Who is Creating This Environment of Antagonism and Hate?

Yesterday I was on Facebook and I saw a friend of mine being bitterly dog piled with nasty and abusive comments after she had posted an innocent post that was obviously misinterpreted.

The comment thread was long and horribly abusive to her, all from her “friends” who, not one of which contacted her privately and asked her what she meant.

Instead they piled on like rabid dogs, gleefully destroying her reputation and her career without a second thought.

I see this a lot on social media, this bully culture where someone makes an innocent mis-step and is punished horribly in a manner in which they cannot defend themselves.

This is bullying. And it is bullying even if the target of your attack is someone it is “ok” to hate as per the current culture.

In this society all you have to do to destroy someone is to call them an epithet that is currently taboo.

Creating these taboos, making them so horrible that they cannot be confronted and throwing them around against innocent people then gives unethical people the right to viciously slander and destroy anyone they don’t like. It even makes these bullies look honorable if you don’t read between the lines.

In another example, I read a post on a local social media site yesterday. It was from a veterinarian who had been viciously slandered by a customer.

This vet had posted a response stating that the customer had come in with a badly neglected dog. He had cared for it and of his own volition and washed it and clipped its nails. Apparently the woman took issue with something and, in the same waiting room where the vet was trying to comfort a family who had just lost their pet, this woman and her daughter went after him with verbal abuse.

She had then posted a screed on social media. He had seen her post and thought it would blow over but when commenters on the post starting talking about how he should be led out in handcuffs and punished in worse ways, he had to come in and defend himself. He was fearful of retribution against himself and his family.

While it is not new that vicious people use the communication lines of social media to trash others, this jumping on and abusing someone by others without knowing even half the story is new.

But how did this reprehensible behavior get a foothold in our society?

Vicious slander is by definition, lies.

And when people are encouraged to lie when it suits the current narrative, a culture of lies, smears and bullying becomes socially acceptable.

“Bully” used to be a term we used to call people who went out of their way to abuse innocent people. Now it has become a term to call someone who publicly disagrees with you and ironically all the tools of bullying are used by the people who are very quick to call others bullies.

Disagreeing with someone is NOT bullying.

Standing up for yourself is not bullying and responding to nasty comments is NOT bullying.

Expressing your own personal or religious beliefs is also NOT bullying.

There are certain terms used in our culture today that are used simply and only to shut people down and completely discredit them without evidence to support the fact that they should be discredited.

Those with no real argument or statistics to back up their argument want to shut everyone down who says anything that might discredit their argument.

Thus you have epithets that are thrown at the person who stands by their statistics.

An example of these vicious epithets are “racist”, “homophobe”, “bigot”, “misogynist”, and a myriad of other smears.

These represent horrible evil in most people’s minds.

Those who are accused of being these things cannot prove that the epithets are false because how do you prove a negative?

How can you prove you are NOT something?

And those who use these epithets bring up evil people from the past whose statements and actions DID prove that they were these things.

And these modern day bullies paint their targets as the exact same as these evil people from history.

Hitler WAS evil.

Stalin WAS evil.

Pol Pot WAS evil.

But someone who simply disagrees with your narrative is not evil by virtue of disagreeing.

So, who is the perpetrator of these lies and smears that are so prevalent that they have created a hostile and nasty culture across the entire United States of America?

Have you seen the news lately?

Have you noticed that they all have the same talking points and anyone who dares go against the hateful narrative they relentlessly push gets viciously smeared with the above epithets?

Unfortunately, the average person unthinkingly sees this on news shows and talk shows and thinks it is ok to do the same thing.

Truth doesn’t matter any more. Statistics don’t matter. The only thing that matters is vilifying and shutting down someone you disagree with.

And while this might seem like the perfect tool to eliminate anyone who you believe is wrong, understand that it is a double edged sword.

If it is ok to vilify someone else wrongly, then it is ok to vilify you.

You can’t agree with a narrative of lies and smears forever. And when you some day disagree, God help you.

And what is the end goal of the media? It is ratings so they can sell advertising. Unfortunately bad news and vicious gossip sells. So this is what they push.

If you want a full account of one of the most vicious smears in history of an innocent man by the media, check out my article on Fatty Arbuckle and William Randolph Hearst.

So I am issuing a call to action here.

When you see someone being smeared on social media, go look at their stats. Are their efforts and actions pushing toward the good of society or are they appealing to the worst in mankind and attempting to enslave?

Does the story you are reading contain generalities like “Everyone knows he/she is a _______”

Does the story depend on emotion and not on statistics or facts?

Is the narrator of the story almost obsessively intent on you believing them without question?

Are you being manipulated by hyperbole?

Then ask yourself, is this the culture you want to live in, where bullies can hit and run on social media and destroy someone’s reputation and career based on emotion and smears and lies?

Where certain groups of people can act viciously in any way they wish and not be punished while others are punished severely?

Where innocent people are beaten and attacked while authorities stand down?

Then ask yourself would you want this to happen to you?

We don’t have to accept this insane culture of lies, smears and bullying. We had a culture at one time based mostly on self respect and respect for others.

We had the Golden Rule telling us not to do to others what we would not want done to us.

It is time to push back on this hostile and vicious environment.

We create the environment, not those bent on destroying our lives and relationships.

And we recreate OUR environment by refusing to buy into the lies, smears and attacks and by understanding that basing our views on an industry that thrives on chaos, destruction and tragedy is about the stupidest thing any society can do.