiana woman whose “favorite scents are lavender and apple cinnamon.” I don’t think she is. The hate she has unleashed onto the internet, though, is unquestionably real.