12 signs a bully is recruiting you for a smear campaign

How to know if you're joining a mob as a Flying Monkey

I originally published this piece in 2021 during an attempted smear campaign against me. I’m re-releasing this lightly edited premium article to help readers see how you can get drawn into another’s conflict, activist-led mobs, and your basic bully’s smear campaign without being aware of it. The follow up piece describes how to avoid becoming someone else’s tool and has applications to not become a useful idiot.

---

The origin story of a smear campaign

It’s likely you’re a person who values truth, justice, and freedom for all. These values are expressed in your professional life and if not, you’re part of groups where you can express those values to find meaning and affirm your belief in the importance of helping others.

You might be having a casual conversation with an acquaintance, coworker or approached by a stranger and they proceed to tell you a story involving an injustice that occurred to them or someone you both know. The story feels familiar as it involves themes of betrayal, deception, or theft.

You gasp “No! That’s awful!” followed by a thought or statement like “The same thing happened to me/someone close to me!!”

Before you know it, you’ve been pulled out of the present moment of your own reality and drawn into the other person’s conflict. Your own memory of unresolved hurt from the past surface and you begin to feel their outrage, hurt and upset all over again, activating a yearning for vicarious justice.

Now that you’re no longer anchored in your own reality, flooded with memories and uncomfortable emotions, you’ve not only lost access to critical thinking, objectivity and discernment, you’re now mentally primed to be used as the Accuser’s agent of justice.

High on the feeling of being chosen because of your special knowledge, expertise or proximity to the one being accused, you unquestionably begin to transmit the accusation on their behalf in order to warn others against the Accused in your attempt to restore justice in a conflict that was never yours.

You, despite your intelligence, life experience, and maturity, have been placed under a spell to form a growing army of sympathizers known as Flying Monkeys to execute a smear campaign against the Accused by someone using strategies of interpersonal narcissism on you.

Image source

What is a Flying Monkey?

This term comes from The Wizard of Oz and refers to the Flying Monkeys who acted as the henchman to the Wicked of Witch of the West. Their task was to bring Dorothy and her entourage back to be punished in order to avenge the Witch’s sister’s accidental death and take Dorothy’s power. The Flying Monkeys intimidate, threaten and traumatize Dorothy and her crew in order to weaken and eventually destroy the targets on the Witch’s behalf. We discover after Dorothy accidentally kills the Witch that the Flying Monkeys, who were under a spell the entire time, rejoice in their freedom and restoration of their joyful nature.

This metaphor can be applied to ANY person acting on the behalf of the Accuser to transmit the accusation through others to punish the Accused. The intent is the constant, increasing and unrelenting assault by the Flying Monkeys will force the Accused to surrender, admit their wrongdoing and face the punishment that suits the definition of justice/revenge for the Accuser and/or be erased from existence.

Whether you refer to these people as Flying Monkeys, henchmen or minions, there’s no word that adequately describes the harm inflicted on targets when the onus of conflict resolution between two people is bestowed on others with bleeding wounds of their own.

Risk factors to becoming a Flying Monkey

Anyone is vulnerable to becoming someone’s Flying Monkey. When your unresolved inner or outer conflicts and memories of past betrayals are activated by resonance with someone else’s story or affirm your doubts about this person, this causes a reaction that intensifies emotions felt in your body and compromises executive function needed for decision-making.

Reactivity will make you want to leap to solutions to fix the problem or save the Accuser (and possibly, your past wounded self) by overriding your critical thinking skills that involve empathy, discernment and healthy scepticism.

Your empathy, which is your ability to see someone else’s perspective without losing your own rational thinking skills and connection to yourself, becomes compromised when their story pulls you into their reality. Their reality includes their narrative, interpretation of the situation, and emotional state that binds them to suffering.

If you are not firmly anchored into your own reality, you can get easily drawn into theirs, feel their feelings and a sense of injustice BEFORE you’ve had the chance to engage your reasoning and form your own interpretation based on additional information that you would need to seek out for yourself, including input from the Accused.

This is a premium article. Upgrade your subscription for full access.