Conservative Troll Tries To Defame 

Over the weekend, while the rest of the world was, at the very least, coming up with more creative ways to scrape the bottom of the barrel, ​alt-right trolls were busy sticking to their tried-and-true script: feigning outrage on Twitter. After last week's swift firing of "Guardians of the Galaxy" director James Gunn over some bad-taste jokes he tweeted out long before Disney hired him to direct the  series, Mike Cernovich — an alt-right ringleader who denies the concept of date-rape and has copped for just about every conservative-fringe conspiracy theory and outrage campaign over the last five years — celebrated his "win" over Gunn on Twitter.

Many celebrities, including "Guardians" cast member Dave Bautista, defended Gunn over the weekend without endorsing the content of Gunn's old tweets, which Gunn himself expressed regret over. Patton Oswalt was one of a handful of celebrities who called out Cernovich by name.

Cernovich responded the only way he apparently knows how: by scanning through Oswalt's old tweets until he found something objectionable.

Of course, it doesn't matter to Cernovich and his ilk that an unseemly statement they resurface might be stripped of vital context — their modus operandi does not depend on the truth of their accusations, only their viral reach and defamatory potential. Still, it's worth noting that in this case, Cernovich hasn't just taken Oswalt's 2013 joke tweet out of context: he's deliberately ignored the premise of Oswalt's entire bit. In 2013, Oswalt spent a weekend crafting two-part tweets where the second, isolated part of the message looks horrible out of context. Here's the NAMBLA tweet preceded by its first part:

Oswalt's bit certainly hasn't aged well — nowadays Twitter has threading capabilities, and there's something sadly quaint about a pre-Gamergate bit where "comments being stripped of context to enduce outrage" was "funny shtick" and not, well, exactly what people like Cernovich do to get their political enemies fired.

Still, Oswalt is one of few prominent comedians who has grappled at length with the damaging potential of offensive humor. It's absurd that Disney quickly kowtowed to an actual rape apologist like Cernovich just because he has somehow managed to build a following off of his transparently strategic use of misinformation. It's an indictment of Twitter that Cernovich is allowed to stay on the platform at all. If "more context" and "credibility" are important to Twitter moving forward, why keep bad faith actors who disregard the former and possess practically none of the latter around?

For what its worth, Patton retweeted the following, so he doesn't seem too beat up about it. This is just another weekend on Twitter in 2018, it seems.