DARVO: The "Real Victims" and the Suckers Who Fall for Their Con

The growing trend of the worst actors in humanity portraying themselves as victims--and the witless fools who fall for it.

Above: the greatest victim in all human history, many people are saying.

Most evil people pose as good people. They portray their monstrous actions as justified.

I mean, we know this, right? The guy who cuts you off in traffic is the same guy who flips you off afterwards, as if you were the one who did something wrong.

There is, I suppose, the occasional murderer who makes no pretense of being justified in his actions. But most degenerates portray themselves as angels.

For example, Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland was known in Germany as a “defensive war’ (Verteidigungskrieg) on the pretext that Poland had invaded Germany. That was a perfect example of what is known as DARVO: "deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender." It is a tale as old as time.

What is new, I think, is the extent to which people are falling for it nowadays.

Today I would like to discuss this trend, which finds examples in the aftermath of the bloodthirsty and barbarous attack on Israel by the jihadists of Hamas, as well as in our national politics (as illustrated by figures like Donald Trump) and even international relations (as illustrated by countries like Russia).

I would also like to explore why people seem to be falling for this stratagem. The answer, I think, is unsurprising: it lies in our New Tribalism, which has intensified due to social media’s reinforcement of insane narratives.

But before we get to Israel or Trump or Russia, let’s start with a simple story of stalking, and how identity politics interferes with many people’s ability to rationally analyze any given situation.

DARVOing by a “Latinx” Stalker Who Claims to Be the Real Victim

Credit goes to Josh Barro for bringing this story to my attention. It is a truly remarkable example of how a bad actor can portray herself as the Real Victim—and get a bunch of credulous college students to buy into the charade. Here’s Barro:

On Saturday, before the football game between USC and UC Berkeley, fifteen protesters rushed the field at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley and refused to leave until they were arrested, delaying the start of the game. Some people mistakenly assumed the protest was a demand for a ceasefire in Gaza. The truth was much odder: The protesters, most of them students at UC Berkeley, were demanding the reinstatement of a suspended Berkeley professor. Ivonne del Valle, an associate professor of colonial studies in the Spanish and Portuguese department, is on leave and faces potential termination because multiple investigations have determined that she stalked and harassed Prof. Joshua Clover, a communist poet in the English department at UC Davis.

There is, of course, nothing new in the phenomenon of stalkerish personalities trying to turn the tables on their victims and to play the victim themselves. Anyone who has read Charles C.W. Cooke’s exposé of Rebekah Jones is familiar with the pattern.

What makes the del Valle story highlighted by Barro particularly interesting is that, unlike many such stories, there is really zero doubt that this stalker engaged in creepy, obsessive, inappropriate, and stalkerish behavior. Del Valle herself does not contest this. A KQED article linked by Barro makes this abundantly clear. Not only does it describe in detail how three separate investigations found misconduct by del Valle, but it includes a passage showing that she directly admitted to KQED many of the disturbing behaviors:

In an interview with KQED, del Valle acknowledged some of the behavior described in the investigative reports, including keying Clover’s car, vandalizing the area outside his apartment door, contacting his friends, posting an image of his partner online and leaving messages outside the home of his mother. Those messages included one that said “I raised a psychopath,” according to the university’s investigative reports. She has also acknowledged in the report calling Clover’s office phone line at least ten times within 90 minutes.

Other behaviors she has admitted, as described by Barro: she '“sat outside his apartment and slid threatening notes under the door” (more about that below) and “dumped chunks of fermented pineapple on his mother’s doorstep.” As Barro: “Again, del Valle admits these facts.”

A long article at the Chronicle of Higher Education goes into the story in much more depth. In short, del Valle got it into her head that Clover was hacking her, essentially because she would have private conversations and later saw messages publicly posted by him as allusions to those conversations. She accused a Twitter account of being a sock puppet of Valle’s, but it turns out to be operated by a writer in New York state who is confounded by del Valle’s suspicions. One of the investigations concluded that she entered Clover’s apartment building and sat outside his door demanding that Clover explain his alleged hacking:

When [Clover] told her through the closed door to leave, she responded that she was going to stay until he explained why he had hacked her. She sat outside his door for at least an hour, reading a book and sliding four handwritten notes under his door. One said: “If you make me leave, it’ll be worse. I’ll keep doing this you can be sure of that.”

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education piece, a university investigation “concluded that del Valle had violated the university’s 2020 no-contact order on four separate occasions.”

So wait . . . given all of this, how does she have a group of students threatening to participate in a hunger strike on her behalf??

The open letter on her behalf offers no evidence, just references to identity politics and employment of DARVO tactics: reversing the victim and offender, and making del Valle the stalker out to be the True Victim:

Open Letter to Chancellor Carol Christ:

We have witnessed the harsh and unfair treatment that our most beloved Latina professor, Dr. Ivonne del Valle, has received at the hands of the administration. We are here to say “Ya Basta!”, meaning ‘enough already’! If UC Berkeley really wants to become a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSIs), it needs to start treating our Latinx professors with respect. Professor del Valle was the one being harassed, yet your administration engaged in victim-blaming, retaliatory behavior. The last time your administration punished her, it was due to her asking the Albany police department for help. We know you are protecting your best friend and her harasser son.

Barro explains that this relatively unimportant incident “bears resemblance to a much more consequential form of left-wing moral idiocy that we've seen on college campuses in recent weeks: the willingness of many students and faculty to excuse (or even in some cases celebrate) Hamas’ terror attack that killed over 1,400 people.” Barro points to the way that the “identity-obsessed left” sees every event through the lens of “hierarchical oppression.”

He’s not wrong. Moreover, he makes a comparison at the end that I was mildly irritated to see in his newsletter, because I had already thought of the same comparison, and had planned to write about it for you folks. But I think I still have something to add.

DARVOing by Anti-Semites Who Rip Down Posters of Kidnapped Israelis and Then Claim to Be the Real Victims

No sentient adult who even casually follows the news can be unaware of the recent trend of pulling down posters of missing kidnap victims taken during the October 7 barbarism.

I have yet to find anyone who can explain to me how there could even conceivably be a justifiable reason to tear down such posters. It’s not free speech, any more than shouting down a speaker at a college is free speech, or burning a book is free speech. It’s anti-speech. And I don’t see how it strikes a legitimate blow for oppressed Palestinians to try to suppress posters that spread awareness of the plight of the hostages taken by the Hamas animals on October 7.

It’s pure anti-Semitism, as far as I can tell. There seems to be no valid justification for it whatsoever. It’s just an act of evil, and I take my hat off to those who have been relentlessly filming the cretins doing it and making them famous.

So, of course, you know who the real victims here are, right?

Of course: according to pro-Palestinian activists, the Real Victims are the people taking down the posters.

Barro noted the widely mocked Daily Dot piece that floated this as some sort of nefarious conspiracy targeted the poor poster vandals. Here’s a passage from that piece:

In lieu of peace and neighborliness, Bandaid’s posters have added fuel to the culture war over the war in Israel, thanks in part to a Twitter account called Stop Antisemitism. In the weeks since they were created, the posters have expanded to billboards, LED signs on trucks, and projections on buildings—and have shifted from an advocacy project to a polarizing symbol that has turned neighbors against each other and incited widespread harassment.

Now some are wondering if the posters are being strategically placed to entrap those who tear them down, many of whom support the Palestinian people.

Ah yes, the ancient doctrine of “entrapment” surely fits this scenario to a T, does it not? These poor harmless individuals were lured—almost against their will, one might say!—into taking the perfectly understandable, nay, all but irresistible action of tearing down posters publicizing the plight of completely innocent hostages victimized by Hamas on October 7 and beyond.

On Oct. 16, a 14-second video of three people quickly ripping off posters taped to the glass walls of NYU Stern School of Business was published to Twitter by Stop Antisemitism. Stop Antisemitism tagged New York University and captioned the post, “HORRIFYING,” adding, “The lack of humanity by your students is not only heartbreaking but extremely concerning.”

The video instantly went viral. The post has garnered over 6.5 million views as of this writing. It was covered by Newsweek and other outlets.

. . . .

Stop Antisemitism soon released the names of two of the individuals allegedly depicted and tagged conservative tabloid New York Post. Additional reporting identifying the students was featured in conservative publications including the New York Post, Daily Mail, National Review, and on Fox News.

According to their website, Stop Antisemitism is “a grassroots watchdog organization dedicated to exposing groups and individuals that espouse incitement towards the Jewish people and State and engage in antisemitic behaviors.” . . .

In recent weeks, the account has focused on publishing footage of people tearing down “kidnapped” posters and asking people to identify those filmed, as well as posts about people who espouse anti-Zionist rhetoric erroneously conflated with antisemitism. It also cheers on terminations and expulsions of people accused of anti-Zionism. The account occasionally reports on neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but in recent weeks, its activity has centered on poster removals and outing people who denounce Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

“That’s their whole thing. Just an upgrade from Canary Mission which was an upgrade from Israellycool,” said Jewish anti-apartheid activist Rafael Shimunov, referring to two other websites known to Palestinian liberation activists that function as blacklists that includes a smattering of actual antisemites, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists to run cover for anti-Palestinian denigration. “It’s basically a grift to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism,” Shimunov told the Daily Dot.

Ah. So tearing down posters of kidnapped hostages is just an expression of . . . criticism of Israel. Or something.

Well, now we know who the real victims are, don’t we?

The thing is, this goes well beyond the Daily Dot story. It’s not just the Daily Dot DARVOing the dirtbags destroying the posters. The New York Times (employers of Hitler-loving stringers in Gaza) got into the act too, with a story titled How Posters of Kidnapped Israelis Ignited a Firestorm on American Sidewalks. It offers the most unconvincingly benign motives possible for ripping down the posters

But removing the posters has quickly emerged as its own form of protest — a release valve and also a provocation by those anguished by what they say was the Israeli government’s mistreatment of Palestinians in the years before Oct. 7 and since the bombing of Gaza began. . . . Those who object to the posters have derided them as wartime propaganda.

Funny, you don’t see the New York Times both-siding other forms of hate in quite the same way. As Gilead Ini notes, if protesters tear down Confederate statues, the resulting New York Times story does not strain to include the pro-Confederate views of those who seek to preserve the statues.

Meanwhile the story portrays the understandable backlash against the vandalism as an “effort to destroy people’s lives.” The article takes care to seek out opponents of Israel who are Jewish, who are only too eager to portray the posters themselves as an attack, and the attempts to document their removal as a campaign of terror. Citing “Jewish peace activist” Rafael Shimunov, we are told that the posters themselves are instruments of aggression:

“These posters are being used to target Palestinians in our community,” he says, concluding: “When you’re reflexively attacking the people taking them down, maybe try to understand why they’re taking them down.”

And, he says, some people putting the posters up may have benign motives, too — while for others, “the plan is to foment war.”

If that’s not unhinged enough, check out the Twitter account of this “Jewish peace activist.” Here’s a fun entry:

Yeah, I’m guessing the thing you are about to read about has not happened in Palestine every day for the last 75 years:

You let me know the next time you hear about Israel doing stuff like that to the Palestinians, will you?

Also featured prominently in the New York Times both-sidesing-the-posters story is an interview with another Jewish opponent of Zionism, who says he rips the posters down because they don’t include a lengthy disquisition on the history of Israel from the Palestinian point of view:

In fact, the motivations of those removing signs take a variety of forms. And as unnerving as the removal of the posters has been for some Jews and supporters of Israel, at least some of the people tearing them down are Jewish themselves.

Miles Grant, 24, takes down posters in New York “occasionally,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s the lack of context that gets me,” said Mr. Grant, who said he is Jewish and a self-described “pro-Palestinian who is not a Zionist.”

“It’s so obvious that they don’t care about people’s lives,” he said of those putting up the “kidnapped” posters.

If they did, he said, the posters would include details explaining the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. “Why did this happen and what are the events that led to this happening? That is what’s missing, and I think it’s intentional.”

He said he had felt concerned at times that he would end up in a viral video, but he has not let that deter him. “I think they’re putting them up to bait people to take them down,” he said. “I think it’s disgusting how they’re trying to destroy people’s lives.”

The bolded part is an interesting insight into this twisted man’s world view, and it’s notable that the story contains no evidence of any pushback from the reporter. This anti-Israel activist somehow knows that people putting up posters of innocent civilians kidnapped by Hamas don’t care about the kidnap victims. How does he know this? Well, the posters don’t contain “the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict”—by which he means, of course, a one-sided history from the Palestinian point of view, in which the state of Israel itself is portrayed as an illegal land grab from the rightful Arab owners of the land.

Somehow, I don’t think this fellow would be satisfied with a history discussing Israel as the ancestral Jewish homeland, from which they were forcibly removed by the Romans. He doesn’t want a history that points out that after the Ottoman Empire lost control of the area after being on the losing side of a world war (pro tip: if you’re going to fight in a world war, try to be on the winning side), the victors in the war declared an intention to provide a homeland for Jews who had been oppressed and without a homeland for thousands of years. Then, after a second world war in which a European country tried to exterminate every last Jew on earth—and was surprisingly successful, killing six million of them—the victor in both world wars turned the matter over to the countries of the world at large, which offered a home to both the Jews who had just been the target of a genocide, and to the Arabs. The Jews accepted the deal. The Arabs rejected it, and have waged war on Israel ever since, starting from the day Israel declared independence.

Is that the history you want included on the posters, Miles Grant? Didn’t think so.

Ultimately, this cretin Miles Grant wants to devalue any attention paid to innocent kidnapping victims, because it does not include his own idiosyncratic view of the behavior of other members of their group. It’s like ripping down a poster of a missing dog, because the poster does not also tell the world how other dogs generally suck, what with their ripping up flower beds and barking at all hours of the night. WHERE IS THE BALANCE?!?!11!!?!

If you heard that complaint from a dog, you might term that dog a self-hating dog. (But if the New York Times hated dogs too, and employed a guy known for worshipping a famous dog exterminator, the Times would likely seek out said self-hating dog and all his friends, for soft-soap interviews about the terrible habits of dogs.)

Another place where the aggressors were portrayed as victims: Harvard, where a group of creepy Palestinian activists surrounded a Jewish man, and assaulted him. You can watch video by clicking here:

Another video is here. The Free Beacon has more detail:

The incident, captured on video reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, shows the student saying "don’t grab me" and "don’t touch my neck" as protesters surround him, blocking his view and their own faces with keffiyehs.

Eventually, the student tells them, "I live here," as he tries to make his way through the crowd.

"You’re grabbing me," he says, amid shouts of "SHAME!"

The student, who asked to remain anonymous, described being pushed and shoved as he tried to film them with his phone. A report to the FBI identified two of the people laying hands on him as fellow Harvard University graduate students, one a law student, Ibrahim Bharmal, a member of the Harvard Law Review, and the other a divinity school graduate student, Elom Tettey Tamaklo, who lives with Harvard undergraduate students in supervisory role known as a proctor.

The defense offered by these cretins: the man was walking around filming the faces of the people lying on the ground during a “die in” in support of Palestine. You can see video of that here. Keep in mind that this was a protest at a lawn at Harvard Business School, where anyone at Harvard could walk by and see the faces of the participants . . . but apparently someone filming it was seen as an act of aggression that justified people chasing this guy around and assaulting him.

The real victims, you see, were the protesters. And the “real aggressors” were any Jews who tried to film them. Shame! Shame!

Also at Harvard, a bunch of students signed an open letter that began in this way:

Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine

We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.

OK. Some of us might think that the people who actually perpetrated the violence would be responsible, but if you want to make a stupid public statement and stand by it, more power to you.

But of course, if anybody notices that stupid statement, and engages in their own speech in response, the New York Times portrays the responders as the aggressors:

But within days, students affiliated with those groups were being doxxed, their personal information posted online. Siblings back home were threatened. Wall Street executives demanded a list of student names to ban their hiring. And a truck with a digital billboard — paid for by a conservative group — circled Harvard Square, flashing student photos and names, under the headline, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”

Now, some of this behavior is indeed aggressive. The threats, of course, are not only wrong but illegal. The threateners should be found and prosecuted. But, as for “doxxing” . . . the devil is in the details. If an address or other sensitive personal information is being posted online, that too is wrong. But we’re not told exactly what “personal information” has been posted, and the absence of such detail is suspicious to me, given the source. (Again, the source is the New York Times: knowing employers of Hitler-lovers.) Is it merely that the signatories’ names are being published? Or their photos? That ain’t doxxing. And if businesses want to know who these people are, so they can have no future dealings with them, I agree with the businesses.

But the New York Times looks at people who blame Israel for its own citizens being beheaded, its women being raped, and its children being murdered in front of their parents, and the Times can easily see who the Real Victims are here: the people blaming Israel.

The students had to contend with “people’s lives being ruined, people’s careers being ruined, people’s fellowships being ruined,” said one student whose organization signed the letter, in an interview.

Many critics have little forbearance for these complaints, saying that the letter itself showed a lack of empathy. But other students and free-speech activists say that the outside pressure has created its own kind of heckler’s veto, dictating what can be said on campus and how institutions must respond.

“You kind of feel like you’re responsible” for the harassment, said one of the Harvard students, whose family’s personal information was released. “That’s how silencing works, right?”

Count me among the critics who have “little forbearance” for these complaints.

Me, I think I can tell who the real victims actually are.

And then you have DARVOing on the right. Because conservatives love to play the victim too.

The most obvious example being, of course, Donald Trump.