We are living in a dangerous inverted world. Abusers claim the mantle of victimhood while pummeling their victims with abuse. Would-be authoritarians are doing the same thing to the public. The powerful harass and silence dissidents, minoritized populations, journalists, protesters, and pro-democracy critics and then audaciously cry victim when anyone dares to push back. Today, these authoritarian strategies have gone digital to terrorize and gaslight publics. The intimidation playbook follows a two-step pattern. In the first step, authoritarian forces target critics with online abuse that silences targeted individuals. In the second step, critics are falsely accused of engaging in online abuse. The concept of online abuse is misappropriated to shield anti-democratic actors from legitimate scrutiny and criticism while simultaneously enabling them to direct abuse towards critics. We are seeing this unfold in real time. As a Presidential adviser and leader of an Executive Branch agency, Elon Musk targeted relatively unknown female federal employees online, leading to cyber mob attack on those women. When reporters interrogated the credentials of the young men working for him in the federal government, Musk decried the reporting as online abuse, sparking a campaign of online abuse against the reporter. Social media companies are eager allies in this authoritarian playbook, and not only those platforms owned by authoritarian politicians themselves. Independent platforms, all of which thrive on the kind of hyper-engagement generated by online harassment and abusive gaslighting, see dollars, not democracy dying. When the authoritarian two-step is aimed at anyone those in power do not like, it is democracy that ends up being the final victim. We need to recognize the digital two-step playbook as part of a coordinated attack on public engagement. Surfacing this strategy is a critical start to combating it.