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[justinspoliticalcorner]

The Far Right's Twin Trolls Taste Their Own Bitter Medicine

Far-right conspiracy-mongers Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec have been protesting pitiably in recent days that some people on the Internet aren’t being nice to them.

Lloyd Grove at The Daily Beast: 

The irony is target-rich.

Far-right conspiracy-mongers Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec—who helped orchestrate the Pizzagate and Seth Rich fantasies, among other falsehoods, and have seemingly stoked social media intimidation in the service of Donald Trump—have been protesting pitiably in recent days that some people on the Internet aren’t being nice to them.

Their wounded complaints come as the men also claimed a new high-profile liberal scalp: the firing by Disney and Marvel of James Gunn on Friday as director of Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 3, after Cernovich and Posobiec resurfaced old tweets of the director joking about pedophilia and rape. Gunn apologized for his words in a sequence of tweets.

Cernovich told The Daily Beast: “Disney took the right first step, but it's time to do an open investigation into all of Hollywood. That this was conducted in the open is disturbing and leaves one to wonder what happens no one is around.”

Cernovich and Posobiec’s instinct to attack is as honed as their assuming of the mantle of victimhood.

“Why are these angry people threatening my wife and child?” Posobiec demanded in an email to The Daily Beast, addressing his experience of being “harassed” by critics.

In a document titled "Sworn Statement" dated Feb. 20, 2018, Posobiec claimed one of his tormenters—Vic Berger, a director of satirical videos that frequently star Posobiec and Cernovich—“engaged in an increasingly hostile campaign of harassment, using electronic systems, of myself and my family” and “posted a threat to my wedding on Twitter.”

Cernovich provided The Daily Beast with a copy of Posobiec’s handwritten statement, which claims Berger—who earns his keep making videos for Super Deluxe, the digital comedy website owned by TBS—instructed his 77,000 Twitter followers to crash Posobiec’s wedding.

Posobiec told The Daily Beast that he filed the statement as part of a formal complaint to an unidentified local police department in Pennsylvania, but Berger said he has never heard from the cops. (The Daily Beast has asked Posobiec to identify that local police department, and will update this article if clarification is forthcoming.)

In his email, Posobiec continued, “I held a peace rally against political violence at the White House”—a sparsely attended demonstration last year in Washington’s Lafayette Park against “fake news,” Kathy Griffin, and a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar featuring the assassination of a Trump-like Caesar. (Cernovich was a speaker at Posobiec’s rally.)

“Their tactics will incite terrible consequences for our country if they continue down this road,” Posobiec gravely concluded.

Posobiec’s buddy Cernovich, meanwhile, blogged this week that “the fake news media” are “accessories” to “stalking and harassment” by pursuing “news tips” provided by Cernovich’s supposed stalkers and harassers.

[...]

“There’s a couple of guys stalking me for about a year, year and a half,” Cernovich told The Daily Beast, referring to Berger and Bernard and claiming that “they’ve now fabricated a rumor that there’s a sex tape involving me and [alt-right activist and Infowars contributor] Laura Loomer. And it’s just like one fake thing after another… They claim that I was having an affair. The stories are just ridiculous.”

Cernovich, however, has claimed repeatedly that Berger “could be” the leader of a pedophile ring known as “Berger’s Boys.” Berger, for his part, has nicknamed his quarry “Weird Mike.”

Among the countless videos Berger has made to lampoon Cernovich—a non-practicing California lawyer who conducts what he calls “Gorilla Mindset” seminars on the joys of male empowerment—is this one posted on Bernard Media, replete with farting noises edited in for good measure, in which Cernovich—wearing exercise gear—breathes heavily and repeatedly slaps himself in the face, presumably impersonating a hulking great ape.

Read the full story at The Daily Beast. 

[justinspoliticalcorner]

How Pizzagate Pusher Mike Cernovich Keeps Getting People Fired

He just took down director James Gunn. Now he's using a trollish rumor about a sex tape to go after journalists.

Luke O’Brien at Huffington Post: 

Mike Cernovich was celebrating on Friday, at least for a few hours. Disney had just fired James Gunn, the director of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, over crude jokes about pedophilia and rape Gunn made on Twitter between 2008 to 2011.

Cernovich had mobilized his network to have the tweets show up in all corners of the internet ― and in Disney’s executive suite ― and he was rewarded when “James Gunn” shot to the top of Twitter’s national trending topics.

“I couldn’t sleep. I was up until 3 a.m.,” an exuberant Cernovich told HuffPost on Friday. “That’s a lot of real sick stuff.”

Cernovich had claimed a scalp. This was what the far-right propagandist lived for, these kamikaze moments. They kept him going. They got him high. They allowed him to cling to a dank relevancy, even as it slips through his fingers.

“I’ve been a very good boy since Pizzagate,” he said, as he watched Disney dispatch Gunn.

By now, it should come as no surprise that Cernovich, who played a key role in manipulating public opinion during the 2016 election, was involved in the campaign against Gunn. The far-right propagandist has been locked in an endless war against the mainstream media, and at the end of 2017, had warned his “enemies” that he planned to use their tweets against them. He would dig up “fireable tweets.”

It was a credible threat, especially for journalists — Cernovich’s favorite targets. In November, Cernovich bushwhacked MSNBC’s Sam Seder, distorting the context of an off-color Roman Polanski joke he’d tweeted almost a decade ago. Much like he did with Gunn, Cernovich smeared the podcast host as an enabler of pedophiles. Pedophilia is Cernovich’s favorite frame-up, and he gloated when clueless MSNBC executives briefly fired Seder.

In February, Cernovich set his crosshairs on a new target: Will Sommer, who was then the campaign editor for The Hill newspaper and covers the far-right in a weekly newsletter.

Sommer, who declined to comment for this story, had put up a tweet — nothing remotely fireable — that linked to a Medium post written by Nathan Bernard, a technologist and humorist who lampoons Cernovich and other fake news merchants online. In the post, Bernard claimed a “source” had told him of a sex tape featuring Cernovich.

In his tweet, Sommer also quoted from an email that Cernovich’s attorney, Marc Randazza, had sent Bernard:

“In the event that you are in possession of ... a sex tape starring Mr. Cernovich, I presume that it would be somewhat old material.”

Bernard didn’t reveal his source. There’s no good evidence the tape is real.

But linking to a Nathan Bernard post — any Nathan Bernard post — is a great way to make Cernovich angry. Over the last two years, Bernard and his close friend Vic Berger, a video producer and humorist at Super Deluxe who makes satirical videos of politicians and public figures, have waged a two-man campaign to annoy, infuriate and, they hope, ultimately stymie Cernovich and other bad actors.

“Satire with a purpose,” Bernard calls their work. (Bernard was roommates in the Bronx with rising progressive star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and says she influenced his politics.)

Bernard and Berger write comedic takedowns of Cernovich and mock the propagandist in videos filled with amusing sound effects, uncomfortable close-ups and awkward slo-mo edits. In a Trumpian flourish, they have branded Cernovich “Weird Mike.” They are out-trolling the troll.

And the troll doesn’t like it.

So perhaps what happened the day after Sommer tweeted the link to Bernard’s post shouldn’t have been so surprising: Randazza, who represents multiple white supremacists such as Andrew Anglin and far-right slanderers such as Alex Jones, emailed a scathing three-page letter to Bob Cusack, the editor-in-chief of The Hill. In the letter, which HuffPost obtained a copy of, Randazza falsely accused Sommer of “soliciting revenge pornography,” “sexual harassment,” and having “an obsession [with Cernovich] bordering on stalking.”

He didn’t stop there. Randazza, who advertises himself as a staunch defender of the First Amendment, referenced the Hulk Hogan sex tape lawsuit that libertarian billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel secretly financed to drive Gawker out of business.

Thiel’s demolition of Gawker has had a chilling effect on press freedom in America, and the case is routinely and gleefully invoked by phony free speech “patriots” who share Cernovich’s agenda to cripple the media.

“Mr. Sommer’s moral bankruptcy should not lead to your financial bankruptcy,” Randazza, who refused to comment for this story, warned Cusack.

The message was clear: Shut up or else.

It wouldn’t be the last time Cernovich came after Sommer. And the journalist wasn’t his first target. Far from it.  

The Ratfucker Cabal

To understand Cernovich’s war on the press — and his gripe with Bernard and Berger — requires a familiarity with the alt-lite, a group of nativist “Make America Great Again” propagandists and grifters who got their name because of their ideological proximity to the white nationalist “alt-right” movement.

Cernovich is a ringleader in the group, whose members include anti-Muslim Laura Loomer, British fascist and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and Lucian Wintrich, a smarmy white supremacist-friendly correspondent for The Gateway Pundit, a far-right propaganda outlet. These dirty tricksters, several of whom have received press credentials from the Trump White House, all work to subvert the real media.

The alt-lite’s fake news ecosystem sprouted from the far-right fever swamp created by Fox News and a tireless effort by movement conservatives to demonize the media. But the new breed of alt-lite ratfucker is feral, with an ability to directly sway gullible minds through social media. Twitter and other social media platforms have abetted the rise of frauds, racists and fascists who spread lies and can easily form cybermobs. This is a worrisome development for the truth business.

One of the best ways to hurt journalists in the social media era, Cernovich knows, is to tar them online; to destroy their reputations. Too many news outlets exist in financial distress. Overworked journalists can be sidelined by harassment campaigns. And many media companies are now run by business-school graduates allergic to controversy and given over to a reflexive political correctness. One flip statement by a reporter on social media can cause lasting professional damage. All of which plays to the strengths of the alt-lite.

[...]

“Don’t care re Polanski, but i hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/ a great sense of mise en scene,” Seder wrote.

Eight years later, sans context, the tweet was irresistible for Cernovich. It combined his obsessions with the media and Hollywood — and child rape. And Seder was the perfect target after he’d recently brought Berger on his show to discuss Cernovich’s mudslinging.

On social media, Cernovich’s attack on Seder was boosted by figures from all corners of the alt-lite and MAGA world, including Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, along with two of Cernovich’s close collaborators ― Stefan Molyneux, a racist Canadian propagandist who has helped radicalize many young men to fascism, and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, a far-right ethnonationalist crew whose members routinely engage in political violence.

Also telling: Around the time Cernovich’s Medium post went live, a “Majority Report” advertiser received a lawyerly email straight out of the Gamergate playbook. The sender warned about “reputational damage” to the advertiser’s brand because of Seder’s “horrific child rape comments” and promised to alert media outlets and an anti-sexual violence organization.

MSNBC caved and cut ties with Seder. After about a week and much outcry, the network hired him back. It was all very sad — the corporate patellar reflex triggered by a knock from political saboteurs, followed by media executives doing the right thing only after being shamed.

[...]

In June, Sommer took a new job, at The Daily Beast. He hasn’t mentioned Bernard’s sex tape claim again. As it turns out, though, the rumor wasn’t cut out of whole cloth, and Bernard’s source — whom I spoke to — was real, and someone I also know and trust.

The source, a writer who focuses on the far-right, explained to me that he’d been interviewing Cassandra Fairbanks, who is close to Cernovich, when Fairbanks mentioned that a female alt-lite propagandist had been gathering sexual blackmail — Snapchat messages, photos, possibly video — on various men in the scene, including “someone prominent in the movement who was married.” Fairbanks confirmed to HuffPost that this account was accurate.

Only a few people fit Fairbanks’ description. Cernovich was one of them. In the past, Cernovich has bragged about how he “cheated ruthlessly” on his first wife. In a 2011 blog post about “How to Avoid a False Rape Case,” he recommended secretly filming sexual encounters.

Still, there was no evidence of a sex tape. The rumor was secondhand scuttlebutt. A news outlet could have never run a story claiming a Cernovich sex tape existed. And most media outlets wouldn’t resort to using Berger and Bernard’s selective editing of videos, which can alter their context.

But the two don’t feel bad. In their minds, they’re just giving Cernovich a chemically salty taste of his own medicine.

Read the full article at HuffPost.