A high-profile Reddit Ask Me Anything session quickly backfired on prominent far-right internet troll Mike Cernovich on Friday, as users with names like “FartHog69” demanded to know how he got a “a rape charge talked down to battery” in 2003.
Cernovich took to Twitter to claim the Q&A session was a “huge success,” despite the top post consisting almost entirely of accusations of impropriety against the conspiracy theorist.
“It’s a matter of public record that you were charged with rape, and pled it down to a battery charge. Did you hire a private investigator to harass witnesses like you claim you did on your old legal blog or is that untrue?” Reddit user sejuani_air_ult asked.
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Cernovich, one of the earliest peddlers of the false Pizzagate conspiracy theory that claimed Hillary Clinton’s campaign was running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza shop that had no basement, did not respond to that question.
In the past year, Cernovich—who also claimed that the shooting in a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church was carried out by the left-wing group antifa—received frequent guest hosting spots on InfoWars and retweets from the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
Reddit users were not impressed.
Several top-rated users asked Cernovich why he named his book Gorilla Mindset when a gorilla is “the only great ape that can’t recognise its reflection as itself.”
“As such, do you attack the man staring back at you when you look in the mirror?” PeteIRL asked.
At one point, a moderator for the community even had to step in after Cernovich was called a “monkey brained moron.” Cernovich had just called a previous blog post about himself masturbating in a woman’s car unimportant because it was a “web forum post.”
“Please avoid personal attacks, even if they’re accurate,” wrote moderator Cahaseler.
“I mean on monkeys,” Cahaseler clarified in an update.
Cernovich received repeated questioning about a 2003 rape charge that later became a battery charge.
“The false accusation against me was dismissed, and my initial arrest was expunged. That’s why you losers can’t find any court records, none exist, expungement!” he wrote.
“Why are you thinking about rape all of the time?” he then asked a user who had not talked about rape on Reddit in over a year, according to his post history.
Cernovich had recently gained mainstream recognition for forwarding verifiable documents to BuzzFeed News confirming Congressman John Conyers quietly settled a sexual harassment suit. Weeks later, Cernovich promised his readers he was “currently reading the sexual harassment settlement documents of a major Democratic US Senator,” which wound up being false, forged documents about Sen. Chuck Schumer. Cernovich later claimed he was duped.
This week, Cernovich falsely insinuated the Amtrak train crash in Washington state was caused by an antifa member pouring concrete on tracks.
Cernovich was asked about the many times he has been dangerously wrong in the aftermath of news events and tragedies.
“Hey Mike, Do you think that an important part of being a good critical thinker is showing intellectual humility?” asked user Stuchapin.
“If so, can you tell us about a few times you have been wrong?”
Cernovich, who once wrote he’d “bet on my life [Barack Obama] is gay” in a tweet he later deleted, responded to Stuchapin by saying he regrets having once believed that right-wing agitator “Dinesh D’Souza’s methods of calling Democrats racists and Nazis [were] corny and ineffective.”
He then plugged a blog post on his website.
