Joining host Alex Marlow on the “Breitbart News Daily” radio program Tuesday, conspiracy theorist and far-right activist Mike Cernovich criticized so-called cancel culture, encouraging conservatives who suffered the indignity of having journalists report what they said on Twitter to cancel liberals in turn. More generally, he encouraged pretty much everybody else on the right to join in the lib-cancelling fun.
The hue and cry over this purported canceling has grown ever louder since a number of high-profile hard-right personalities saw their Twitter and Facebook accounts terminated in the wake of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building.
Cernovich claims to be a victim of cancel culture—the phrase used by conservatives to slam what they see as liberals' propensity for encouraging criticism and boycotts of anyone who expresses ideas that liberals find repugnant. Cernovich, for his part, was broadly criticized for boorish behavior, including the hounding of women online in the misogynist harassment campaign known as Gamergate, boosting the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, encouraging sexual assault, and making racist comments. He once claimed, “Rape via an alpha male is different from other forms of rape,” and said about 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, “He got got before he was able to rape anyone.”
Nevertheless, Marlow brought Cernovich on to discuss the cancel issue, claiming it’s only a matter of time conservatives are thrown in jail.
“This is one of these things where people don’t take sufficiently seriously—where the slippery slope goes,” Marlow said. “It’s not just going to be people don’t advertise on conservative outlets or maybe you lose your Twitter platform, soon it could be you lose your bank account. And who knows as we get this super state where the government and tech elite all seem to agree on everything that—who knows when it's going to turn into what it’s turning into in China, where you cannot use public transportation because you've got the wrong politics. Don’t think it’ll stop at that. They want us not, just as you say, not just canceled from Twitter, they want us canceled from everything. I mean they’d put us in jail if they could.”
Cernovich agreed, before turning his focus to the supposed cancelation of the Conservative Political Action Conference held this past weekend in Orlando, Florida. The conference, which was once viewed as a bastion of conservative and libertarian thought, has become a gathering for Trump worship.
“CPAC, they always felt, you know, in a way I don’t feel bad for them at all, because they always felt they were haughty, above it all ... ‘that person is too dangerous, that person maybe tweeted something bad 10 years ago,’” Cernovich said. “Good luck getting a hotel chain next year.”
The problem, Cernovich claimed, is that Christians are too nice and moral to fight back.
“I’ll be careful how I word this because I’m pro-Christian, but fundamentally Christian —Christianity can make, if you’re to make me critique, Christianity is too passive,” Cernovich claimed. “Where I remember the first time I got blasted by the media—like, I didn’t even write that tweet but whatever—so then I said, ‘Fine, I’ll look at your tweets, you want to play like this?’ And then I started getting people ‘canceled.’ Conservatives attacked me! I thought, what’re you doing? You people live in fear every time you’re going to tweet, why don’t you just find their tweets? … Why don’t you do more of this? ‘No, we don’t do that. We don’t cancel people.'”
While conservatives may rail against so-called cancel culture, Cernovich encouraged conservatives to espouse it for their own causes. “The only way to fight back against cancel culture is you have to cancel them,” he said.
“I’m going to create a caricature of them based on two or three tweets I saw of you. That’s who you are forever, that’s what we’re going to bring up for the rest of your life,” he continued.
"We need a thousand people on the phones, we need a thousand people saying this is a hate group.”
“But conservatives, because of that Christian morality, don’t really want to do that. And if you don’t do it ... if you’re lucky, you’re banned from social media,” he said. “But look at the trends from the protests … lives are being ruined now."
The conversation moved to the events of Jan. 6.
“I disavow political violence just like you do, Mike,” Marlow said. “But it wasn’t everyone there. A lot of people were just protesting, a lot of people were just exercising their First Amendment, a lot of people were obviously let into the Capitol, a lot of people who were there weren’t violent. And those people don’t count, those people get canceled too, just by being present in the same city as the handful of violent people too.”
Cernovich agreed, pointing to the “MAGA grandmas'' who have been arrested on trespassing charges after joining the storming of the Capitol. “Feds are indicting MAGA grandmas, holding them, in some cases, incommunicado,” he claimed. “Feds are coming for you, headhunting.”
Cernovich wasn’t the only conservative to call for the cancelation of others; over the weekend, Rep. Matt Gaetz took to the CPAC stage to attempt to call for the cancellation of his Republican colleague, Rep. Liz Cheney, who had voted her conscience to impeach then-President Donald Trump.
