On March 28, 2017, I posted about Mike Cernovich’s interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Although Cernovich’s campaign for CBS to release the full 45-minute video has not borne fruit, he does have the full transcript of the interview, which he posted on Monday, April 3.

At times such as these, it’s reassuring to receive an enthusiastic nod from the White House, in this case, the Counselor to the President:

Here is the short interview, preceded by a discussion with notional experts about what constitutes fake news:

Cernovich posted the transcript of the entire interview on Medium.com.

Excerpts follow from his exchange with Scott Pelley. Subheads and emphases are mine.

What’s Left and Right anymore?

Scott Pelley: … A-are you a right-wing person?

Mike Cernovich: I consider myself center-right. But these labels don’t really make much sense. I believe in some form of universal basic income. Well that isn’t a, quote unquote, conservative position because we have automation coming. What are you going to do?

I’m pro single payer healthcare. Is that right-wing or is that left-wing anymore? Well, if you have a lot of people, a large swatch of the company, or country, are suffering, then I think that we owe it to all Americans to do right by them, and to help them out. So is that right-wing or is that left-wing? I don’t know.

I’m pro free speech. Well, I remember when my great heroes who I read in college, like Allen Dershowitz, were with the ACLU marching with the Nazis. Now I read that well, that guy’s a Nazi. Is it okay to punch him? Is it okay to hit him? So I’m pro free speech, that used to be a left-wing value. That was core left-wing value. And now we’re, we’re hearing from the left hate speech, and you should be able to punch people who disagree with political violence, and becoming more normalized.

That’s why I don’t like labels like left-wing or right-wing anymore. And don’t think they apply.

Target audience

Scott Pelley: Who’s your audience?

Mike Cernovich: The people. Regular people who feel like their voices aren’t being heard in traditional media outlets. People of all walks of life, all genders, all ages. It’s a really fun, eclectic group actually …

Scott Pelley: Help me, uh, with, uh a bit of, uh the technology behind all of this. Would your site be as successful as it is, without Facebook and Twitter?

Mike Cernovich: They’re different platforms, definitely. So it would be, Twitter is very useful for different things. But my website would get around. Word would get around one way or another.

Scott Pelley: But, uh, web, uh. Let me ask a question this way. Twitter and Facebook are useful to you how?

Mike Cernovich: Reaching people directly without an intermediary. So what, the-the way I always explain to- you’re mediators. We’re going to talk for a number of minutes about a number of questions. This is going to go through editing, and then you’re going to go to television and say this is Mike Cernovich, this is what he believes. And then you’re going to tell a narrative whether I’m a good guy, a bad guy, a misguided guy, whatever the narrative is. And that’s fine. We’re all telling a story, right?

The issue is that that media is an intermediary. With social media, I can say to the people here’s me live on video for an hour. The full thing, raw and uncut. So it bring the message directly to the people. It bypasses intermediaries in the media.

Media bias

Scott Pelley: You’re a political activist?

Mike Cernovich: I’m a social activist, absolutely.

Scott Pelley: Well, that would be the big difference between you and reporters in journalism.

Mike Cernovich: Reporters are the mouthpiece of Democratic National Convention. Most of it is pro Hillary, pro Barack Obama. Donald Trump tweets something mean, the whole world, left-wing media explodes. Barack Obama prosecutes whistle-blowers more than anybody before him. Good old Barry. We love Barry, we love Barry, we love Barry. 90% of campaign contributions that came from journalists went to Hillary Clinton.

So the idea that journalists are these unbiased bastions of truth, and they’re not human beings, is completely not consistent with reality. Not consistent with the observable data. And moreover not consistent with what we know about people.

Truth in reporting

Scott Pelley: What, What stories have you published that turned out to not be right?

Mike Cernovich: None, that come to mind.

Scott Pelley: None?

Mike Cernovich: That come to mind, no.

Scott Pelley: You know, it seems to me that the quickest way to destroy a democracy, is to poison the information.

Mike Cernovich: That’s exactly why the Iraq war was a mistake, caused by hysterical, fake news coverage. I also remember when people claimed, a Kuwaiti woman had claimed that Iraqi soldiers had went into a hospital, taking babies out of the incubators, throwing the babies away, and this was all reported true, they were untrue. So again, the idea is-

Scott Pelley: I’m talking about your work.

Mike Cernovich: I’m talking about the nature of truth though, because my work has to be contextualized relative to the structures that we resist in the media structure.

Scott Pelley: So some reporters, some where made a mistake and therefore it’s okay for you to write anything you want, whether it’s true or not.

Mike Cernovich: No, I never said that at all. I said that people are human beings, and that mistakes made by the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, and other outlets, have caused great damage to our democracy and is definitely a problem …

Scott Pelley: Who[se] responsibility is it to judge whether something on your website is true, you, or the viewer?

Mike Cernovich: Oh, many people do. I have to judge it, the legal system judges it, the viewers have to judge it. Remember too, that I am an attorney. Right? You have a legal department of sixty minutes, we all know defamation, we want to avoid it. Not only because it’s not moral to harm people, dishonestly, we shouldn’t harm private people at all, but that’s a different conversation. So you’re going to be filtered through many people, but ultimately all news, all information, the personal responsibility of the person receiving it, to reach their own conclusions …

Mike Cernovich: I remember when John Edwards had fathered a wo- a child out of wedlock with a woman he was cheating on while his wife had cancer, the media wouldn’t cover it.

Scott Pelley: The question’s not about John Edwards. The question’s not about John Edwards, it’s about you, what’s your standard of proof?

Mike Cernovich: We’re having a philosophical conversation about the nature of truth, and the nature of truth is that John Edwards did not have a lovechild, that is fake news. Well actually it’s true, that happened. Right? So there are many stories that are under reported.

The producer’s question

PRODUCER: Do you think that maybe you can uh, ask him uh, you know, if he thinks that what he’s doing is filling the void left open by the mainstream media.

Scott Pelley: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes, absolutely. That’s a good one. Everybody ready? Are you filling a void that has been left open by the mainstream media?

Mike Cernovich: Yeah, that is why my profile has risen so much. Everybody kind of writes the same stories. Right now, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. That’s what I hear everywhere, that’s all I hear anywhere. I don’t hear about Saudi Arabia. I’ve actually gone through thinking of real journalism, and doing research, and using my expertise as a lawyer, I’ve gone through FAR records to see who is actually paying people to be their mouthpieces. Ukraine, big money. They pay a guy, Doug Schoen, who goes on Fox News, $40,000 a month. Victor Pinchuk does. Pays him $40,000 a month, he goes on Fox News and says “Russia’s bad, the Ukraine is good”, he never discloses that he’s getting $40,000 a month. Saudi Arabia, more than any other country, they pay for propaganda. You can go through the FA- the FAR reports. Right? I don’t see any of that on the news.

Let’s talk about how Saudi Arabia owns a percentage of Fox News. Let’s talk about how Saudi Arabia owns a percentage of Twitter. Let’s talk about how they bought bombs from Obama, and they’re murdering the, let’s talk about that. I don’t see any of that. Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. It’s like in the movie Being John Malkovich, being in Russia and America. So what I’m saying is well hey, why don’t we talk about Saudi Arabia? Why don’t we talk about Ukraine? Why don’t we talk about other stories that the media isn’t telling? Of course you’re going to draw an audience with that.

There are many news stories that Big Media do not cover.

One is Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s visit to Washington DC this week. Whilst I have not watched the news, there are plenty of people who have.

They have reported in comments online that, even though President Donald Trump spent much of Monday, April 3 with his Egyptian counterpart, the Big Media narrative in the US — and Australia — that day was ‘Trump White House in chaos’, referring to spying, Russia and supposed internal rifts.

Wow.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

More on Al Sisi tomorrow and on a Cernovich scoop at the end of the week.