Mike Cernovich was celebrating on Friday, at least for a few hours. Disney had just fired James Gunn, the director of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump , over crude jokes about pedophilia and rape Gunn made on Twitter between 2008 and 2011.

Cernovich had mobilized his network to have the tweets show up in all corners of the internet and in Disneys executive suite and he was rewarded when James Gunn shot to the top of Twitters national trending topics.

I couldnt sleep. I was up until 3 a.m., an exuberant Cernovich told HuffPost on Friday. Thats a lot of real sick stuff.

Cernovich had claimed a trophy. This was what the far-right propagandist lived for, these kamikaze moments. They kept him going. They got him high. They allowed him to cling to a dank relevancy, even as it slips through his fingers.

Ive been a very good boy since Pizzagate, he said, as he watched Disney dispatch Gunn.

By now, it should come as no surprise that Cernovich, who played a key role in manipulating public opinion during the 2016 election, was involved in the campaign against Gunn. The far-right propagandist has been locked in an endless war against the mainstream media, and at the end of 2017, had warned his enemies that he planned to use their tweets against them. He would dig up fireable tweets .

It was a credible threat, especially for journalists Cernovichs favorite targets. In November, Cernovich bushwhacked MSNBC s Sam Seder, distorting the context of an off-color Roman Polanski joke hed tweeted almost a decade ago. Much like he did with Gunn, Cernovich smeared the podcast host as an enabler of pedophiles. Pedophilia is Cernovichs favorite frame-up, and he gloated when clueless MSNBC executives briefly fired Seder.

In February, Cernovich set his crosshairs on a new target: Will Sommer, who was then the campaign editor for The Hill newspaper and covers the far-right in a weekly newsletter.

Sommer, who declined to comment for this story, had put up a tweet nothing remotely fireable that linked to a Medium post written by Nathan Bernard, a technologist and humorist who lampoons Cernovich and other fake news merchants online. In the post, Bernard claimed a source had told him of a sex tape featuring Cernovich.

In his tweet, Sommer also quoted from an email that Cernovichs attorney, Marc Randazza, had sent Bernard:

In the event that you are in possession of ... a sex tape starring Mr. Cernovich, I presume that it would be somewhat old material.

Bernard didnt reveal his source. Theres no good evidence the tape is real.

But linking to a Nathan Bernard post any Nathan Bernard post is a great way to make Cernovich angry. Over the last two years, Bernard and his close friend Vic Berger, a video producer and humorist at Super Deluxe who makes satirical videos of politicians and public figures, have waged a two-man campaign to annoy, infuriate and, they hope, ultimately stymie Cernovich and other bad actors.

Satire with a purpose, Bernard calls their work. (Bernard was roommates in the Bronx with rising progressive star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and says she influenced his politics.)

Bernard and Berger write comedic takedowns of Cernovich and mock the propagandist in videos filled with amusing sound effects, uncomfortable close-ups and awkward slo-mo edits. In a Trumpian flourish, they have branded Cernovich Weird Mike. They are out-trolling the troll.

And the troll doesnt like it.

So perhaps what happened the day after Sommer tweeted the link to Bernards post shouldnt have been so surprising: Randazza, who represents multiple white supremacists such as Andrew Anglin and far-right slanderers such as Alex Jones, emailed a scathing three-page letter to Bob Cusack, the editor-in-chief of The Hill. In the letter, which HuffPost obtained a copy of, Randazza falsely accused Sommer of soliciting revenge pornography, sexual harassment, and having an obsession [with Cernovich] bordering on stalking.

He didnt stop there. Randazza, who advertises himself as a staunch defender of the First Amendment, referenced the Hulk Hogan sex tape lawsuit that libertarian billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel secretly financed to drive Gawker out of business.

Thiels demolition of Gawker has had a chilling effect on press freedom in America, and the case is routinely and gleefully invoked by phony free speech patriots who share Cernovichs agenda to cripple the media.

Mr. Sommers moral bankruptcy should not lead to your financial bankruptcy, Randazza, who refused to comment for this story, warned Cusack.

The message was clear: Shut up or else.

It wouldnt be the last time Cernovich came after Sommer. And the journalist wasnt his first target. Far from it.

The Ratfucker Cabal

To understand Cernovichs war on the press and his gripe with Bernard and Berger requires a familiarity with the alt-lite, a group of nativist Make America Great Again propagandists and grifters who got their name because of their ideological proximity to the white nationalist alt-right movement.

Cernovich is a ringleader in the group, whose members include anti-Muslim Laura Loomer, British fascist and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and Lucian Wintrich, a smarmy white supremacist-friendly correspondent for The Gateway Pundit, a far-right propaganda outlet. These dirty tricksters, several of whom have received press credentials from the Trump White House, all work to subvert the real media.

The alt-lites fake news ecosystem sprouted from the far-right fever swamp created by Fox News and a tireless effort by movement conservatives to demonize the media. But the new breed of alt-lite ratfucker is feral, with an ability to directly sway gullible minds through social media. Twitter and other social media platforms have abetted the rise of frauds, racists and fascists who spread lies and can easily form cybermobs. This is a worrisome development for the truth business.

One of the best ways to hurt journalists in the social media era, Cernovich knows, is to tar them online; to destroy their reputations. Too many news outlets exist in financial distress. Overworked journalists can be sidelined by harassment campaigns. And many media companies are now run by business-school graduates allergic to controversy and given over to a reflexive political correctness. One flip statement by a reporter on social media can cause lasting professional damage. All of which plays to the strengths of the alt-lite.

Cernovich honed his troll game years ago. Long before a gloves-on profile in The New Yorker in 2016 boosted his reputation as the meme mastermind of the alt-right, hed used social media and his blog and a seven-figure divorce settlement from his ex-wife to become a celebrity in the anti-feminist pick-up artist scene.

He later gained a large platform during Gamergate, a 2014 harassment campaign by angry young men many of them gamers, some of them white supremacists directed at women in the video game industry. Gamergate was an attack not only on feminism but also the media. When Sam Biddle, a Gawker writer who was later targeted by Peter Thiel with litigation, posted sarcastic tweets about shaming and bullying gamers, Cernovich pressured Gawkers advertisers to cut ties with the publication . Several did, including L.L.Bean and Adobe. The trolls realized they had leverage. A crude movement took shape online, with Cernovich as a figurehead.

A year later, he segued smoothly into a role as megaphone for the Trump campaign, using his audience to push propaganda and malign the media. Cernovich had trafficked in openly racist ideas and rhetoric for some time, associating with the alt-right movement as early as 2015.