Death by a Thousand Digital Cuts
Trump Normalized the Tactics Online Harassers Use to Silence Independent Journalists and Claim Victimhood
Online bullies work to destroy the people they target, and thousands reward the cruelty. Independent journalists rank among the most exposed targets, because a solo writer answers every attacker without a newsroom. What do the attackers actually win when a writer stops investigating the powerful?
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.”— Aldous Huxley
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The Conversation (1908–1912), Henri Matisse. Physical distance and rigid silence reveal how bullying destroys communication, isolates targets, and replaces human connection with mistrust.
Huxley described the recruitment in 1937, and modern scientists have measured the harm those recruits inflict. Rockefeller researchers documented cardiac decline and psychiatric deterioration in targets of organized bullying.
Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen found that sustained threat can elevate cortisol and impair cardiovascular and immune functioning. Targets may experience these effects while responding to repeated accusations. Writers who publish under their own names often cannot disengage from the platform where the harassment occurs.
The aggressors profit from that deterioration. Social psychologist Rahav Gabay identified a claimed victimhood that licenses cruelty while demanding sympathy. One who cites a professional credential converts an accusation into expert testimony. Online audiences reward a stranger’s suffering with shares and follows. British television host Caroline Flack died by suicide in 2020 while thousands solicited attention from her destruction.
Repeated exposure increases the harm because readers become more likely to believe a false claim after each repost.
A 2018 Science study tracked 126,000 stories that three million Twitter users shared. Falsehoods traveled farther and faster than accurate reports. Human users, not bots, drove the disparity.
Harassers use permanence, scale, and constant access to convert individual aggression into collective punishment. Psychologist Anthony Volk defines bullying as goal-directed hostility driven by unequal power and social rewards. Attackers may select prominent people because harming them can elevate their own status.
Instigators use proxy campaigns to recruit dispersed participants without direct coordination. Organizers who never post a direct threat retain plausible deniability while followers deliver the abuse. Social identity theorists show how group loyalty can suppress independent judgment and intensify animosity toward outsiders.
Social psychologist Albert Bandura developed moral disengagement theory to explain how people justify harmful conduct. Participants may recast cruelty as justice, divide responsibility, and minimize personal involvement. Audiences who approve each post reward escalation.
Pew reported that 41 percent of American adults had experienced online harassment by 2021. A review of 20 studies documented trauma, financial losses, damaged relationships, and lasting changes in self-perception. Betrayal trauma research links attacks from trusted communities with reduced feelings of safety, weakened attachment, and diminished trust. Prolonged accusations and exclusion can cause lasting harm, even after formal vindication.
British television presenter Caroline Flack died by suicide in 2020 after intense scrutiny and online attacks. Her coroner identified impending prosecution as a significant factor, although suicide never has one cause. Researchers studying cybervictimization link prolonged aggression with severe distress and suicidal ideation.
Rockefeller neuroscientist Bruce McEwen described cumulative biological strain as allostatic load. Health psychologist Jos Brosschot found that worry and rumination can prolong stress responses between confrontations. Their research shows how repeated incidents can contribute to continuing physiological harm after each event ends.
Readers often circulate accusations faster than targets can gather evidence to rebut false claims. Social psychologist Rahav Gabay found that a strong sense of interpersonal victimhood can foster moral superiority and resentment. People with vulnerable narcissism may interpret correction as humiliation, show less empathy, and retaliate.
Computational social psychologist William J. Brady found that users who receive approval for moral outrage express more of that hostility. Claimants can convert perceived suffering into social authority through competitive victimhood, so anyone presenting contrary evidence threatens both the allegation and personal standing.
Through projection, a person can assign unwanted motives to others and present aggression as advocacy. After 2016, schools in Virginia localities where voters favored Trump reported 18 percent more bullying and increased race-based teasing. Researchers recorded correlation, not causation, while social-learning theorists describe how prominent figures normalize cruelty.
Trump rewarded insults and norm violations as proof of partisan loyalty. Elite-cueing scholars explain how followers adopt conduct that trusted leaders endorse. Trump framed humiliation as strength and viciousness as authenticity, and Americans expressed open xenophobia more freely after he won national office.
After Trump made false claims about Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, both women received threats and racist abuse. Freeman fled her home, while election officials nationwide resigned under similar intimidation.
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Victims of sustained harassment need more than public rebuttal. PEN America teaches threat assessment, account security, evidence preservation, and support planning. The Coalition Against Online Violence offers legal, digital-security, and trauma resources for media workers.
Targets must save a screenshot of every post before the author deletes the evidence. Each capture needs the username and the URL, with the timestamp visible in the frame. Anyone facing immediate danger calls local police first. For lesser threats, the FBI accepts reports at IC3.gov, and federal agents open cases from those filings.
Free help exists beyond law enforcement. PEN America publishes a field manual for harassed writers at onlineharassmentfieldmanual.pen.org, covering account security and evidence preservation. The Coalition Against Online Violence connects media workers with digital-security and trauma resources at no charge. Every major platform accepts harassment reports, and targets who document each report strengthen later appeals.
A single author never acts alone. One person publishes an allegation, and only willing followers spread the abuse. Every participant bears responsibility for examining evidence before joining the attack.
Platformed sadists select one target and win acclaim from thousands of spectators. Each one then claims victimhood and collects a second payment in sympathy. Platforms can ban the coordinators today and stop the bullying within hours.
A fellow Substack writer launched a bullying campaign against my family. This article responds to their recruitment of others who repeated claims contradicted by documented evidence. Those participants carried the attacks across the platform and into my professional life.
Regardless of the target, I challenge false claims with verifiable evidence. When my family faced those allegations, the accuser mocked my connection and called correction persecution. Through DARVO, they redirected scrutiny from the evidence toward the person presenting proof.
Ongoing proxy harassment has disrupted my journalism, damaged my primary business, reduced my income, and worsened my health. Many independent writers cannot afford prolonged attacks or the working hours they consume. Readers must question accusers and demand proof before repeating serious claims. Anyone who circulates unsupported accusations joins the harassment and shares responsibility for the damage.
We must challenge lies wherever they appear, regardless of the community involved. I will not surrender to intimidation or abandon the truth. Reader support has strengthened my resolve to confront falsehoods and defend people targeted by false accusations.
“Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.”
— Bertrand Russell
— W. A. Lawrence
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Sources
Brady, W. J., McLoughlin, K., Doan, T. N., and Crockett, M. J. (2021). “How Social Learning Amplifies Moral Outrage Expression in Online Social Networks.” Science Advances, 7(33), eabe5641.
Noor, M., Shnabel, N., Halabi, S., and Nadler, A. (2012). “When Suffering Begets Suffering: The Psychology of Competitive Victimhood Between Adversarial Groups in Violent Conflicts.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(4), 351–374.
Reis, S., Huxley, E., Feng, B. E. Y., and Grenyer, B. F. S. (2021). “Pathological Narcissism and Emotional Responses to Rejection.” Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 679168.
Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. “The Spread of True and False News Online.” Science, 2018.
Volk, Anthony A., Andrew V. Dane, and Zopito A. Marini. “What Is Bullying? A Theoretical Redefinition.” Developmental Review, 2014.
Pew Research Center. “The State of Online Harassment.” 2021.
Brooks, Samantha K., and Neil Greenberg. “Psychological Impact of Being Wrongfully Accused of Criminal Offences: A Systematic Literature Review.”
Gabay, Rahav, Boaz Hameiri, Tammy Rubel-Lifschitz, and Arie Nadler. “The Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood: The Personality Construct and Its Consequences.” Personality and Individual Differences, 2020.
McEwen, Bruce S. “Protective and Damaging Effects of Stress Mediators.” The New England Journal of Medicine, 1998.
Brosschot, Jos F., William Gerin, and Julian F. Thayer. “The Perseverative Cognition Hypothesis: A Review of Worry, Prolonged Stress-Related Physiological Activation, and Health.” Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 2006.
Huang, Francis L., and Dewey G. Cornell. “School Teasing and Bullying After the Presidential Election.” Educational Researcher, 2019.
Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, 1979.
Bandura, Albert. “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1999.
Suler, John. “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” CyberPsychology & Behavior, 2004.
Resources for Online Harassment
PEN America Online Harassment Field Manual
Guidance on threats, documentation, digital security, and support.
https://onlineharassmentfieldmanual.pen.org/
Coalition Against Online Violence Response Hub
Legal, security, and trauma resources for journalists and media workers.
https://onlineviolenceresponsehub.org/
FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center
Official portal for reporting suspected internet crimes.
https://www.ic3.gov/
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AN EDUCATED POPULATION IS THE BEST DEFENSE AGAINST ARISTOCRACY
Trump and the Heritage Foundation both know that education is their enemy. Free speech by educated citizens can destroy their plans to turn our country into an autocracy where the ruling power can reshape the country to benefit the wealthy. Trump has dismantled the Department of Education, cut funding for advanced studies at universities, and degraded and controlled elementary education. These changes are all part of the plans promoted in Project 2025.
Compared with other countries, our educational program does not rank among the top 20, with South Korea first and the Nordic countries next. The US and China represent two contrasting educational philosophies. The US system prioritizes decentralization, holistic development, critical thinking, and student-driven exploration. In contrast, the Chinese system employs centralized curricula, intense academic rigor, and a meritocracy heavily driven by high-stakes testing and memorization—University of Colorado.
America is becoming an ignorant population. We are unwilling to invest the effort required to acquire knowledge in any form. We are lazy, and AI will contribute to this lack of education. We are a country whose population thinks in eight-minute segments, the time usually allotted to a TV segment on any show. Our educational process has been described as weak and ineffective, and our colleges as extended day camps. We have discontinued formal standardized testing and reduced the number of science and math courses. Whereas in the past we aimed to ensure that college graduates had a well-rounded education, we now have useless college degrees.
Trump and company have reduced or eliminated funding for advanced studies in the sciences, weather research, and space exploration. Education is now in the hands of the individual states, with no national standard in place, and subject to local reductions in the importance of national educational standards. Local authorities will control the standards in each state and may have no national responsibility. Combine all of this with the erosion of our freedom of speech, and you can see an organized effort to keep our population ignorant.
Other countries, including China, South Korea, Japan, and all the Nordic countries, recognize that the education of their citizens is essential to their survival. Trump is an ignoramus who sees money as the only measure of success and security; he is an example of an uneducated person with false credentials who is an uncontrollable liar and has conned the uneducated 38% into believing he was a successful businessman. He lied about his success as a businessman, and the uninformed, uneducated Americans drank his Kool-Aid and thought that with him in power, they could go about their lives without having to think.