Nathan Bernard, a free speech activism pioneer and co-founder of Bernard Media, was silenced by Twitter dot com on February 19th, 2019 for exercising his God-given first amendment rights, posting a satirically photoshopped picture of “Weird Mike” Cernovich. Now, Cernovich, who forged documents to try to get Sen. Chuck Schumer in trouble with false claims of sexual assault and cheered on Laura Loomer when she released revenge porn of a congressman, is crying victim once again.
Mr. Cernovich is famous for architecting the pizzagate conspiracy, alleging a child sex ring was operating out of a Washington, DC pizzeria basement, despite the pizzeria having no basement. The conspiracy eventually reached a fever pitch and on December 4th, 2017 a gunman open-fired in the pizzeria, convinced by Cernovich and his followers that he was a martyr saving the children imprisoned there. The gunman found nothing and was sentenced to four years in prison. In January, another pizzagate acolyte traveled to the pizzeria to try and burn it to the ground. Thankfully staff put the fire out before the restaurant was destroyed.
Before pizzagate, Mr. Cernovich was arrested for rape, pleading the charge down by hiring a high-powered investigative firm to intimidate his victim, forcing her to amend her story or face the consequences. To those that knew Mr. Cernovich, the rape charge came as no surprise. He has a well-documented history of assaulting women.
The comedically photoshopped image Mr. Bernard posted is a picture of Mr. Cernovich flipped 180 degrees with a heavy blur over his crotch. The original photo was a post-workout mirror selfie taken and posted by a sweat drenched Cernovich wearing only dirty boxer-briefs. Mr. Cernovich has previously used the the original image to market hyper-masculinity and homemade “blue pills,” that are not FDA-approved, to his followers.
Within hours of Mr. Bernard posting, Cernovich and his feral mob of sycophants had found Mr. Bernard’s tweet, knowingly treating a comedy joke as a threat of “revenge porn” in bad faith. The Cernovich led mob included the beanie wearing white nationalist apologist Tim Pool and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire employee, Ryan Saavedra, who has previously stated, “People think I’m kidding when I say this but the crusades need to come back.” The Daily Wire and Saavedra came under fire last year when a Shapiro superfan who studied their relentless anti-Islam rhetoric shot up a mosque, killing six.
Together, they organized a bad faith, mass reporting harassment campaign against Mr. Bernard, encouraging hundreds of thousands of their followers to report Mr. Bernard’s tweet and account for “targeted harassment”. Twitter’s reporting mechanisms are currently incredibly broken and allow bad faith actors to exploit the system.
Cernovich and his ilk were ironically the ones actually engaging in a targeted harassment campaign, which they do frequently. Their harassment campaigns often involve baselessly accusing their enemies of being pedophiles. In the past, Cernovich has also actively worked with lawyer and credibly-accused child rapist Alan Dershowitz to intimidate and take down a victim of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Cernovich and his friends have never been suspended from Twitter for any of these campaigns. In the past, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey has even commended Cernovich’s lackeys for having “very interesting points“.
Despite the mass reporting campaign being in bad faith, Cernovich was still successful. Mr. Bernard’s account was locked by Twitter, indefinitely suspending him unless he capitulated and deleted the tweet with the Cernovich photoshop. If he agreed to delete the post, Twitter would then suspend Mr. Bernard’s account for twelve hours before letting him use the website again. Twitter was essentially caving to Cernovich’s harassment and intimidation campaign, helping this convicted batterer silence a critic.
It is extremely unfortunate that Twitter frequently allows bad faith actors like Cernovich, Pool and Saavedra to bully them, bending over backwards to silence critics. In the recent past, popular accounts such as Krang T. Nelson and ClassicalLib3ral have fallen victim to similar mass reporting troll campaigns. And in December 2017, Cernovich used a mass reporting campaign to force MSNBC to fire Majority Report host, Sam Seder, for an out of context decade old tweet. After massive backlash, MSNBC rehired Seder, realizing they had been duped by a known bad actor and smear merchant. Cernovich, who claims to be an alpha male, responded with a tear-filled livestream claiming victory despite Seder getting his job back along with gaining hundreds of thousands of new listeners to his show The Majority Report. Later in 2018, Cernovich successfully had James Gunn fired from directing Guardians of the Galaxy over decade-old, out-of-context joke tweets. Gunn has since been hired by Warner Brothers to direct a Suicide Squad sequel.
Some bad actors in the media are also rushing to throw fuel on Mr. Cernovich’s modern day, digital cross burning. The day after Bernard was suspended, Breitbart, an outlet where many racist writers are given free reign to push their hateful lies, released a story stating, “Bernard’s verified Twitter account remains online, and the social network has not taken away his blue checkmark — a punishment the platform has previously given to verified users who break Twitter’s rules.” Pizzagate fanatic Jack Posobiec and Ryan Saavedra, amongst others, shared the story to their followings.
After the suspension, Mr. Bernard appealed the decision from Twitter and waited for an answer, which he never received. Bernard is still hopeful that justice will be served. Through his counsel, Mr. Bernard stated, “I love the Constitution, I love free speech. So naturally, a clear infringement of my rights as an American is distressing to me. At this current juncture, it is obvious Mr. Cernovich is colluding with bad actors to silence and deplatform me. It is unclear why Mr. Cernovich so vehemently hates the first amendment and I would recommend he reviews the Constitution at his earliest convenience. God bless and may peace be with you all.”
