Someone that brings up VARA and copyright laws is not a peddling anything. They are bringing up a very important legal copyright point. It is a legal fact that if anyone does anything with the art that the artist does like like, placed in a country were they have differences of political opinion or is published somewhere they do not like (magazine, newspaper, website) since the artist is the only person that has legal copyright they can sue to have it removed / taken down. If at anytime you would have said, stated or pointed to the fact that this was going to be under a " Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International" license then that would answered the question / concern.
No one is attempting to or trying to bully you, since that would be and is a clear violation of the code of conduct of this forum. Any person doing so would have the offending post(s) removed, the person would then be suspended or banned. To my knowledge no one has been suspended or banned for attempting to bully you on these forums, so such a statement is nothing but grandstanding and a perception of events by you that are completely untrue.