If you’ve spent much time walking in the fallow, burned-out fields of internet political discourse of late, you’ve almost certainly found yourself smelling something foul at some point, checked your boots, and realized that you’d stepped in a big ‘ol pile of Mike Cernovich. For those unfamiliar with Cernovich, he’s the sort of guy who not only makes public “jokes” about things like rape and the death of Trayvon Martin, but is also responsible, in part, for the popularization of burrowing “alt-right” brainworms like the PizzaGate conspiracy and the use of “cuck” as an insult. (Honestly, it takes a rare talent to make “personal friends with Alex Jones” rank quite this low on a personal list of shitty character traits.)
Considering that his entire public brand seems built around stretching “no such thing as bad publicity” to its illogical breaking point, then, it’s not wholly surprising to learn that Cernovich decided to toss himself into the hungry maw of the internet today by announcing he’d be doing a reddit AMA. And yet, it’s still kind of shocking to see how quickly his efforts to build up some kind of public goodwill went off the rails; this isn’t just “Woody Harrelson AMA bad”—this is a bold new frontier in public trainwreckery.
It turns out that the “anything” people were most interested in asking Cernovich about mostly broke down into a few simple categories: His thoughts on sexual assault, his lisp, his reportedly sub-par living situation, and the penis sizes of gorillas. (The latter because he’s still trying to drum up sales on his 2015 “self-help” book, Gorilla Mindset.) For his part, Cernovich has largely responded with the tranquil disposition of a guy who’s largely known for his capacity for internet self-owns, and is supposedly arguing with his wife on a livestream about why she can’t find any “good questions” for him to answer.
You know things are bad when even the moderators are getting in on the dunks:
Cernovich, of course, is already celebrating this fresh influx of attention, because it’s easy to feel successful when you’ve managed to so aggressively redefine the meaning of success. Meanwhile, we’re happy to simply bask in the warm, Yule log-like atmosphere of this asshole getting repeatedly, brutally burnt.