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 and 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 trophy. 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.