“People Who Have Been Cruel to Me Have All Had Something Very Bad Happen to Them”: The Logic ZeroDarkTony Uses to Justify Cruelty

Exhibit A: An illness, declared deserved

Three minutes and twenty-nine seconds into the stream, D’Amato tells his audience there is “someone who might not have many new days left.” He names Jeffrey Augustine, a critic of the Church of Scientology known for his role challenging the church’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, and references him being hospitalized with “a view of the blue building.” Then:

“That’s the intersection of irony and cruelty. That’s where you end up when you’re cruel to people. And again, the people who have been cruel to me have all had something very bad happen to them. So you might want to, you might want to step off a little bit.”

A few minutes later, describing Augustine’s condition further:

“Jeffrey is going to live a life of drool and applesauce. And that’s the way that goes. And I didn’t do it. No, you know, he did it to himself.”

And:

“In this case cancer ain’t wrong. They got the right guy this time.”

Three things are happening here, and each is a specific pattern rather than cruelty in general. The first is grandiosity: D’Amato isn’t just glad someone got sick, he’s presenting the illness as proof of a moral order he personally administers. The second is denial of responsibility arriving in the same breath as the cruelty itself. “I didn’t do it” removes him from the causal chain of a statement he is actively making, live, about a man’s medical condition. The third is the absence of any empathy for Augustine as a person. Nothing here acknowledges that a human being is sick. The illness only matters as evidence for D’Amato’s case.

The chat supplies a fourth piece: confirmation. At 13:56:16 UTC, during the “blue building” line, @ZenDark_WildCoconuts, D’Amato’s moderator who goes by Coco, writes: “he’s got a seat at karma cafe… right staring at blue… sent me [skull][skull].” A minute later, she adds: “Total jerk off.” Neither comment engages with the fact that a man is hospitalized. Both function as applause. D’Amato states the moral order and his moderator hands it back to him confirmed, which is exactly the kind of external validation he needs and that keeps this pattern running.

Exhibit B: Degradation with no claim behind it

D’Amato refers to Karen de la Carrière, a figure in the same online community, almost exclusively through sex-work slurs rather than any claim about her conduct:

“Jeffrey and his ex hooker wife Karen.”

“Imagine being under the thumb of an ex-prostitute.”

“Let’s take our little red-headed bitch.”

He goes further than mockery. At one point he says of her and Augustine:

“Now they’re getting what they deserve, and the only decent thing that could happen here is that it’s contagious.”

That is not karma-as-metaphor the way Exhibit A frames Augustine’s illness. It is a stated wish that whatever Augustine has spread to Karen de la Carrière too. He follows it with appearance-based mockery that makes no factual claim at all:

“She is a fossil that has to put herself together with, you know, makeup and spray paint makeup and crazy glue. She probably looks like the crypt keeper when she doesn’t have all her cheap makeup stacked on her face.”

Timestamps: 00:12:33 – 00:15:57 | Watch with a free account

Elsewhere in the stream, D’Amato references a lawsuit involving de la Carrière and says a judge found her testimony unreliable. That is his own account, stated on stream, not something HNZ has independently verified, and it is not repeated here as fact. The material driving this exhibit rests only on her sex and her age, not on anything she is accused of doing.

This looks like splitting. Narcissistic splitting is a mental defense mechanism where a person uses all-or-nothing, black and white thinking to view themselves, others, or situations as either completely good or completely bad. Here, de la Carrière is rendered entirely as the worst possible version of herself, nothing in between. He shows it as contempt keyed specifically to her sex. The insults above are not about anything she has done. They are about what she looks like and who she has slept with. That distinction matters. An accusation can be checked. Degradation like this cannot, because it was never a claim in the first place.

The chat treats it as entertainment. At 14:05:57 UTC, @Beck106 replies: “Like Death Becomes Her.” Seven seconds later: “Great movie btw.” This is the same user who, six minutes earlier, described being disturbed by cruelty from “ZDT haters” toward a twenty-year-old who had recently died, someone Beck said they knew personally, and called those critics “soooo righteous” for the hypocrisy of it. The standard Beck applies to D’Amato’s critics doesn’t carry over to D’Amato’s own room six minutes later when he laughs about someone’s cancer. Beck doesn’t seem to notice the switch, or if she does, she doesn’t mention it.  

This is itself the mechanism: cruelty reads as cruelty only when it comes from outside.

Exhibit C: Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender

At roughly twenty-six minutes into the stream, D’Amato addresses HNZ directly:

“I am far far far from the only one who doesn’t like them. And I’m not the type, I’m not a doxer, I don’t do any stuff. They’re like, oh, he wants to dox us. No, I don’t. I want to identify you and I will. And don’t think that I won’t. Because I have to. I don’t want to. You think I want to take… an extra second of my time for this crap? No. But I’m going to protect myself, my privacy, and my family, and my safety.”

Timestamps: 00:26:11 – 00:29:30 | Watch with a free account

He says he isn’t a doxer. In the next breath, he says he intends to identify HNZ anyway. Then he calls it self-protection. This is a specific, recognized pattern: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. He denies the label, states the underlying conduct regardless, then recasts himself as the one under threat, the one who has to protect his own privacy and safety, rather than the one making the threat.

In the same segment, he pivots to describing the copyright campaign against a separate critic’s channel as already underway: “I think we’ve done eight or nine strikes on that channel,” calling the whole effort “tortious interference” and “a targeted campaign.” The same entitlement that lets him deny doxxing while promising to identify HNZ lets him describe a deliberate effort to remove someone’s channel as a legal grievance rather than an attack. Both moves rest on the same premise: whatever D’Amato does to a target is response, not aggression, by definition.

Exhibit D: A stated goal and its denial, three sentences apart

D’Amato describes a deliberate campaign of copyright strikes meant to remove a channel entirely:

“I want that channel gone and I’m going to keep striking it.”

Then, in the same monologue:

“I don’t try to destroy people, you know, and a copyright strike ain’t trying to destroy somebody. You know what I mean, it’s like you’re putting yourself in that position. I’m not doing that.”

Timestamps: 00:52:43 – 00:54:57 | Watch with a free account

This is entitlement in a specific sense: the belief that ordinary consequences, a channel disappearing, a livelihood ending, don’t count as destruction when he’s the one causing them, because the target deserved it. The stated goal and the denial that his behavior amounts to destruction sit three sentences apart. 

The clip establishes D’Amato’s framing of the conflict as a war of attrition in which he described himself as the surviving party. No specific conduct by critics is identified by name in this segment, other than his framing of using his content to “malign” him.  He’s the victim here. 

Exhibit E: The frame that makes the rest possible

At roughly one hour and four minutes in, still on the subject of identifying his critics, D’Amato adds:

“And when it gets to a situation where it needs to be in a legal court environment, I am going to have the same level of mercy that you have had upon me.”

Timestamps: 01:04:00 – 01:05:54 | Watch with a free account

This dresses up retaliation as reciprocity. “The same level of mercy that you have had upon me” implies he has received none, which licenses him to give none, while framing the outcome as fairness rather than a threat. It’s the same reframing instinct as Exhibit C, applied to a courtroom instead of a doxxing denial: whatever he does to a critic isn’t cruelty, it’s balance being restored.

Exhibit F: The pattern repeats on a different target

After receiving a counter-notification to one of his copyright strikes, D’Amato addresses the person who filed it directly. He first frames the campaign as calculated:

“I’m establishing a course of conduct.”

He is establishing a course of conduct all right. It just happens to be his own.

He then describes the conflict as impersonal before immediately contradicting himself:

“Strictly business.”

“That’s not true, it doesn’t get any more personal than it is.”

And finally, addressing the same person:

“I’m going to keep striking the videos and they’re going to keep getting taken down… it’s not a threat, it’s a promise… I can’t wait to see the look on your fucking face when you are in that courtroom being under direct examination from my attorney.”

Timestamps: 01:11:11 – 01:15:10 | Watch with a free account

This is the same denial-and-threat structure as Exhibit C, run a second time on a different target over a different dispute. Deny the label, “it’s not a threat,” reframe it as something else, “it’s a promise,” then treat the relabeling as though it changes what was just said. It doesn’t. A promise to do someone harm is still a threat. That D’Amato runs this exact structure twice in one stream, once at HNZ and once at a copyright counter-notification filer, is what makes it a pattern rather than a single outburst.

D’Amato has made this kind of threat against HNZ before. A prior subpoena effort targeting the channel @herolightcody as well as several other channels was quashed, and his attorney was sanctioned over it.

Across the six clips above, spanning roughly seventy minutes of the September 16 broadcast, D’Amato named specific individuals, described one as hospitalized, wished the same illness on another, and stated his intent to continue a documented copyright strike campaign while anticipating litigation against people he has not named.

The frame that makes it all work

One thread runs under every exhibit above: D’Amato is always the target, never the actor.

“The tryhards think that… they’re going to do me in. I don’t think so.”

“I am far from the only one who doesn’t like them… they’re too scared.”

“I have something called dignity and class.”

This is grievance functioning as identity, and it is what makes everything above legible to his audience as defense rather than what it plainly is. The illness comments, the degradation of de la Carrière, the DARVO structure, the copyright campaign and its repeat performance in Exhibit F: all of it depends on D’Amato being the one under attack. If he is always the target, wishing illness on two people, degrading a woman, and threatening to identify a publication and a critic in the same stream all become self-defense in the retelling. Take the frame away and none of those acts have anything left to stand on.

Pattern, not diagnosis

The conduct documented above sorts into specific, recognized narcissistic patterns: grandiosity and a lack of empathy for named targets in Exhibit A, splitting and contempt keyed to sex in Exhibit B, deny-attack-reverse-victim-and-offender or DARVO in Exhibits C and F, entitlement in Exhibit D, and the same reframe run against a courtroom in Exhibit E, all held together by the persecution narrative. 

This piece does not diagnose Anthony D’Amato, and it doesn’t need to. D’Amato is currently in court-ordered treatment. What is being addressed there, and whether any diagnosis has been reached, is not public. What’s on the record doesn’t depend on it. The conduct documented above happened on a public livestream, in his own words, with a chat room ready to confirm every frame of it. Whatever is or isn’t happening in private, this is the version of himself he broadcasts.

Sources

• Original YouTube Video
• Full SRT Transcript: for HNZ Supporters
• Full Text Transcript: for HNZ Supporters
• Full Chat Transcript: for HNZ Supporters
• Date: 2026-09-16
• Stream ID: YOUTUBE · uBiIWVB0DUI

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