He had a wine glass in one hand and an iPhone in the other. He Is sick of winning.
Right-wing internet celebrity Mike Cernovich was soaking in the hot tub at his Orange County, California, home. One of his hired hands—Cernovich calls them “weaponized autistics”—had dug up director James Gunn’s racist tweets. In a few months, Cernovich was planning to premiere the documentary Hoaxed, his cinematic debut, which predictably covers “fake news,” and he worried mainstream reporters would comb through his own old tweets.
To combat potential attacks, Cernovich says he had put out a $10,000 bounty targeting tweets more offensive than his, written by someone more famous than him. He had already bushwhacked several high-profile men—among them, MSNBC pundit Sam Seder, fired then rehired after Cernovich misrepresented Seder’s old tweets about pedophilia, and longtime Michigan congressman John Conyers, who resigned in November 2017 after Cernovich fed BuzzFeed documents alleging Conyers sexually harassed his employees—but Cernovich needed someone huge. Gunn could fit the bill.
But the racial stuff won’t go anywhere, Cernovich recalls thinking. In his hot tub, he ran Twitter searches for “James Gunn” alongside words like “pedo,” “pedophile,” and “baby.” Bingo. Among a bunch of old, politically incorrect tweets, Gunn had tweeted, “For the record I’m against rape and baby eating in real life (unless you’re really, really hungry).” Gunn had also tweeted, “I’m doing a big Hollywood adaptation of The Giving Tree with a happy ending—the tree grows back and gives the kid a blowjob.” And there was this, too: “Three men and a baby they have sex with.” Gunn had typed the tweets when he worked for the edgy media company Troma Entertainment, but if Cernovich took them out of context, these tweets would sound worse than Cernovich’s old tweets denying the existence of date rape. He’d found his winning strategy.
Later that evening, Cernovich shared his plan with his wife Shauna.
“But this guy is a big deal,” Shauna replied, according to the couple’s recollections. “Please lay the fuck off. This is a high-target scalp. I don’t want to deal with this guy!”
“He’s just a blue checkmark,” Cernovich countered.
“Marvel fans are insane!”
Shauna pointed out that Gunn had spearheaded the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, which had grossed over $1.5 billion—news to Cernovich. He deliberated, then smirked.
“Nope,” Cernovich said. “I’m all-in.”
Disney owned Marvel, and in May the company’s television network, ABC, had fired conservative comedian Roseanne Barr from her eponymous sitcom for tweeting, “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes has a baby=VJ.” Barr was referencing former president Obama’s African-American advisor Valerie Jarrett. Cernovich reasoned the company would can Gunn, or else face boycotts from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh—serious repercussions for a corporation with a family-friendly brand, and whose theme parks partially rely on Midwestern tourists. On July 19, Cernovich circulated Gunn’s old tweets. The next day, Disney fired the director. A $152 billion company had caved to a right-wing, vest-wearing Orange County dad who built his celebrity, such as it was, via the internet.
The Gunn story was covered by everyone from the New York Times to Fox News (which, by the way, had banned Cernovich for his offensive tweets), but the scandal turned out to suck for the Cernovichs. Mike claims he was doxxed, his home address and other information revealed, by comic book nerds. When we get together at a coffee joint near their home this past Columbus Day, the couple still appears shaken.
“I’m now more sympathetic to feminists who get rape threats,” Cernovich says, balancing his one-year-old daughter on his lap. “There are crazy people on the internet, and it’s not fun when they go after you.”
As his daughter watches cartoons on an iPhone, Cernovich hops to his laptop. Shauna, several months pregnant, dressed in a maternity onesie, sits across from them, eating an egg croissant sandwich.
“My daughter’s a daddy’s girl,” Shauna remarks.
Cernovich gestures at his child, then says, “I don’t bully people on the internet anymore!”
That would depend on your definition of bullying. Although he once tweeted statements like, “I went from libertarian to alt-right after realizing tolerance only went one way and diversity is code for genocide,” Cernovich asserts he has avoided getting banned from Twitter, unlike Alex Jones, because he recently has refrained from targeting women or people of color. He says he made an exception for MSNBC anchor Joy Reid because, years ago, she had written homophobic blog posts. (Reid denied writing the articles, at one point suggesting time-travelers had hacked her website.) For Shauna’s part, out of concern for her family and life with Cernovich, she prays her husband will one day fuck up online.
“I hope Mike gets banned from every social media platform,” Shauna says.
“[In action movies] the hitman is retiring,” Cernovich replies, “and then he’s given one more mission, and he’s sucked in. That’s where I am.”
After he releases Hoaxed, Cernovich promises to quit. This documentary, between its rapid editing and dramatic music, resembles predictable right-wing fare, like Dinesh D’Souza’s cinematic propaganda and the flop Democrats by African-American Trump supporters Diamond and Silk. While Hoaxed features appearances from conservative media regulars, like “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams, it also includes feminists. Toward the end of the film, Cernovich hints that he himself has propagated fake news, before pivoting away from a full-blown confession. It’s his swan song to internet fame. Or maybe, Cernovich says, he may produce one more movie. “My job is to help people,” he adds.
It’s impossible to trust anything Cernovich says. In the age of Trump, he has epitomized the concept of “bad faith actors”—media personalities who sully others’ reputations while expressing false outrage. During our conversation, Cernovich admits he has lied to reporters about receiving $50,000 a month in alimony from his ex-wife. Then he tells me he received $1.5 million in a divorce settlement. The only thing he stays consistent about is the source of his methods—a fact that he likely promotes to aggravate his opponents.
“[Reporters ask], ‘Dude, what’s your trick?’” Cernovich says. “I learned it from reporters. I learned it from them!” He points to the liberal nonprofit Media Matters, which exists to find dirt on conservative media organizations, and Andrew Kaczynski, aka “KFile,” formerly of BuzzFeed and now with CNN. Kaczynski helped build his career doxxing Democrat Anthony Weiner’s sexting partner, Sydney Leathers, and recirculating controversial statements made by Rand Paul and Mitt Romney.
Since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the online liberal activism group Sleeping Giants has taken this to the next level, successfully targeting companies that have paid to advertise on conservative media outlets.
“The left wrote the rules,” Cernovich says. “I’m just holding them to their own rules. I would be happy to call a truce, but they never would.” Cernovich points to liberals who still have jobs after scandals, like MSNBC’s Reid, NBC’s Brian Williams, who lied about events he saw as a war reporter, and ESPN’s perennial naughty tweeter Keith Olbermann.
“Mike Cernovich’s greatest accomplishment is that he’s turned everyone on Twitter into Mike Cernovich,” says Jon Levine, media critic for The Wrap. “Everything is weaponized, context is dead, apologies are not taken at face value but used as a scalp to encourage more trolling. This behavior is prevalent on all corners of English-language Twitter. Those who rightly criticize his bad faith are often guilty of the same behavior.”
Cernovich didn’t always care about politics. After attending Pepperdine law school, the 40-year-old Kewanee, Illinois, native wrote a legal blog in the mid-2000s. He wanted to earn a living as a writer, but who reads legal blogs? He rebranded himself as a pickup-artist guru after his 2011 divorce, dispensing advice on a website called Danger and Play. It spawned a self-published book and meetups with fans, where Cernovich taught men dating techniques. During 2015’s lead-up to the presidential election, Cernovich pivoted to Trumpism because he thought, The guy’s gonna win.
“Then people started arguing with me,” Cernovich says. “I got sucked into it and here I am.”
“Do you regret it?” I ask.
“Absolutely. My life was great. If I could go back to a blog that 30,000 people read, I would go back to it. It was a great life. [What’s happened since] has raised my profile, but not in a way that’s fun for me.”
As we speak, Cernovich is tweeting about how Christopher Columbus was a “Stalin-like murderer.” Shauna, of Persian descent, says her husband wanted to alienate the racists who had gravitated toward him. Cernovich may just be manipulating the media and segments of the public again to reposition himself. The right-wing online ecosystem where Cernovich blossomed has shifted since Trump took office. Alex Jones has been booted from all social media platforms. Breitbart’s traffic has cratered. And although her previous stunts went viral, Laura Loomer, after melting down during Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s September 2018 appearance before a Congressional committee, failed to break through the Trump-dominated news cycle.
Cernovich’s enterprise nearly collapsed in the wake of “Pizzagate.” Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, he helped promote a wild conspiracy theory alleging that Hillary Clinton and other liberals operated a child-sex ring beneath Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. After a random Pizzagate believer drove to the nation’s capital from North Carolina and shot up the restaurant with an assault rifle in December 2016, Cernovich claimed his boosting of the nutty conspiracy was just “hashtag surfing”—tweeting with the Pizzagate hashtag to promote himself.
Nobody believed this. The machine he’d built was foundering. And then Cernovich changed the narrative surrounding himself in November 2017 by leaking to BuzzFeed documents alleging Conyers had sexually harassed employees. After verifying the information, BuzzFeed published an explosive, widely circulated story. John Conyers resigned. The media went into a tizzy, wondering how the Pizzagate conspiracy blogger had received information so powerful it helped end the 52-year career of a Democratic congressional lion.
“That’s story arc!” Cernovich says. “It became a different storyline—‘Oh shit people talk to him.’ Everyone’s in a movie of their own creation. You have to be in the mindset of, ‘What’s my storyline?’ You’re a character in a Tom Wolfe novel. What would this character in a Tom Wolfe novel do? He’d be a journalist.”
Referencing a 2017 book on the Trump-Steve Bannon partnership, Cernovich continues, “The reason I leaked it to BuzzFeed was because I read Devil’s Bargain, and Bannon said he would leak to the New York Times. I think [BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief] Ben Smith is the only person in media I respect. He understands media—or new media anyway.”
Says The Wrap’s Jon Levine, “Things like James Gunn or [Cernovich’s] involvement with the John Conyers story showed that he could still move the needle on national news in ways most of the others around him can’t.”
After my breakfast with the Cernovich family, we drive to Disneyland for a visual reminder of the scale pertaining to one of his top takedowns. Shauna, who holds a Disneyland annual pass, jokes, “I’m Orange County, ride or die!” Around 6 P.M., her husband stops outside California Adventure and gazes at the hulking orange and silver tower housing the Guardians of the Galaxy ride.
“Crazy that a dad from Orange County took down a franchise that big,” I say.
“It looks like a cool ride!”
Earlier, waiting in line outside the park, Cernovich revealed he had experienced a revelation. To promote Hoaxed, he planned to apologize for Pizzagate. He’s thinking of saying something like, “I never really thought it through.” He would issue the apology around the time of the film’s release.
“Is that a genuine apology?” I ask.
“Nothing is genuine in this world.”
Mike Cernovich’s Most Notorious Hoaxes
Like a cheesy pop star, Mike Cernovich has reinvented his media persona multiple times. Whenever the role has grown too controversial, he has distanced himself, hoaxing his audience into believing he was never involved in his previous hoax. Here’s a timeline of his most notorious roles and disavowals.
Pickup Artist or Men’s Rights Activist?
Cernovich first came to prominence teaching dweebs how to get laid on a blog called Danger and Play. Whereas books like The Game and other pickup-artist guides recommended negging, Cernovich posted advice that read like Men’s Rights activist Reddit threads. “Choking works because it’s a show of dominance,” he wrote. “Women only want to have consensual sex with men they know could rape them.” His current stance? He was writing a satiric Fifty Shades of Grey for straight men and only deleted his blog because he knew liberals would take his words out of context.
Proud Boy or Fellow Traveler?
Cernovich told me associating with white nationalists is “really retarded,” but at his Night for Freedom Party (aka “Mike Cernovich’s Deploraball”) in January 2017, Proud Boys and Vice Media founder Gavin McInnes gave a speech, saying, “If going outside tonight and beating the shit out of radicals means I’m a radical, then I’m a revolutionary.”
Pizzagate Conspiracist or “Hashtag Surfer”?
Near the end of the 2016 election, right-wing Twitter celebrities began promoting a theory that Hillary Clinton operated a child-sex ring beneath Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizza joint. “Pizzagate is not going away, this story will be huge!” Cernovich tweeted. A few months later, a conspiracy believer shot up the restaurant. At which point, Cernovich denied ever promoting the theory, claiming he was just hashtag surfing. “Hashtag surfing,” he explains, “is where if there’s a big trending hashtag, you just post what you want. Just like when it’s International Men’s Day, and women tweet with the hashtag, they’re not supporting International Men’s Day—they’re promoting their message.”
BuzzFeed Source or Media Hoaxer?
After the Comet Ping Pong shooting, Pizzagate conspiracy theorists were forced underground. But in November 2017, Cernovich fed BuzzFeed legitimate documents alleging longtime Democratic congressman John Conyers had sexually harassed female employees. By providing legit material to a news outlet, Cernovich says he was hoping to manipulate journalists into thinking, “Oh shit, what happens if the Pizzagate guy has actual stories?” Cernovich was right that BuzzFeed couldn’t resist the bait, and he’s flourished ever since.
Moral Crusader or Opportunist?
Cernovich sees pedophiles everywhere. After his BuzzFeed rebound, Cernovich published Disney director James Gunn’s old jokes about pedophilia. A few months earlier, Disney had canned conservative comedian Roseanne Barr for an offensive tweet. The corporation caved after Cernovich’s maneuver, firing Gunn from the third segment of the billion-dollar Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. “I was bringing awareness to the international pedophile crisis,” says the man who once gave tips on choking women. Or, as he later says, he was just holding the left to their rules. If the left would stop dragging up conservatives’ past, Cernovich claims he would call a truce. Who knows if that’s true?
