Washington, D.C. — The National Bullies Union has reportedly launched a nationwide lobbying campaign seeking stronger protections against victims who retaliate, arguing that bullying has historically been understood as a strictly unilateral activity and that recent developments have introduced a participant who was never meant to be there.
A senior union representative explained:
“This is a unilateral operation.”
He continued:
“The moment the other person starts participating, you’ve fundamentally changed the nature of bullying.”
Leading bullying lobbyists agreed, warning that widespread retaliation threatens one of America’s oldest informal institutions.
The Core Principle
According to union officials, traditional bullying operates under a simple framework:
Bully initiates.
Victim receives.
Bully continues.
The organization claims modern anti-bullying culture has introduced a dangerous fourth stage:
Victim responds.
Union attorneys reportedly called this:
“A complete breakdown of established norms.”
One lobbyist explained:
“Our members entered these interactions with a reasonable expectation of nonreciprocity.”
Asked where that expectation came from, he said it had never previously needed a source.
Asked whether he could name a document, a statute, or an agreement in which the victim had consented to receive without responding, he said the arrangement had always been understood, and that written understandings were the kind of thing you needed only once someone started arguing. He identified the person who had started arguing as the victim.
Industry Concerns
The union says retaliation has created severe uncertainty across the bullying sector.
Members reportedly complain that victims increasingly:
- insult them back
- report them
- embarrass them publicly
- defend themselves
- turn out to have older brothers
- occasionally discover they can fight
One veteran bully described the changing environment:
“Back in my day, you picked somebody who wasn’t gonna do shit.”
He shook his head.
“Now everybody got confidence. It’s destroying the industry.”
Asked how he identified suitable targets in previous decades, he said you could just tell.
Asked whether he had ever been wrong, he reportedly declined to continue the interview.
A younger member, present for the exchange, said he had entered the field expecting a stable career and had been blindsided by what he described as a hostile climate. Asked to clarify who was being hostile to whom, he said that was exactly the kind of question that made the work so difficult now.
Proposed Legislation
The union is lobbying Congress to pass the Bullying Stability and Non-Retaliation Act, which would establish clear protections for registered bullies conducting approved bullying activities.
Under the proposal, victims would be prohibited from escalating interactions beyond their traditional role of:
“Standing there and taking that shit.”
The legislation would also establish a federal complaint process allowing bullies to report victims who hurt their feelings while responding.
One lobbyist defended the provision:
“Nobody is saying victims don’t have rights.”
He paused.
“We’re saying those rights should begin after we’re finished.”
The bill defines “finished” as a determination made by the bully.
A draft appendix reportedly clarifies that a bully may declare himself finished, unfinished, or provisionally finished, and may revise the determination retroactively if the victim’s response proves more effective than anticipated. The appendix contains no provision for the victim to be finished, on the grounds, an aide explained, that the victim had not started anything and therefore had nothing to conclude.
Due Process Provisions
Section 4 of the draft establishes what the union calls a Reasonable Notice Requirement.
Under the provision, a victim intending to respond would be required to submit written notice not less than fourteen days in advance, specifying the anticipated response and its expected severity.
Union attorneys say the requirement is standard.
“Our members simply want to know what they’re walking into.”
Asked whether bullies would face a comparable notice requirement, the attorney explained that this would defeat the purpose.
Asked to elaborate, he said the element of surprise is foundational.
Asked how a victim could give fourteen days’ notice of a response to an act that had not yet occurred, the attorney said this was the victim’s problem to solve and precisely the kind of planning the union had been encouraging all along. He described the requirement as an invitation to the victim to become more organized. He described the bully’s exemption from it as unrelated.
Industry Certification
The union has also proposed a licensing framework distinguishing registered bullies from what officials describe as “an alarming rise in unaffiliated actors.”
“Anyone can call themselves a bully now. There’s no standard.”
Under the framework, certified members would display credentials and adhere to a published code of conduct.
Asked what the code prohibits, officials said it prohibits retaliation.
Asked what it prohibits bullies from doing, officials said they were still drafting that section.
Asked when that section would be complete, officials said there was no timeline, and that the section prohibiting retaliation had been finished first because it was the urgent one. Asked what made it the urgent one, they said retaliation was the only conduct in the document that had a victim.
Victims Respond
Anti-bullying advocates reportedly criticized the proposal as absurd.
One former victim asked:
“So you can mess with me, but I can’t mess with you?”
Union representatives responded:
“Exactly.”
The representative then appeared confused about why further explanation was necessary.
Asked to state the principle in his own words, he said the principle was that he goes first and it ends there.
Asked what makes that a principle, he said it had worked for a long time.
Asked for whom it had worked, he said for the people it had worked for, and characterized the question as a further example of the participation the campaign was designed to address.
Economic Impact
The National Bullies Union warns that retaliation could devastate employment throughout the broader bullying ecosystem, including schoolyard intimidation, workplace harassment, internet trolling, lunch-money acquisition, and unauthorized locker occupation.
One economist hired by the union warned:
“If every bully has to consider the possibility of consequences, bullying participation could collapse.”
Critics reportedly responded:
“That’s the point.”
The economist acknowledged that this represented a significant weakness in the report.
Asked whether he intended to revise it, he said it had already been submitted.
The report’s central projection, a figure the union has quoted widely, holds that consequences reduce the activity that produces them. The economist confirmed this was the finding, confirmed it was also the objective of every anti-bullying program ever written, and confirmed he had listed it under Threats.
A Dispute Over Terminology
The union has objected to the phrase “fighting back,” which officials describe as loaded.
The organization’s preferred term is “unauthorized initiation.”
Asked how a response can be an initiation, a spokesman explained that from the member’s perspective, it is the first thing that happens to him.
A reporter noted that something had happened before it.
The spokesman said that was a different event.
Asked what made it a different event, the spokesman said it involved the bully, and that events involving the bully were classified separately for reasons of clarity. He said the two events could not be compared because one of them was the baseline.
Bottom Line
- What Happened: The National Bullies Union is lobbying for a federal law that would prohibit victims from responding to bullying, on the stated grounds that bullying is by tradition a one-way activity and that a victim who responds has broken the arrangement.
- Why It Matters: Every provision — the notice requirement, the licensing code, the complaint process, the terminology — is built to preserve a single asymmetry: that the bully may act and the victim may only receive. The campaign is unusual only in that it says this out loud and asks Congress to write it down.
- The Complication: The union cannot describe the principle without describing its own defeat. The “core principle of bullying” it seeks to protect is simply the demand that the stronger party face no consequences, and consequences are the one thing every party to the story agrees the weaker party is entitled to.
- What Happens Next: The code of conduct’s section on what bullies may not do remains unwritten, the section on what victims may not do is finished, and the union president — having demanded security the moment a reporter turned the activity around on him — has filed a complaint under a process he designed for exactly the person he had just become.
Closing Statement
Union leadership insists it supports fairness.
“Bullying only works when everybody respects their role.”
At press time, the press conference ended abruptly after a reporter began aggressively mocking the union president.
The president immediately demanded security intervention.
When reminded that retaliation would violate the core principles of bullying, he reportedly shouted:
“THAT’S DIFFERENT. I’M THE BULLY.”
He was escorted out.
He filed a complaint.
Corrections
A previous edition described the union as representing bullies nationwide. Membership is 4,100 and has declined every year since 2019. The union attributes this to retaliation.
THE EXTERNALITY reported that the union’s president had no comment. He has since submitted eleven.
A previous edition stated that the Reasonable Notice Requirement applies to both parties. It applies to one. The error was ours; the asymmetry was theirs.
Editorial Footnotes
- Bullying is a real and serious harm, most consequential where the power imbalance is widest — among children, in workplaces, and online — and the reason it works is precisely the asymmetry this article’s fictional union asks to protect: the target is chosen for being less able to respond. The Externality’s satire is directed at the demand for immunity, not at the people on the receiving end of it.
- The National Bullies Union, its representatives, the veteran and younger members, the attorneys, the economist, the spokesman, the president, the Bullying Stability and Non-Retaliation Act, and every quotation herein are fictional. The structure they defend — that one party may act and the other may only absorb it — is the ordinary shape of the thing, stated plainly.
- “Fighting back” and “retaliation” describe a response. A response requires a prior act. Any argument that treats the response as the origin has to make the first act disappear, and the union’s entire legislative program is an elaborate procedure for making the first act disappear.
- The Externality notes that the president invoked the right to consequences within seconds of experiencing one, and takes no position on whether this was hypocrisy or simply the first correct thing anyone at the union had said.