Don't Feed the Trolls

Some Thoughts On Why Trolls Are Symptoms of Our Broken Culture

While I was running for office, I heard some wild shit about myself, and there were some simply bizarre comments on some of my public-facing social media posts (pretty much everything I post on social is public, because I have a rule for myself that if I wouldn’t say something in a room full of other human persons, I should not say it on social media).

This happened on my personal pages and on my April Listens pages.

Generally I left the comments up, unless they commented on my appearance, or involved my offspring. Those comments, I deleted and then blocked the person who made them.

The folks I saw out in the world would be like, “holy cow I saw those comments on social! I’m so sorry that happened to you!”

And I’d generally laugh, because I choose joy, and because frankly, it did amuse me. Like, I made jokes with friends for weeks after hearing that I was in rehab that I couldn’t come to whatever because I’d be very busy shooting up.

And this isn’t me complaining about the wild bullshit people said. Really, I have not taken it personally in the way that I believe what these nut balls are saying. Obviously I am not a drug addict, in rehab, a groomer, evil, toxic, and whatever else.

Their bizarre fascination with whatever about me bugs them has absolutely nothing to do with me.

Photo by Dmytro Bukhantsov on Unsplash

And after the election…and then the damn tie breaker, it pretty much ended.

I learned a long time ago that what other people think of me and say about me is not my business as long as I’m happy with the way I move through the world.

I am.

I am proud of myself, I am proud of the way I act most of the time. Of course sometimes I say things I wish I hadn’t, and sometimes I fuck up, but I am proud of the way I own those things, have done the emotional work I needed to do so that I can make genuine apologies, and am capable of learning lessons and amending my behavior moving forward and the way I continue to seek growth!

But I have been thinking a lot about these two specific cases:

One is a Known Troll, Michael Tselentis, who goes on every single local democratic candidate for anything’s social and says absurd things, makes weird threats, and generally causes mayhem. He started calling me Henrietta Hippo toward the end, but in the beginning, for like quite a scroll, his facebook feed was just shares of my Tiktok. People out in the world asked me if he was pro- or anti-April, and I was like, “I dunno.”

It became clear eventually, and after his nonsense got unhinged and he started being simply cruel, I spent way too much of my valuable time locating and blocking all of his profiles on facebook, instagram, and tiktok.

The other is this person who has several aliases, and I have no idea who he (assuming it’s a man, but it could be a woman?) is, and he has been popping up on my socials intermittently to call me a groomer. This started early. He hated me for months before Tselentis.

This photo is one of my favorite memories with my kiddo, and it was before I knew they are trans.

This weirdo found it and posted it in a comments section as “evidence” that I am a groomer.

And then, last week, a bunch of comments in the same style from a new alias popped up here on Substack.

This person uses my kid’s deadname.

This person is obviously unhinged.

These are the recent comments. I deleted them and blocked this user.

And the thing about these two cases that I find to be notable is the utterly uncurious, judgemental, entitlement these humans feel to assert their half-baked, toxic imaginings onto the rest of us.

And the way this person has missed so many of the points is, well, if it weren’t so pathetic, it’d be funny.

I have not screen capped any of the previous things, but I did memorialize the ones from here on Substack because a) they happened well after the election and tie breaker, and b) they are emblematic of an intellectual and social rot that I think we, as a culture, should be very worried about.

Also—I think most of the time this kind of thing is projection. The same way the current administration is trying to convince us all that the violence toward Ilhan Omar was faked. And about 4 million other examples.

What I’m getting at is this: We should be concerned about this kind of behavior because of the way it signals a kind of loneliness and misery in enough people that trolling has its own term and lots of ink spilled on how to manage it, and how it evinces an inability to think critically, to consider all sides of an argument, and to avail oneself of the panoply of information on offer.

Unchecked, this kind of unreasonable preoccupation leads to outbursts, violence, harm to self or others. This kind of cult thinking, that everything “other” is evil, and everything MAGA is just, is a cancer on our culture, and we’re gonna have to work to fix it for generations.

It is a failing of healthcare, a failing of education, and the way we fail our boys and men by not teaching them how to deal with their feelings and not teaching them how to make and nurture friendships with people they don’t want to sleep with.

It is generations of parents being affirmed for abusing their children instead of being taught to nurture them.

When we don’t teach girl children how to manage their feelings, it is extremely likely they will land in a social group where someone helps them figure out how to learn or how to get access to help.

But too many men end up like these trolls. Sad and angry and lacking the emotional resources to sit with their feelings and grow. (Obviously not all women are compassionate and excellent at their feelings and not all men are trolls, and I think we can mostly accept and agree that the differences in the ways we have socialized boys and girls going back centuries ARE NOT SERVING US IN THE CURRENT MOMENT).

We have so many opportunities to do better. And I hope, after whatever comes in the next three years, we will be able and still free to do so.

That is all.

Thanks for being here. Here are the things you can do:

A note on subscriptions: I am affirmed by all subscriptions. I welcome both free and paid subscribers. If you are able to be a paid subscriber, you are helping me continue to make time to write, you are helping me make choices in 2026 that will lead to a life of reading, writing, and thinking about things, and you are a patron of the arts. Believe me I love you one million percent either way. <3 Thank you.