The Truth is Never Far Behind

Reader note-this article is so long it may choke in your email. Click through to read it directly on Substack.

The video-show version of this is shown on April 27’s episode of Disaffected.

Rumble
Youtube (look for the latest video on YT)

---

Introduction

My show and my writing introduce you to Cluster B-style behaviors, abuse tactics.

One important aspect of learning to recognize these disorders is learning to recognize the specific tactics and techniques used by these individuals to achieve their aims.

This essay is in two parts and has two purposes:

1. It introduces you to the person I am using as an example, Karlyn Borysenko. This is necessary context for you to understand the second part fully.

2. I will illustrate in steps how compulsively dishonest and narcissistic people successfully tell “good lies” by mixing in just enough truth to fool the unwary. My goal is for you to see the hand movements behind the curtain and outside the frame so that you can better recognize when a manipulative person is trying to fool you to your disadvantage.

What and Why

In a way, this piece is a long-time coming, but in another way, I’m not pleased to be writing it. Direct personality conflicts between named individuals are not something I like to dig in and write about. Not only is there a danger of hitching your wagon to “one side” when it’s more complicated than that, but participation also fuels the bad behavior of the involved parties.

Also, it's boring. It's just boring to go on about one specific person, or one specific personality conflict. It's only truly interesting to the parties themselves.

Even more, it often directs abuse your way once you stick in your oar. For these reasons I have avoided writing about Karlyn Borysenko until now. I’ll familiarize you with her below. In brief, she is a YouTuber, a cultural commentator. She has a degree in psychology, and claims to have worked in the past as an organizational psychologist. She is nominally both anti-Communist and anti-woke, but as you’ll see, my view is that she is first and foremost a severely personality disordered abuser who goes farther in targeted harassment than most.

Friends of mine, as well as those I don’t know well but have friendly associations with, have been targeted by her for years. She has accused them of crimes, of covering up crimes, of running financial scams, and more. I’ve metaphorically held some of them by the hand on the phone while they were in frustrated tears.

Because any additional attention to her, I feared, would direct more of her wrath onto my friends and others, I’ve largely stayed out of “the Karlyn wars.” I don’t recall ever having communicated with her directly (it’s possible I did once or twice years ago and I simply don’t remember). Despite her claims, I have never presented an episode of Disaffected about her (this becomes important below). Still, she has presented at least two episodes of her livestream show accusing me of doing so, and a whole lot more.

Remember, this is a woman I have never spoken to. Her fury with me appears to be owed to several factors:

-I am friends with Keri Smith (host of Deprogrammed) and Mike Harlow (who also has a YouTube show), two of the people she despises the most. I have offered them my friendship and support when Karlyn has targeted them heavily, and she dislikes that.

-I can see through Karlyn Borysenko, and she knows that I can see who and what she is. In my view, she is one of the most severe cases of a thorough-going Cluster B personality disorder I have ever personally seen even semi-up-close. She displays traits from the borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and anti-social categories.

Why am I writing about her now? For two reasons:

1. While her star seems to be dimming, and more people are noticing how manipulative and dangerous she is, she is still able to reel in the unsuspecting. Despite the fact that she actually abuses her fans and screams at her financial supporters (you will see this in video, below), she has a rotating fan club of people who pay her obeisance and cash money. She was the Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate for New Hampshire recently, demonstrating that she is able to position herself in places where she fools people who ought to know better, and where she can do broader damage.
   

2. She has set her sights on me again with accusations that I am “harassing” her. Nothing she says about me matters to me. It does not hurt my feelings. It does not make me feel fear. There’s nothing for me to be sad about, or fearful of, because nothing she says about me (or any of her other targets known to me) is true. My ego is not wounded.
   
   Instead, her recent behavior is a good opportunity to offer you a lesson in how the best lies are created and maintained. Think of this as a foundational lesson in Cluster B modus operandi. My hope is that you’ll get the lesson, and then be able to see the dynamic in other places, leaving you better able to stop people like her from deceiving you.

Who is Karlyn Borysenko?

This is only going to be a sketch based on what I have observed. It is not an exhaustive biography or catalog of her every move.

Borysenko is a Youtuber who has done some political investigation and activism. She is intelligent, and capable of good work, such as her numerous exposés of how schools in the Northeast, including Vermont, have been indoctrinating children into woke ideology, and especially into LGBTQ+ identity ideology.

The problems she brings are not because of lack of intelligence, and they're not about inability to perform professional journalistic work. She is both smart enough and skilled enough to do this, and you may look up some of her output to confirm this for yourself.

It is her character that brings trouble. If Borysenko is new to you, or if you have only seen a few of her best pieces of work, you may find this essay surprising. You may even want to object and to defend her, assuming that I am unjustly criticizing her.

That's why I'm writing this. Narcissists—yes, I believe she is a diagnosable-level narcissist—rely on the outside world being able to see only shaded or partial context. Like stage magicians, they use sleight of hand to direct your eyes away from what they're doing and toward the illusion they wish you to believe is reality.

If you've only ever seen one or two of her very good videos on a journalistic topic, you'd have no reason to suspect she was anything but what she seemed to be.

There is, however, much more to her, and it ranges from venal to sadistic. I believe Borysenko has crossed the line into legally actionable libel and slander repeatedly. She has accused people who have done nothing to her of "abusing" her, of faking terminal illnesses for fun and profit, and more.

All the while, she contrives a persona of being a wounded or tormented little bird. It's simple narcissistic reversal: you just accuse other people of exactly what you're doing.

First, a disclosure. I have met Keri Smith and Mike Harlow in person, and I have known them in an online and phone call way for about four years. Yes, I consider them friends.

Several years ago, Mike Harlow had a health scare. He was worried he may have had cancer, and was waiting on test results. Fortunately, the results were negative. In the meantime, Borysenko sent a flurry of social media posts claiming falsely that Harlow had claimed to be dying of cancer simply to get sympathy and run a con for donations – and that he was specifically doing this to smear her. This was not true.

Keri Smith has been targeted by Borysenko multiple times. If you do not know of Keri, she is one of the most soft-spoken and genuinely kind people I have met in the past few years. A Christian, Keri is a repentant former leftist and woke adherent. Like me, she was "in the cult," and now she uses her show, Deprogrammed, to help people see outside of the toxic social justice/woke left.

Borysenko has accused Keri of harassing Borysenko, of "making shows about her" constantly, of organizing social cliques against Borysenko. In truth, that was what Borysenko was doing to Keri Smith. Borysenko is the bully who waits until no one is looking, sticks her foot out to trip the girl next to her, then falls to the floor dramatically and cries while accusing the girl she tripped of tripping her.

There have been numerous other people Borysenko has treated this way, and they have some serious stories about the false accusations she has leveled against them. I'm not going to repeat them here, but the information is available online for those interested.

My experience with Karlyn Borysenko

My friend and business partner Kevin Hurley and I launched our weekly show Disaffected in January of 2021. The show has a thesis: that the Cluster B (narcissistic, emotionally manipulative) psychology that makes abusive parents and spouses act the way they do is the same psychology that took over the left. I grew up under a mother with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, and have observed that the left I used to be a part of, and that is now mainstream culture in the West, ran on the same rotten psychology that made my childhood hell.

The first episode in January 2021 was titled 'Mommie Issues.' It told an abbreviated version of my childhood, and laid out the thesis that domestic abuse has now gone public and feral.

Three months later, in April 2021, I did a two-part episode of about 3 hours in total called 'Over the Borderline' parts I and II. These episodes told details of my childhood as a way of explaining the specific Cluster B behaviors that animate people like my mother. My intent is to help the audience recognize that they too have seen this behavior, and to help them connect the dots.

These two episodes were somewhat difficult because they were the first time I'd told the unvarnished truth, in detail, in public, in front of a camera. They were worth doing, as viewer feedback confirmed that many people who watched them said, "This was my childhood, too. I didn't know anyone else had gone through it and I didn't know there was a name for it."

Sometime in 2021 I learned who Karlyn Borysenko was for the first time. I don't recall how I did. And, to the best of my recollection, I have never communicated with her directly. In the four years I have put out Disaffected, I have never mentioned her on the show. No, not even indirectly. She has never been a topic on Disaffected.

To my bewilderment, Borysenko believed that she, rather than my mother, was the topic my episodes 'Over the Borderline.' In December of 2022— one year and 8 months after my ‘Over the Borderline’ episodes—Borysenko did a three-hour livestream during which she claimed that my episodes were about her. As you see, she did feature my picture in her thumbnail, the very thing she falsely accused me of doing to her.

It began with the bizarre claim that the thumbnail image used to promote the Disaffected episodes contained a picture of Borysenko. In reality, the thumbnail image used a cartoon-like depiction of a young "woke-looking" woman that Kevin sourced from his collection of images (he's a professional media producer). I don't believe that Kevin knew at the time who Borysenko was, and she was not part of any discussions about the thumbnail image.

Here is a picture of Karlyn, then a picture of the thumbnail for Over the Borderline.

As you notice, the "woman" on the left is a version of Faye Dunaway playing actress Joan Crawford in the child abuse-themed autobiographical film 'Mommie Dearest.' The image of the young woman on the right with a half-shaved head was a generic image meant to represent the narcissistic type of modern "wokie" who uses the same tactics Joan Crawford used. It is not an image of Borysenko, nor is it a reference to her.

If it had been, I would have said so then, and I would say so again now. Those who read my writing or watch my shows know that I say what I mean and that I'm neither coy nor afraid to criticize people by name.

It was a surprise to learn that Borysenko launched a livestream shortly after 'Over the Borderline' ran in which she accused me using an image of her, and of talking about her. At first it was impossible to understand—my episodes were quite obviously about my mother, whose abuse and prevarication I narrated in detail.

Somehow, though, Borysenko believed, or alleged to believe, that I was actually talking about her. Here is a clip from her livestream about me (remember, we have never spoken to each other, and I have not done a show featuring her) claiming that ‘Over the Borderline’ was about her.

How did she come to believe I was talking about her? In addition to the simple fact that, for a narcissist, everything is always about them, I suspect it is because I am friends with someone she despises and torments, Keri Smith, and because Borysenko is so obsessively self-focused that her anger and zeal causes her to make elementary mistakes.

Here is what I mean. In December, 2021, Keri Smith wrote an essay about both her abusive Cluster B mother, and about the documented harassment by Borysenko against Keri, and against our mutual friend Mike Harlow. Like me, Keri sees the connection between the wicked behavior of our mothers to their children, and the abusive behavior of the left/mainstream culture toward anyone who is not on the left.

That’s December 2021. I’m going to keep repeating dates because you need to keep their relationship firm in your mind to understand the sequence of events.

Now, jump forward in time one year to December, 2022 (note this carefully-2022). That’s the time when Borysenko ran her three-hour livestream (the one linked above with my photograph in the thumbnail, the one that accused me of talking about Borysenko when I was actually talking about my mother). In that episode, Borysenko claimed that it was obvious that my ‘Over the Borderline’ episodes were about her. Why?

Because Borysenko did not notice dates correctly on Youtube videos. If you don’t know this, Youtube puts a relative date on each video. A “relative date” is when you say, “It was a year ago,” instead of using an “absolute date,” like, “It was filmed in 2021.” When you look at YT videos, you’ll often see “1 year ago.”

That is misleading. Youtube also rounds dates to the year. So when you see a video that claims it was made “1 year ago,” that video may actually be one year and 11 months in the past.

I had Keri Smith on Disaffected in March, 2021. Keri wrote her article on Borysenko in December 2021 (nine months after her appearance on Disaffected). Fully one year after that, in December 2022, Borysenko ran her three-hour livestream claiming my earlier ‘Over the Borderline’ episodes were obviously about her, because they allegedly came out at the same time as Keri was writing her article about Borysenko. She also claimed that the “fact” that “Keri and Josh” are “best friends” was supporting evidence of the connection. Keri and I are friends, but not “best friends,” whatever that may mean.

But Keri’s essay was written eight months after my ‘Over the Borderline’ episodes. They didn’t happen “at the same time.” Borysenko either did not bother to look past Youtube’s misleading relative dates, or she was pretending that she didn’t know the actual dates.

Fast Forward to April, 2025: How to Tell a Good Lie

Thank you for bearing with me through this, readers. I’m trying to make it as clear as possible, and it’s a bit tedious, I know.

This is the section where I show you how a good lie is constructed when a narcissist uses a spoonful of truth to help the poison go down.

I have again become the subject of a series of videos by Borysenko. This time, in April, 2025, she is claiming that I am abusing her about her recently deceased dog, and that I have claimed that she killed her dog. I have not claimed that she killed her dog, and I have not harassed her about her deceased dog.

But there’s a teeny, tiny bit of truth. It’s just enough to hook the unwary, or those who don’t have any of the context, and who don’t know of her demonstrated character and historical behavior.

Readers, I have to stop and ask you to adopt a frame of mind deliberately, and not to fall into the first emotion you feel when you read what follows. Yes, I did make a joke, to a third party on Twitter, that referenced Borysenko’s dead dog. I did not say it to Borysenko, though, yes, of course I knew that anything published on Twitter can be seen by anyone, including her. Yes, I knew she might see it, and yes, I chose to make this joke anyway. No, I did not do it to “get her,” I did it because some of us on Twitter were blowing off steam about this woman who has lied about us and bedeviled us for years. I have never enacted any aggression against Karlyn Borysenko; I have never spoken to her, and this is the first essay I have written about her. By contrast, I have kept my mouth shut about her despite consistent, and sometimes extreme, provocation.

I’ve had enough.

Here’s what happened. Recently, Borysenko’s dog died. This is, of course, sad. As a pet lover who has spilled tears burying many cats over the years, I know what grief for a beloved animal feels like. It is because I know that, and because most other people know that, that Borysenko’s recent livestreams about her dead dog rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

To be blunt: I believe she used her dead dog to evoke sympathy and cash payments on her Youtube channel to an extreme and vulgar degree. To be even more blunt: I don’t believe her claims to have been genuinely grieving. I think she’s lying. The only thing she cared about vis-a-vis her dog’s death, in my view, is the attention, sympathy, and cash her contrived mourning could bring. As someone who has deeply mourned beloved pets, I found her antics offensive.

You may, or may not, be convinced that I “had a right” to make this joke. You may, or may not, think it went over the line. But it was not borne of cruelty, nor was it a sin of epic proportions. Yes, I will be showing you the joke and all the detail below; please bear with me.

As an example of her duplicitous behavior, Borysenko has been accusing people of lying about how much beer she has fed her dog over the years. She has been in high dudgeon on her channel recently about the allegedly cruel lies from people who say she was irresponsible to have given her dog so much beer to drink. Why, she’s only ever let her dog lick a beer glass clean, she claims, and everyone is lying.

Then, in the same video, she says something different:

Here is a sample of the way in which Borysenko went on at great length over her deceased dog. I watched more of this than I am sharing with you, and I did not see a single genuine tear. What I saw was an actress affecting to be heartbroken for “the ratings” and the cash.

In this clip, Borysenko relates a tarot card reading she gave herself about the death of her dog. Notice the name she gives herself in the title card, “honey’s mom.” Notice also the question she asks: “Did Honey love us?”

To reiterate, I judge this to be a pity performance, not a genuine expression of grief.

Now it’s time to talk about the joke I made. Recall that Borysenko is claiming that I have accused her of killing her dog (I have not), and that I have been “harassing” her. What kind of person would stoop so low to hurt a woman in grief?

I have a Twitter mutual named Frank McCormick. He goes by the Twitter handle (at)CBHeresy. That stands for “Chalkboard Heresy.” Frank is a former teacher who was drummed out of teaching by an angry woke mob. He too has been the target of narcissistic abuse, some of it from Karlyn Borysenko. Yes, he also goes hard on her on Twitter, making fun of her frequently.

Recently, Frank made one of those now-popular AI templates that create “action figure” toys out of real people. Here is the one he created to depict Borysenko.

Here is the joke I made on Frank’s thread:

The joke—whether you approve of it or find it to be in bad taste or not—is this: she used her dead dog like an accessory. The joke is not “making fun of her because she’s grieving.” Instead, it’s “she’s so narcissistic that she used her dead dog during an interminable, maudlin livestream in order to glorify herself and roll around in audience pity while making money.”

I’m not sorry. I don’t take it back. I haven’t changed my mind. I haven’t thought better of it. I still mean it.

But surely we can all agree that it’s poor form to make any joke about any person who’s experienced a death. Can we? In December, my friend Adam Burgoyne died on his apartment floor from an aortic aneurysm at the age of 39. Many of us, including me, genuinely grieved the loss of this wonderful man.

When Adam died, an obituary appeared online. Because Adam supported Israel in the Israel-Hamas conflict, a huge number of Hamas supporters flooded the comments on his obituary saying things so obscene and profane that I will not repeat them here. His friends worked behind the scenes to try to get the funeral home to take the obituary down before Adam’s parents could see what people were saying about their son.

Other people who knew Adam noticed this. Borysenko made sure to comment publicly in support of the anti-Israel people who said obscene things about Adam in his published death notice. She also did several dishonest streams wherein she claimed that she was being pressured to “mourn” Adam, when in fact she simply couldn’t bear to see an outpouring of love for someone detract attention from her usual position as Twitter’s Main Character of the Day.

Borysenko has also claimed in the past that Jews brought the holocaust on themselves; that their mass murder was the result of karmic justice. At the same time, she opined that Adolf Hitler went to heaven. Her remarks were so shocking Newsweek covered the story.

She is also manipulative and abusive to her own viewers and financial supporters. She screams at them and accuses them of failing her and of being stupid. Here’s an example where she harangues her supporters and demands money or she will end her livestream:

Wrapping it all up

There are numerous additional examples of Karlyn Borysenko’s deceitful and vicious behavior. What I’ve shown you above is just a sample. It is my view that she is one of the most severely personality disordered people I have ever encountered online. She is the walking definition of “personality disorder otherwise unspecified” in the DSM. She has a surfeit of traits from all four of the Cluster B disorders, borderline, histrionic, narcissism, and antisocial.

She will of course, as she has in the past, accuse me of “unethically diagnosing” her. I am no more diagnosing her by publishing this article than I am practicing meteorology when I opine, looking at the sky, that rain seems likely. Also, she knows that a layman like me doesn’t have the power to make an official medical diagnosis; none of my opinions can have any effect on her medical chart or “course of treatment.” Heh-as if there were a snowball’s chance in hell the woman would ever seek treatment. That would require her believing she was in any way imperfect, let alone wicked.

But why bother going on so long about some “internet rando,” right? It’s not worth it. Just ignore her, right?

This woman successfully fooled the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire into running her as the state’s gubernatorial candidate in 2022.

She persuaded the venerable Prager University to work with her to produce video content, a decision I’d imagine they now regret.

People like Karlyn Borysenko are not just “internet randos” who can be dealt with by “just ignoring” them. Narcissists of her caliber are often successful, for a time, at duping otherwise intelligent and accomplished people into getting into projects with them. They only find out when it’s too late.

You, reader, may well have been duped by her recent claims that I am a singularly cruel man who kicked a grieving woman in the stomach when she was in mourning over her dead dog.

This is how narcissists create compelling lies with legs. There is a kernel of truth in most of their prevarications. They take this kernel and polish it up like a rare gem until it glitters before your eyes. The effect is hypnotic. Your tender emotions are immediately grabbed because you’re a decent person who disapproves of what appears to be cruelty. This is how they get you. All the while, they are standing behind a curtain twiddling dials and pulling levers as fast as they can to keep the smoke and light show going on the other side of the room.

Look sharp.