When you’ve had a lot of exposure to the SJ side of Tumblr, you’ll start to pick up common abusive tactics they use to instill control over people who are unsure of what side they want to be on.
The most common type I’ve seen was projection. It’s when someone wants to remove all accountability from the actions resulting from bad traits they hold by attributing those bad traits onto you. And I’ve seen it in this form the most: Somebody could go into hysterics about the supposed ‘self-hate’ you have because of certain political views you hold (that don’t apparently “line up” with your minority status), but a quick scroll down through their blog would either reveal those typical self-depreciating posts, how much they hate/want to kill themselves, or how nobody else likes them.
They tell you not to talk to certain people they perceive to be bigoted based on their very broad definition of one. If that doesn’t work, they’ll resort to toying with your emotions. I’ve talked about this before, but they’ll insist that nobody else (outside of the minority group they’re apart of) cares about them. Basically it usually goes like: “If you associate with them, they’ll drop you in a heartbeat when you don’t become useful to them anymore, but since we’re the only people who supposedly care about you, you’re better off staying with us no matter how much abuse we throw at you.” They feel threatened when anyone, especially other minorities who are expected to have camaraderie with them at all costs, point out faults within their mindset so they resort to this particular tactic.
There’s also the “Preemptive Defense” strategy which a lot of narcissists love to use. I didn’t know there was an exact word for this, but I’ve seen this one play out way too often on here. It’s when someone says you should trust them right off the bat because they’re a “nice person”. But on here it comes in the form of trusting someone - especially believing whatever they say without question - because they’re a minority of some sorts. Because they’re a minority and therefore inevitably ‘oppressed’, everything they say, they say with good intentions (or everything they say is right) even if it comes in the form of overtly abusive language.
And you can’t really do shit about it cause, “You gotta listen to them or else you’re speaking over them and denying their right to a voice!”
Another attribute that narcissists share (and lots of people on here) are subjecting people to “smear campaigns”. They control how others see you by making themselves out to be the good person while you’re the toxic one. A smear campaign is a preemptive strike to sabotage your reputation and slander your name so that you won’t have a support network to fall back on lest you decide to detach and cut ties with this toxic person. They may even stalk and harass you or the people you know as a way to supposedly “expose” the truth about you; this exposure acts as a way to hide their own abusive behavior while projecting it onto you. I think I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen this happen here.
They deliberately misrepresent your thoughts and put words in your mouth too. They’ll try their damn hardest to rephrase whatever you say to make your opinions sound like garbage. This gives them a sense of power as everybody comes running to their side and away from yours because they purposely misinterpreted the core argument you made in your post. One of their favorite approaches is finding something slightly off with your wording and using that to twist the point you made while moving the goalposts at the same time. I made a post that said ‘Radfems will call a transwoman a man because they raped somebody as if men are the only ones capable of rape’ and I got swarms of replies talking about how I didn’t care about the rape victim affected (which they ironically proceeded to deny his identity by referring to him as a ‘’female’’ because he was a transman) because I happened to bring up a different issue at that time. Either that or I was a rape apologist.
Once they lose that sense of control – because you disagree with their thought process – they’ll either try to strip of you of your identity or use fear-tactics (i.e: nobody cares for you except for us) as a consequence of not conforming to their political views. “If someone’s reaction to you setting boundaries or having a differing opinion from your own is to threaten you into submission, whether it’s a thinly veiled threat or an overt admission of what they plan to do, this is a red flag of someone who has a high degree of entitlement and has no plans of compromising.”
Then comes the oversimplifications and generalizations of complicated matters. They’re left-wing versions of reactionaries, they don’t bother to look at things from different perspectives; they instead apply their own bias where they see fit. They have no concept of nuance and dismiss people who point this out.
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