The following is based on an email and text sent to the Mirror by Cheryl Miele.
There’s a pattern at work in online spaces — and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
When someone starts speaking up, gaining visibility, or earning recognition for something real, something shifts. Not from strangers. That’s expected. It shifts from the people already around them — the ones who see exactly what’s happening in real time and have a clear choice in how they respond.
What they choose is telling.
They don’t call it out. They join it. Or they ignore it. And both responses feed the same outcome.
What begins as subtle becomes coordinated. Dismissal turns into undermining. Undermining turns into targeted behavior. Targeted behavior turns into group harassment. This is not random. It is collective — a mob mentality that enforces social control, where a group silently agrees how someone should be treated and acts in unison to push them into that position.
Nobody gets to decide where someone else belongs. But that is precisely what this behavior attempts to do.
This isn’t about disagreement. It isn’t about conflict. It is about control — control over how someone is perceived, how they are treated, and whether they are accepted or pushed out entirely.
Two Groups. One Result.
The people driving this behavior aren’t operating from a position of strength. They’re operating from insecurity, resentment, and ego.
Some lack empathy at a fundamental level. Narcissistic personalities exist, and for them, other people aren’t experienced as equals — they’re tools, obstacles, or sources of validation. That’s why the cruelty doesn’t register. There is nothing in place to stop it, because there is nothing inside them that wants to.
Then there’s the second group — arguably the more dangerous one. These are people who do have the capacity for empathy, but suppress it. They go along to stay included. To protect their position. To avoid becoming the next target. To feed their own ego. They know what they’re doing, and they do it anyway.
That is cowardice. And it deserves to be named as such.
The Lowest Form of It
There is a floor to this behavior, and some people find it without hesitation.
Telling someone to kill themselves. Telling someone to “go be with” a deceased loved one. That is not an insult. That is not drama. That is targeted psychological abuse — a conscious decision to identify someone’s grief and weaponize it against them.
Stable, grounded people do not do this. This is the behavior of someone making a deliberate choice to cause harm at the deepest level they can reach.
And it does not exist in a vacuum. It grows in environments where group targeting is tolerated, where this kind of treatment becomes normalized, and where people are quietly conditioned to accept it as part of the culture.
It’s Violence. Not Drama.
Let’s use accurate language: this is psychological violence. Not a conflict. Not “online drama.” Violence — sustained, targeted, and designed to destabilize.
Most people won’t break under it. But some will. That is the obvious goal, displayed openly and without shame from behind a fake profile name.
And when people are pushed, isolated, and degraded long enough, outcomes can escalate into something far more serious. That doesn’t excuse anything. But it exposes something these communities refuse to face: environments that normalize this behavior create consequences they don’t get to control.
The Double Standard Nobody Talks About
While all of this unfolds, there is a separate expectation placed on the person being targeted: stay calm, stay quiet, stay polite, don’t react, don’t defend yourself.
Because the moment you do, the narrative flips. Now you’re the problem. Now you’re “too much.” Now you’re the one being judged.
That’s how this works. It provokes — and then punishes the reaction. And somehow, people expect you to accept that framing.
That’s not happening.
Silence Is Not Neutral
Here is what bystanders need to understand: silence in these situations is not neutrality. It is participation. It protects the behavior, allows it to grow, and sends an unambiguous message to the person being targeted — you are on your own.
When a community allows this to define how its members are treated, that is the culture, regardless of what anyone wants to call it. What happens behind the scenes is the truth. And eventually, that truth surfaces somewhere it can no longer be ignored.
The question isn’t whether this is happening. It’s whether anyone is willing to say so out loud.
About the Author
Dang Cheryl, you nailed it.
That sounds to me like a perfect description of the “Woke” movement that is taking control of our society.
Between Wokeness and AI semi-intelligence it is indeed becoming an Orwellian Brave New World.
Human beings are all about self. That is why they attack you when you don’t want to do what they want you to do and say what they want you to say and be what they want you to be, because they have this false image of themselves, they must create a false image of you so that you can fit in with the false image they have created of themselves.
Amazin’!