In this video introduction, Marc Gafni addresses the unprovoked smear campaign.
He begins by saying:
“I want to thank you for coming and being here with us on this website. The website, whoismarcgafni.com, is a place I want to find out who I am. Who is Marc Gafni? Thank god there’s finally a website where I can do some introspection. And I start lightly because we’re about to enter into a very serious realm. It’s the realm of Internet abuse. It’s the realm of false complaints. It’s the realm of Internet smear campaigns. It’s the realm of cyberbullying. It’s the realm of what early feminists and one philosopher called name rape. It’s the realm in which new forms of sexual abuse, the abuse of the sexual, appear that haven’t been noticed by culture, but are becoming rampant.”
Marc then continues to say that he is here to break the silence:
“I’m here to talk to you in order to take a stand for the evolution of consciousness in public culture. I’m here to break the silence. I have been silent for a decade and not responded to virulent attack, defamation, name rape. And for those of you who are provoked by that term, you should be provoked by it. I understand that and I’ll explain the term and we’ll talk about it together. I’ve been silent in the face of an incessant smear, base ulterior motivation, malice, and suffered enormously.”
Gafni then takes a bold stand:
“My reputation is something that I care about a little bit less every day. I’m here to take a stand, to take a stand for justice. I’m here to take a stand for justice in the face of extremism.”
He continues:
“I’m here to take a stand for what our public culture needs to look like. Our public culture needs to be a place of respect, of dignity, of integrity. And our public culture is now slowly becoming dominated by the virtual realm, the realm of the Internet, and the Internet is becoming largely influenced by hate, by hate trolling, by cyberbullying, by vicious attack.”
Later in the video, Dr. Marc Gafni elaborates:
“The Internet has become a place in which shadow is rampant, in which verbal violence, threats of physical violence, utter distortion of fact, utter willingness to defame, to be brutal, to be cruel, to launch smear campaigns, to cyberbully, to allow for that which was impossible before the Internet, levels of human brutality, levels of destruction have entered into the realm of genuine possibility. The very institution of leadership is threatened. For a long time leadership acted with impunity. It could not be challenged. Now we’ve correctly challenged leadership, but now it’s gone too far. Now the challenge no longer has to have veracity. The challenge no longer has to have integrity, no longer needs to be motivated by positive and constructive motivation. Now we can launch a smear campaign against any leader and bring them down, merely by attacking them in an organized way in a smear campaign on the Internet.”