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.