Mike Cernovich is a Trump-loving, conspiracy-slinging alt-right fellow traveler with a nasty habit of smearing people he doesn’t like as pedophiles.
Now he’s become the target of a small army of trolls who have managed to pull off the difficult feat of being even more terrible than he is.
Cernovich, you see, has been organizing something called the Deploraball, a kind of senior prom for Trumpian superfans scheduled for the night before their hero’s inauguration. And he’s been hoping the event will come off smoothly with none of the overtly fascist overtones that marred the recent National Policy Institute convention — you know, the Nazi salutes, the attendance of Hitler-idolizing barely-a-celebrity Tila Tequila, that sort of thing.
A couple of days ago, much to Cerno’s horror, a fellow helping him plan the event — who claims it was actually his idea in the first place — started Tweeting about the, er, Ew-Jays, if you catch my meaning.
Me: Upon research, I noticed Jewish people run 95% of American media that is very interesting
Internet: Why do you want to gas the Jews ?
— Baked Alaska (@bakedalaska) December 26, 2016
If the screenshots of their alleged internet convos that Baked Alaska posted shortly afterwards are accurate, Cerno reacted with fury, telling him to shut up about the “JQ” — that is, the “Jewish Question.”
PRO TIP: If you’re hanging out with people who will instantly know what you mean when you bring up the “JQ,” there’s a very good chance your friends ARE NAZIS, and you might just be one yourself.
Not that Cerno ever had any illusions about what the alt-right really stood for. In a now-deleted Tweet from last year (archived here), he not only declared himself to be an alt-righter but also echoed the alt-right’s ridiculous rhetoric about so-called “white genocide.”
But the new Mike Cernovich doesn’t want to associate himself with people like, well, the old Mike Cernovich. So he took Mr. Alaska off the party planning committee, and disinvited him from the party.
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/813545317387804672
And that’s when things started to go south for Cerno. Mr. Alaska informed his 131,000 followers that Cerno had banned him from the Deploraball. Then he began a counterattack of sorts, which involved making fun of Cerno’s slight lisp
I guess you could say I've been THILENTHED ! lol 😂
— Baked Alaska (@bakedalaska) December 27, 2016
Lithen up goys! I'm the new twither polithe!! If u thpeak of me again u will not b allowed 2 go to my parthhy! pic.twitter.com/MvlfkC7Qtd
— Baked Alaska (@bakedalaska) December 27, 2016
After that, the deluge, as Mr. Alaska’s followers piled on, peppering their tweets with every slur they could think of.
https://twitter.com/MaxxBot/status/813900062233272320
"Dont want parasites and junkies in my life" has Milo around him hahah @Cernovich is a faggot cuck https://t.co/lhFzF7wMmM
— Nate (@BigNate1690) December 28, 2016
So @Cernovich went full cuck. You never go full cuck bro. Let the men be men. Stay out of their way.
— 📎(((Alpha)))📎 (@ChancellorAlpha) December 28, 2016
https://twitter.com/Dr_Soapstein/status/813899984257118208
https://twitter.com/WIlliamPierceX5/status/813724092226379776
@Cernovich Have fun at your faggy sausage party, you lispy jewish faggot.
— Jager Jantiago (@offthedust) December 27, 2016
There were literally hundreds more tweets along these lines; they’re probably still going at it.
One inventive fellow repurposed a crude anti-Semitic cartoon, turning it into an attack on Cerno’s alleged treachery:
https://twitter.com/HitechLowlife88/status/813575823961661440
Another posted video of himself literally burning a copy of one of Cerno’s books.
https://twitter.com/UntergroundBoss/status/813633980217987072
Given his rather, er, casual handing of his can of lighter fluid, it’s kind of amazing AnimeRight UB didn’t reduce himself to ashes alongside Cerno’s book.
Naturally, the waggish Angrew Anglin, head boy at the neo-Nazi tip sheet The Daily Stormer, had a few thoughts on the matter as well. In a celebratory post (archived here), he informed his readers that
[t]he cuck/kike contingent of the Trump movement is cucklapsing/kikelapsing right before our very eyes.
And he warned them that Cernovich’s
Deploraball is apparently an attempt at a sanitized, cuckolded, pro-Jew version of the NPI conference.
Well, you can’t say that Anglin is shy when it comes to talking about the, er, “JQ.”
But the most interesting thing I’ve run across in this glorious debacle came from Mr. Alaska, who posted what he said was a screenshot of an email from Milo Y, apparently in response to an earlier invitation to the bash.
I’m guessing there are a lot more screenshots of Milo missives like this stored on the hard drives of people who have interacted with him in the past. Milo’s inevitable implosion should prove to be interesting to watch.
But back to the here and now. How did Cerno respond to all this vitriol? He put up, then deleted, a Periscope trashing Mr. Alaska as a “junkie” and a “little bitch” with a very low credit score whose mother pays his rent. (You can find the deleted video posted on Youtube here.) In a post on his blog he declared that Mr. Alaska was a con man who “lies about everything.” I guess he’s saving the spurious pedophilia accusations for later.
On Twitter, he posted, and then for some reason deleted, several Tweets claiming that most of the supposed Nazis on Twitter are nothing more than a bunch of “paid shills.” (I got a screenshot of the Tweets before they vanished.) He followed up with a similar claim about the Ku Klux Klan, based on a blatant misreading or misrepresentation of a USA Today article.
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/813952448184270848
Apparently Cerno finds it more comforting to think that the people sending him nasty tweets are paid shills in the employ of some shadowy SJW billionaire than actual human beings who hate his guts (if, alas, for the wrong reasons). Like his idol Trump, Cerno seems to prefer to live in a world of his own imagining.
The Cerno-Alaska falling-out was noisy and nasty enough to spur a second, if somewhat less dramatic, alt-right blowup, with Trump superfan and Twitter activist Bill Mitchell disavowing the alt right on account of all the alt-rightists in it.
Whatever #AltRight was, it's been taken over by white supremacists and I disavow it. I'm #AmericaFirst where we can ALL be great again.
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) December 27, 2016
I don’t have much to add to my original response to his complaint.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, to discover white supremacists in this white supremacist movement! https://t.co/blzFNMTKW9
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) December 27, 2016
NOTE TO EXTREMELY LITERAL-MINDED READERS: I was being sarcastic. It is of course not very surprising to find white supremacists in a white supremacist movement, and my sarcastic comment, echoing a famous line in Casablanca, was meant to convey my suspicion that Mr. Mitchell was already well-aware that the alt-right, like Rick’s cafe, was filled with Nazis.
I’m still waiting for the inevitable alt-right falling-out with Trump himself. He’s already “disavowed” them. And some of them have gotten themselves pretty worked up about the Happy Hanukkah tweet he sent out on the 24th.
Come on, all you assholes, tear each other to shreds. The world will be a better place once you do.
I am in awe of the inventiveness that goes into some of these names. But on to something serious.
“White genocide” is yet another illustration of why PC was a bad thing. Gay marriage supporters are fond of saying that opponents are saying the same things about gay marriage that they once said about interracial marriage. Because that’s all behind us and we’ve moved on. “Loving” is a moving story but it’s the PAST. Soon people will accept gay marriage just as they did interracial marriage.
But the “white genocide” thing, especially the freakout about the commercial where a mixed couple gets engaged, shows that it’s NOT in the past at all. A lot of people NEVER accepted interracial marriage and still don’t. And now that there are safe places for them to express their views, they’re doing it.
Suppressing racist ideas didn’t cause them to go away, except into hiding. Now, OMG, where did all the racists come from? They were there all along, you just didn’t know it because they were silent.
When was racism suppressed and when were racist people silent? I must have missed that day.
@Stephen
Are you by any chance white? Cos that would explain why you think racists weren’t, very louldy, exclaiming their bigotry since… forever. When was this golden age wherein racists shut the fuck up? Before or after the Rodney King beating and the LA riots? 9/11? Obama’s election? Cos I can’t seem to find it
At most, one might say that ‘supressing’ (blergh) racism made wilfully oblivious White Liberals(tm) assume racism was over. So, while the ‘economic anxiety’ people are tripping over themselves, tryna figure out where the racism came from, the rest of us aren’t nearly so confused, thank you
White genocide is bullshit and just another goddamned dog whistle for these fucking bigots to spew their ugly rhetoric.
It has never gone anywhere, it’s never been hidden, and the fucking rise of social media has given them a platform to vomit their ugliness.
There are more decent people than these souless fuckwads, and although progess may slow, it will NEVER stop.
Assholes will not win, ultimately. And pretending that “PC” is the cause of this stupid shit is blaming the wrong people.
Bigots can fuck right off. They can go right back into their holes they crawled out of.
What the hell does any of that have to do with “PC”?
Because if we weren’t so gosh darn mean to racist people by oppressing their freeze peaches, they wouldn’t have to go be even more racist. Or something.
@opposablethumbs, @Troubelle
Thank you for the support.
Let me see if I’ve got it: Critisizing racism is bad, because it sends extreme racist ideas “underground” (read: outside of the awareness of ignorant white people who make no attempt to look past their own comfortable bubble of privilege). Far better to let racism go unchallenged, so that it will stay visible to white people. That will make racism go away faster, because… uuh… nope, looks like I don’t got it.
@Stephen
Dude. Assholes have always been assholes. We need to block the assholes, and assholish input should be severely muted.
where asshole=person who doesn’t seem to get the memo that everyone with human DNA is human and should be treated as such
….I’m tired and should really go to bed. Maybe you should too.
@Stephen
Huh? What does that even mean?
@Steven Dutch
You’re probably aware of the notion of “dog whistles”, y’know, carefully coded language to signal group membership without actually coming out openly as a member.
It doesn’t always have to be deliberate, of course. When you’ve spent enough time ingesting and expressing certain ideas to the point where they seem normal and natural to you they kinda leak out in normal everyday conversation, unless you’re very careful.
An easy way to spot this sort of thing is people who use SJW as a pejorative. They probably hide it behind scarequotes, maybe hoping that there’s no way that anyone could see through that cunning disguise. Another one is people who bemoan “political correctness”, mentally substituting in “I wish we could go back to the good old days when I could be a sexist, racist, homophobic, religiously intolerant and loudly opinionated bigot without someone calling me out for being a colossal asshole”.
Maybe it is just a coincidence. But if you don’t want to be mistaken for a duck, maybe, just maybe, you should stop quacking.
@Kat
I’m sorry about your brother. All of the hugs. I know the type of person who are full of hatred in part because of shitty parenting, and they’re never easy to deal with.
@Steven “Totally not a troll” Dutch
Y’know, I’m pretty sure the Universe at large keeps its very own Constitution somewhere, and there’s a law in it that says you can’t say shit like that and then expect reasonable people to take you seriously.
That’s, like, the laws of physics or something. It’s demonstrated by the very strong correlation between pretty much every comment you’ve ever posted and instances of eyes rolling so hard they almost fall off their sockets.
@dreemr: thanks for posting that. I noticed it yesterday, and sent warnings to my various relations in Western Montana to avoid Kalispell and Whitefish this weekend.
I can vouch for that.
Wait, I got it.
When Steven said
they meant to say
Now, I don’t necessarily agree, but it has helped organize and embolden the worst elements of society. So point to Steven. If that is indeed what they meant to say. Otherwise
@Kat,
Echoing opposablethumbs, first, and my god I respect and admire you.
Second, yes to all the points you raised. I was talking with my son earlier today about the alt-right and he was wondering how/why people turn out so differently, even sometimes given similar circumstances. It’s an immensely complicated question.
Your posts about your family are always so nuanced and thoughtful (also heartbreaking). Thank you.
I’m on my way to bed; apologies if the above is slightly incomprehensible due to sleepiness 🙂
Just finished listening to a long podcast series on the French Revolution, and the way revolutionaries continually strove to outdo each other in terms of ideological purity and ultimately devoured their own reminds me a lot of what’s happening on the alt right now. At this point it’s still fun to watch, but given how the French Revolution turned out, I’m not so sure how long that fun will last.
The alt-right is a bunch of people with different ideologies who decided to group together because they thought they could have more influence as a coherent group. It ranges from serious Nazis to people who simply wish that they weren’t held accountable for their behavior. They rallied around Trump because they thought they could have the most influence on society, but now they’re turning against each other.
What is that name for the MRA/Alt-Right/PUA tactic to act like positive actions and words are bad? Like SJW or PC which totally are positive things that need to be happening to progress? Stephen was subtle but still detectable! 😀
Simon and Shitster just signed Milo to a book deal…guess who I will be boycotting? (Best thing about finding this out was Mike Cernovich just retweeted Sarah Silvermans tweet about how it is horrible they did so. Allies are makeshift to these lackadaisical blowhards.)
@Angry:
Me too. Not that it matters much, I suspect, since Milo’s waste of murdered trees will soon enough wind up in the remainder bin. It’s just the six-figure advance for obvious drivel that’s so damn galling…don’t these publishers care about putting out a quality product at ALL anymore? Or do they just figure a notorious name will roll in more bucks than it will ultimately cost them in unsold books?
Simon and Schuster/Threshold published Trump and Limbaugh. Adding Milo is just the cherry on top of their shit sundae.
@Sinkable John, @Mish
Thank you for the kind words.
@Steven Dutch
I’ve seen zero evidence of white genocide being real, despite the efforts of some individuals and groups to get me to believe in it. And as a white person, if I thought it was real I’d be pretty damned alarmed and fight it tooth and nail.
I’ll tell you the genocide (in addition to the genocide of persons of color, both past and present, including the current attempted genocide of Native Americans right here in my country, the USA) that has me worked up the most: the genocide of the human race, along with the animals, plants, and minerals of my home, planet Earth. Ignore this potential genocide at your peril!
Who dates and marries whom is none of your business. It’s nobody’s business but the people involved. Extend the courtesy to other people that you’d like extended to yourself.
The genocide of the human race and its fellow travelers? That is very much your business.