First things first: It is absolutely the case that the harassment of Sarah McBride, the newly elected Democratic representative from Delaware, is rooted in Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., having an insatiable desire for attention. Mace's narcissism is legendary even by Capitol Hill standards. In one of the juicier exposés in recent memory, the Daily Beast reported that the congresswoman's "abusive" behavior created a "toxic" work environment that eventually led to a total staff turnover in the space of a couple of months. Mace's latest bid for camera time was purchased by introducing a bill that might as well be titled the "Sarah McBride Defamation Act" because it only targets one person and lies about her.
McBride is trans, and Mace is using this as an excuse to put forward a bill barring McBride from using the women's restroom on Capitol Hill. Mace shamelessly claims to be afraid of McBride. "I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces, so I'm absolutely 100% going to stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women's restroom," she said, lying about McBride's gender. Notably, Mace loudly supported Donald Trump's presidential bid, despite a 2023 jury finding him civilly liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room. As Tim Miller at the Bulwark argues, "Nancy Mace doesn't really feel unsafe," and "it's all farce" and a bid to get attention by being a bully.
It is tempting, therefore, to argue that the best response is to not feed the troll by giving her the attention she craves. This is the classic "deplatforming" argument, which continues to persist because, in the past, there were some victories of the "ignore them and they go away" variety. (Anyone heard from Milo Yiannopoulos lately?) But, as Zack Beauchamp of Vox wrote after the election, "Trump’s wins are proof that gatekeeping doesn’t really work anymore." Media fragmentation "means there's not enough cultural unification to ever really expel anyone from the discourse." Even if all liberals collectively agreed never to say "Nancy Mace" again, she can take advantage of the robust right-wing propaganda machine to get attention with hate.
There's an even more disturbing aspect to this harassment campaign against McBride. It's the latest example of how the mainstream GOP has embraced a tactic that hateful trolls first developed online during the "Gamergate" fiasco of 2014 and has become a favorite tool of the far-right for recruitment and radicalization: selecting random, innocent people to dangle out to their audiences as the hate object of the day. Back then, it was a handful of female video game developers and critics who were presented to largely male crowds online as targets for relentless, inchoate abuse.
The tactic has since become rote on the right, largely through the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. Run by far-right influencer Chaya Raichik, Libs of TikTok offers a bloodthirsty audience a constant stream of photos and videos of random people — usually from their small, personal social media accounts — usually for no other reason than they are queer or queer-positive. Her followers, whipped into a hateful frenzy, flood the victim du jour with hateful messages and often escalate to offline contact of harassing phone calls and bomb threats. We can see how this is already manifesting in the attacks on McBride. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is going along with the abuse. Less than a day after initially saying he wanted to "treat all persons with dignity and respect," he switched to attacking McBride by saying, "a man cannot become a woman."
Someone must've told Mike Johnson after his first statement that he sounded too much like a squish. Note the difference in his second statement today about McBride. pic.twitter.com/ceJ6ybrrbS
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 20, 2024
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose every instinct is to join a bullying mob, joined in, saying it's "like a physical assault" to share a restroom with a trans woman. Like Mace, Greene is an avid supporter of Trump, despite the civil jury's legal finding that he committed sexual assault, which corresponds with a tape of him bragging about doing so.
The psychology of Gamergate or the Libs of TikTok is nothing new. We see it in the long history of witch hunts, lynchings, gang rapes, or even just schoolyard bullying. A mob forms to target an innocent and often helpless victim, and the members of the mob draw on each other's energy to justify their sadism and turn it into entertainment. It's also a potent political weapon. Hate is more exciting when aimed at a person with a face and a name. So when you dangle out a random person and falsely accuse them of being a threat, it's a lot easier to whip people into a frenzy.
Making a spectacle out of private parts of the target's life — which are usually not the subjects of polite conversation — is a crucial aspect of this dehumanization. We saw this in Gamergate, where wild speculation about the sex lives of the victims reinforced the framework that the victims do not deserve the protection of basic respect and decorum. Libs of TikTok does this daily, by mining the social media accounts of people who thought only their close friends would see their posts, but who are now being exposed to a large audience that they never intended to speak to.
Anti-trans bigots love "debating" the bodies and biological functions of their targets. Their language is often focused on the scatological, where they shamelessly talk about what they believe to be the genital shapes, chromosomal make-up, and sexual habits of their victims, usually with no actual evidence to go on. This prurience is wrapped in moralizing language, such as Mace declaring, "I'm not going to stand for a man, you know, someone with a penis, in the women's locker room." The real purpose is to insinuate that this person doesn't deserve the basic presumption of privacy. Mace certainly knows there will never be a national news cycle in which people discuss what her genitals might look like.
One reason the flying monkeys tactic works is that it isolates the target. People often avoid coming to the victim's defense, for fear that they will be the next person targeted. Multiple innocent victims of Libs of Tik Tok find themselves fired or otherwise shunned by their community, and not because people actually believe Raichik's deplorable equation of LGBTQ people with pedophiles. This is a fear response, the classic "throwing them to the wolves" strategy of feeding the victim to the mob, in hopes they don't eat you next. We see this in Johnson's change of heart, as he realized it's easier for him to placate the MAGA mob than to ask members of his own caucus to act like adults.
The good news is there is a way to disable the gang-up tactic. It just requires the courage to rally around the victim. "Safety in numbers" isn't just a saying. It is much easier to terrorize one person, especially with harassment tactics, than it is to go after a collective. We saw this during Gamergate. Once the harassment campaign started to get more national attention, thousands of feminists logged on to defend the targets, flooding Twitter with memes and counterarguments that recognized the true villains as the Gamergaters themselves. It took the wind out of Gamergater sails and, eventually, the harassment died down.
Many Democrats in Congress seem to grasp this, and are rushing to McBride's side. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called Mace's behavior "just plain bullying" and many others mocked Mace for being ridiculous. "This is your priority," questioned House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. "You want to bully a member of Congress, as opposed to welcoming her to join this body so that all of us can work together to get things done and deliver real results for the American people?"
Instead of focusing on lowering costs and real solutions to improve the health and safety of women and families, Republicans are cruelly attacking our new Member to distract from their inability to govern.
— Democratic Women's Caucus (@DemWomenCaucus) November 19, 2024
We won’t stand for it.https://t.co/ejEiyxiXzx
The more people who do this, the harder it will be for Republicans to pass a law singling out one member for humiliating treatment, just to appease the sadism of their voters.
