Right-wing internet celebrity Mike Cernovich has sabotaged the careers of a Hollywood director, a veteran congressman, and more. Is he really calling it quits, or is this more media trolling?

With a wineglass in one hand and an iPhone in the other, 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 some of director James Gunn’s offensive tweets. In a few months, Cernovich was planning to premiere the documentary Hoaxed, his cinematic debut, which predictably covers “fake news,” and he worried that mainstream reporters would scour his own tweet record.

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, who was fired then rehired after Cernovich misrepresented a cringeworthy Seder tweet from 2009; and longtime Michigan congressman John Conyers, who resigned in November 2017 after Cernovich fed BuzzFeed documents alleging Conyers sexually harassed his employees. Cernovich needed someone huge. Gunn could fit the bill.

But this stuff won’t go anywhere, Cernovich recalls thinking as he looked at the first tweets. 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 Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, who is African-American. 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 (where, by the way, Cernovich is unwelcome because of toxic past tweets), but the scandal turned out to suck for the Cernoviches. 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 checks 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 posts, at one point making what amounted to a time-traveling-hackers defense.) 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.

“It’s like how 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 will produce one more movie. “My job is to help people,” he adds.

In the age of Trump, Cernovich has epitomized the concept of “bad faith actors” — media personalities who sully others’ reputations while expressing false outrage.

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 outing 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 41-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 & Play. It spawned a self-published book of the same name 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 the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. 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 self-promote.

Nobody believed this. The machine he’d built was foundering. And then, in November 2017, Cernovich changed the narrative surrounding himself by leaking to BuzzFeed documents alleging John Conyers had sexually harassed employees. After verifying the information, BuzzFeed published an explosive, widely circulated story. 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 story line — ‘Oh shit people talk to him.’ Everyone’s in a movie of their own creation. You have to be in the mind-set of, ‘What’s my story line?’ 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., Cernovich 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 the director of a franchise that big,” I say.

“It looks like a cool ride!”

Earlier, waiting in line outside the park, Cernovich revealed that 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.”