AUTHOR’S NOTE:
This is for real people existing in the real world who understand that there is a percentage of bad apples out there to be dealt with or victimized by.
If you refuse to be a victim then you need to understand the mindset of those who would destroy you.
This will also make it easier for you to recognize the tactics of character assassination when they are being used against you.
The author is not liable for use or misuse of this information. It is offered here purely as cathartic read for those who like to entertain novel ideas and approaches to solving everyday problems.
Simply knowing how character assassination can happen can protect yourself from becoming a target of a defamation campaign.
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
―The Assassin's Creed
Preface
Political warfare exists at all levels of society. There is no opt-out. If you haven’t figured this out yet then this book is perfect for you. Understanding what could happen to you might just save you from irreparable reputational harm.
If you go through life without getting stabbed in the back, double-crossed, undermined, or smeared at least once, consider yourself blessed. The best offense is a good defense and, moreover, an understanding the weapons of the enemy will make you more aware of these tactics when they are being used against you or someone you love.
Should someone you love be targeted with a smear campaign this book will be invaluable in helping them through it. And best of all, this doesn’t mean you can’t pursue your opponents in court, as these tactics are all covert, and will not directly implicate you if you’re cautious.
Finally, this book concludes with tips on how to handle yourself publicly should you become targeted in a public defamation campaign; even as you get revenge covertly.
Every chapter ends with a key concept reinstating its main point. These guidelines are meant to protect you from the consequences of what you provoke.
KEY CONCEPT: Everything is political. Since you cannot opt out, you may as well opt in. By acting, rather than just reacting, you’ll be in a better position to take out your enemies, friends of enemies, and enemies of friends.
Contents
The Character Assassin Handbook 0
1
Preface 2
Unfriendly Competition 6
Revenge: Best Served Cold 9
Dossiers 12
Building a Straw Man 15
Clones 18
Misrepresenting 21
Death By 1000 Cuts 24
Defending Against Character Assassination 27
Afterword 30
Unfriendly Competition
Most of our social interactions are underscored by sublimated warfare. Competition is in our nature, and can be constructive; driving all competitors to do and be their best. But there is another side to the competition: when it gets unfriendly.
In the workplace, in particular, there is an inbuilt scarcity of available positions. Even if the limited positions aren’t open in the near future, your future opponent may already be making covert moves. Perhaps highlighting your flaws and emphasizing your assets while at the same time highlighting their own abilities which would make them a better contender.
Just entering into situations knowing that, statistically speaking, you’re going to have to eliminate one or more of your competitors by fair or unfair means is empowering. You'll know more about your friends than they do about you, which will make you a better friend because you are in a more secure place relative to them.
Character Assassination is an art, not merely a set of dirty tricks. The assassins were known for placing warning notes, often accompanied by a dagger, at the bedside of those who they wished to warn. A quiet display of power is much preferable to a stab in the back.
KEY CONCEPT:
A good Character Assassin will avoid getting blood on their hands. Once things devolve into spectacle and drama involving two parties hellbent on mutual destruction, people begin to take sides. And nobody wants to side with the bad guy. Feign disinterest in the affairs of those you are working to destroy.
Revenge: Best Served Cold
"Its meaning should be obvious. Your actions must never bring harm upon us – direct or indirect!"
―Al Mualim
The worst thing you can do is engage in overtly impugning your enemy's character. You should critique their actions, but don’t overstate the facts. The ad hominem should be left to the other side.
Easier said than done? Yes.
It’s not easy to hold back when someone’s taking cheap shots. This is why having a methodology prepared is critical. When you have a plan in place, you won’t feel defensive because you’re already gaining the upper hand---hitting them back in the dark while you publicly take hits.
This puts the dynamic in your favor, you being the underdog and the bigger person for not taking the bait. Anything they do in the future is as an escalation on their part. Keep this facade while you engage your counter attack.
They hit below the belt, you aim for the ground beneath their feet.
It is especially important that your revenge “best served cold”. This is where most slip up. And why do they slip up? They lack a strategy.
Think of your target as a political opponent. All political warfare rests on the ability of the candidate to place themselves in a better light than their opponent. Since both are usually scum, the aim is to drag the other one down further into the muck.
By avoiding the frontlines and engaging in a protracted and hopefully artful deconstruction of your opponent’s image you can watch them sink from a position of relative security.
KEY CONCEPT:
Never wrestle with a pig. You both get covered in mud but the pig likes it. Directly engaging will put you on the same moral plane where you want your target to be. You both lose if you end up in face to face screaming matches.
Dossiers
I recommend a cloud-based storage service for this. Use Google Docs, and open up a document for each of your potential opponents.
Just copy and paste, screencap, and add links to this document as you go. Also use it to log anything they do or say regarding you. Social Media posts, chatroom comments, etc. Logs are necessary to establishing a pattern of behavior. Ensure that your enemy is indeed working against you.
If you’re unknown to the mark and are taking them down for a third party you’ll want to document anything they say regarding the third party.
Keep records. Remember, character is revealed over time. Someone can dismiss an occasional faux paux, or dismiss a night of drunken belligerence, but when you can provide evidence of a sustained pattern of bad behavior it will force people to choose sides.
Keeping Records in a searchable live document will save you time and will give you material to work with as you build the Straw Man, described in the next chapter.
Three tips for building your file:
Always search for family members’ social media accounts. More often than not, that’s where you’ll find people who think they are anonymous.
Create clones of family members on social media accounts. Build them up over time. Keep the login and passwords in your dossier so you never lose it. These are your sleeper agents.
Search their various email accounts in quotes and see what turns up, even on image searches. Look for monikers used in their social media profile URLs. Like vanity plates, custom URLs often point to other social media sites where the same user has an account.
KEY CONCEPT:
Research, don’t react. Opposition research is the most important action to take and it does not put you in the line of fire. Misinformation campaigns work best when your target is not defensive. Just sit back and watch for slip ups.
Building a Straw Man
The more data you have the more you can define your target. This is what character assassination really is: redefining someone’s character as such as way as to outgroup them among their peer groups. The more you know, the more you can exaggerate, distort, and confabulate.
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There are three types of false information to employ in the destruction of your target:
Black Propaganda: false statements misattributed to your target.
Grey Propaganda: baseless rumors which contain enough truth to sound credible
White Propaganda: use their actual statements against them by controlling the context or interpretation.
As you build your Straw Man you may want to create social media clones and start sending politically incorrect tweets. Just get them out there into the public record.
You may find it useful to mix all three types of propaganda here, for example: send a tweet where your target quotes Adolf Hitler or Ted Bundy, but as themselves.
KEY CONCEPT:
You’re painting a picture in the minds of people who come across the misinformation. Think of this as setting this person up to fail their next background check. Create a misrepresentation to represent your target.
Clones
"Let the people mask you such that you become one with the crowd."
―Al Mualim
You will need to have access to the social media accounts of your target. This means having mutual friends. One way to do this is to clone family or friends who may have an account on Facebook, for instance, but not on Twitter.
You can use their own words and images to clone them quite convincingly. These will have use later. Think sleeper agents.
It’s also necessary to have spies with no personal connection to you. In fact, it would be wise to minimize your social media presence as much as possible.
The more control and restraint you exercise in the construction of your own public persona, the less power would-be Character Assassins will have over you. Build your own defenses to prevent becoming a Straw Man.
(More on the defending against character attacks in the final chapter.)
On all your cloned accounts be sure to keep your usernames and passwords in your master document. There is too much important information to keep it all in your head. A searchable live document is key.
KEY CONCEPT:
Plant your misinformation outlets early. You want to be near your target’s social networks for maximum impact later, when you disseminate the damaging information.
Misrepresenting
Once you’ve accumulated a good collection of statements, quotes, and victim testimonials related to your target it’s time to take it to the next level.
Find their professional contacts. Subscribe to all their social media contacts. Take special note of those who comment regularly on their photos.
Start sending private messages with leading statements to their friends, such as:
“Hey Bob, look what this blog says about Sandra. It’s probably not true but should I let her know it’s out there?”
Repeat this process at your leisure. The point is not to burn them down all at once. Just set little fires. Lots of small fires will do more damage than one conflagration.
Big dramas come and go. But an apparent prolonged pattern of bad behavior cannot be so readily forgotten about.
Here are a few tactics:
Plant fake mugshots
Open accounts on social media sites with adult themes, and then screen capture comments which you make in their name. Use this content on blogs where you expose the pervert from an apparently credible, albeit anonymous source.
Find blog posts from people who have been victimized by psychopaths, and attribute these to victims of your target. This can be violence, fraud, or worse.
Post inflammatory comments under their name on controversial or contentious topics, like race or gender identity.
KEY CONCEPT:
Create content to be sourced by your misinformation outlets in order to spread the information around enough to obscure the origin. Keep it the Grey Propaganda: believable and vague.
Honey Pots
Set up a website with a contact form in the name of your target. Make it generic. A simple splash page with links to other social media, a mix of authentic and your own cloned accounts.
The idea here is to phish for a list of personal contacts to use against your target later. These people can be reached out to with the defamatory content from behind the scenes.
There’s no reason to respond in your target’s name. Impersonation is not needed here. This is simply a honeypot operation.
If you’re attempting to frame your target up with offensive web postings, you may want to use a URL grabber to get your target’s actual IP address. This IP address can then be added to victim testimonials which you plant.
You’re misleading casual searchers to conclude that your mark is a bad person. That’s the primary objective. The more you can reach the people close to your mark the greater the damage it will do.
Who knows, your smears may become self-fulfilling prophecies. People under sustained character attacks often react in ways that validate the attacks, as though the real person is being revealed.
Character assassination presumes guilt. At no point should there be ambiguity about the fact that the person is indeed a damned reprobate who needs to be exposed.
KEY CONCEPT:
Intercept communications meant for your mark. Add all the people in their social network to your master file. Set traps that will work for you 24/7.
SOCIAL ENGINEERING
Death By 1000 Cuts
Make allegations by proxies. This is key. But it is crucial that your attacks come from many different angles.
One or two allegations is bad, but ignorable. But many more extending over several years? Damnable.
Allegations of a sex crime might never go away. Or perhaps a few anecdotes about the target being cruel or negligent to animals.
For example, leak a story about their pitbull that nearly died after being abandoned in a hot car several summers ago. Make use of behavioral traits which spell out trouble over the long term; like drunk driving incidents spread out over a five year period.
Find existing stories/ account/ and witness statements regarding the bad behavior of other people and rewrite them if you need source material for Grey Propaganda.
This is a campaign aimed at destroying the dignity and reputation of your adversary. You want to portray a hangable character.
It is crucial to criticize them in an unfair and dishonest way when they are not present. Don't’ engage directly. Ever.
You should also agitate for others to “look into” your target. Especially on web forums. The more mentions of your target the better, especially if you tie them into lurid allegations of crime or scandal.
Implicating someone in a coverup or in corruption is even more effective when you pass these tidbits on to mutual enemies.
Remember: the enemies of your target are your friend. You may also wish to attribute your attacks to them. False flag smear attacks have a way of dragging their enemies out and potentially inciting them to use your character attacks along with their own ammunition.
KEY CONCEPT:
Manufacture the appearance of consensus. Use sock puppets with different personas and no common interest other than an agreement that your target is a monster.
Sensationalize
Take a cue from the tabloids: sensationalize the story. If your mark is a church goer, expose their hypocrisy. If they support guns, out them as gun hoarding anti-government extremists. If they are fitness fanatics, call them steroid users. If they are drinkers, brand them as alcoholics.
Use existing traits and build on them. Remember too that a picture is worth a thousand words. And don’t limit yourself to readily available pictures.
Make full use of the photo editing software out there to create and spread misleading photos.These should also be metatagged and linked so they appear in the appropriate searches.
Use words is your content intended to attract attention in the postings about your mark.
For example:
Bigoted, violent, deviant, racist, creepy, cringey, phoney, narcissistic, homophobic, islamophobic, and two-faced.
Use a lot of adjectives to reinforce the overall misrepresentation you have created.
KEY CONCEPT:
Hyperbole sells. You’re not just telling a story, you’re selling it. And what sells? Sex, drugs, drama, and scandal.
Defending AgainstCharacter Assassination
Your own character has to be unimpeachable if you are going to publicly make statements against someone else character.
And nobody’s immune to smear campaigns. So what can you do?
You can’t change the past. But you can control how you ACT from the moment you enter the fray until the moment you emerge as the victor.
Character is revealed over time. No matter how much muck the muckrakers make to bring you down, you will ultimately be judged by your actions.
You can even use your recent actions as a defense against your alleged past. As the same time, your target’s responses to the character attacks will be used against them.
If you aren’t going to be publicly associated with your opponents' takedown then maintain as many degrees of separation as you can from them. You don't want to be caught in your own crossfire.
If you observe necessary precautions, work from the dark, and never directly engage, you can do irreparable harm, and possibly provoke your target into a downward, self-destructive spiral.
KEY CONCEPT:
Nobody is perfect, but if you keep your hands clean as your opponent defends themselves against sticky and reckless allegations, you’re going to win.
Don’t leave yourself vulnerable to attack and conceal your disdain for your target, even as you get close enough to push them over the edge into the grave you prepared for them.
Outsourcing and Automating
Don’t overlook the myriad of ways in which you can hire out tasks, specifically tedious ones, in your Character Assassination campaign. This can be as simple as paying for negative feedback on business websites to having writers create the defamatory content.
One potential job you could hire out is having social media accounts opened in the name of your target or the cloned accounts you’ve created.
Another aspect to selling your version of the target with your disinfo and misinformation is propagating it far and wide. This can be accelerated and sustained with automation.
Purchasing spambots is not off the table here. Moreover, paying for bloggers to publish content on a schedule can be done via websites like Fivver.com. Just post job offers to specify that you need them to create a blog content for spamming purposes.
Have spammers copy and paste this content onto other platforms. When spamming these sites, make sure to use your mark’s name and email address if you have it. Make the defamation campaign as searchable as you can.
KEY CONCEPT:
Quantity over quality will win the infowar. Automate and outsource the busywork. Create the content or have it created, but magnify the damage exponentially with virtual assistants and by exploiting the gig economy.
Afterword
If you found this handbook useful, stop by the author’s page on Amazon.com. The common theme with this series is reverse engineering malicious behavior in order to understand and overcome it.
These books are meant to be empowering. How you use this information is up to you.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
---Sun Tzu
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