Sickening WaPo expose - what Trump's doing to our children

[Laura PourMeADrink]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/local/school-bullying-trump-words/

Trump’s words, bullied kids, scarred schools
The president’s rhetoric has
changed the way hundreds of children are harassed in American classrooms, The Post found.

By Hannah Natanson, John Woodrow Cox and Perry Stein Feb. 13, 2020

Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered "Ban Muslims" at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: "This is Trump country."

Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children more than 300 times since the start of 2016, a Washington Post review of 28,000 news stories found. At least three-quarters of the attacks were directed at kids who are Hispanic, black or Muslim, according to the analysis. Students have also been victimized because they support the president — more than 45 times during the same period.

Although many hateful episodes garnered coverage just after the election, The Post found that Trump-connected persecution of children has never stopped. Even without the huge total from November 2016, an average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. Still, because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Post’s figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesn’t include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that aren’t directly linked to Trump but that the president’s detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.

More at link

[dewsgirl]

1. Stomach churning.

[democrank]

2. This made me cry.

What have we become?

[B Stieg]

3. "Public pedagogy"

Unfortunately, the tradition is that the president is supposed to be the "lead teacher" for the entire country.
But this pResident lies as his first resort!

[CaptYossarian]

4. It's the Hitler Youth 2.0.

[bucolic_frolic]

5. Not to mention pollution and poisons

from Trump policies

[renate]

6. I live in a purple area of a blue state

I think around here people are likelier to stick up for someone being bullied than to do the bullying, but stories like this make me wonder what kind of darkness is lurking in the hearts of people who behave well. Here, the majority are liberal or at least centrist; if these same people were plunked down in the places where even little children are racist, would any of them start to act like this?

And although Trump is responsible for the words that come out of his own mouth, it breaks my heart to think of the kind of hateful atmosphere these kids are growing up in. Kids aren't naturally racist. They're learning this, actively learning it, at home.

What a literal cesspool this country has become.

Interesting that the Post includes the fact that kids have been harassed for supporting Trump 45 times, vs the 28,000 times it's gone the other way. Cuts any possible "what-about" argument off at the knees.

[spanone]

7. I've wondered how children are reacting to the hate coming out of the White House.

Now I know and it's not pretty.

[mwooldri]

8. Parents aren't blameless either.

This parent catches his youngest son lying and asks if he's doing a Donald Trump - youngest son knows immediately that he's been caught lying. Oldest son has been known to engage with some Trumpers (close-ish family sadly) on Facebook disavowing their views.

[DENVERPOPS]

9. It's not

what is coming out of the white house "directly", it is their racist/hate mongering parents.

The parents spawn, and indoctrinate and then the bunch of them continuously multiply like rabbits until they become 50 million........

Upon reaching adulthood, they turn into sheep.............

[flibbitygiblets]

10. If only we had a first lady with a mission to stop bullying

what a joke in every sense of the word

[Laura PourMeADrink]

16. And a proven liar. Lied about college degree, stole

Michelle's speech, and doubt all her papers are legit.

[dlk]

11. Sadly, Trump doesn't care & neither do Republicans

They are one and the same.

[Farmer-Rick]

12. Not to mention the sterling example set by the first nude lady for our daughters to emulate.

Her gold digging and sex work is really not what I want my daughter to look up to.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

13. My husband thinks the same. But he confesses

Although politically incorrect, he thinks the first lady should be American.

[Farmer-Rick]

15. I don't mind a foreign first lady...I guess at first all our first ladies were foreign born

But Slovenia is in Putin pocket so there is that.

But her porn and escort work is really what is a shame. My daughter made a joke the other day...she's 29...about being short of money and taking up the first lady's occupation. But she joked, she doesn't have a good pimp like Malaria has in Putin. I about spit out my coffee.

[dalton99a]

14. The article is a must read. Just one example:

For Ashanty Bonilla, the damage began with the response to a single tweet she shared 10 months ago.

“Unpopular opinion,” Ashanty, then 16 and a sophomore at Lewiston High School in rural Idaho, wrote on April 9. “People who support Trump and go to Mexico for vacation really piss me off. Sorry not sorry.”

A schoolmate, who is white, took a screen shot of her tweet and posted it to Snapchat, along with a Confederate flag.

The next morning, as Ashanty arrived at school, half a dozen boys, including the one who had written the message, stood nearby.

“You’re illegal. Go back to Mexico,” she heard one of them say. “F--- Mexicans.”

Ashanty, shaken but silent, walked past as a friend yelled at the boys to shut up.

In a 33,000-person town that is 94 percent white, Ashanty, whose father is half-black and whose mother is Mexican American, had always worked to fit in. She attended every football game and won a school spirit award as a freshman. She straightened her hair and dyed it blond, hoping to look more like her friends.

She had known those boys who’d heckled her since they were little. For her 15th birthday the year before, some had danced at her quinceañera.

A friend drove her off campus for lunch, but when they pulled back into the parking lot, Ashanty spotted people standing around her car. A rope had been tied from the back of the Honda Pilot to a pickup truck.

“Republican Trump 2020,” someone had written in the dust on her back window.

Hands trembling, Ashanty tried to untie the rope but couldn’t. She heard the laughing, sensed the cellphone cameras pointed at her. She began to weep.

She seldom attended classes the last month of school. That summer, she started having migraines and panic attacks. In August, amid her spiraling despair, Ashanty swallowed 27 pills from a bottle of antidepressants. A helicopter rushed her to a hospital in Spokane, Wash., 100 miles away.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

20. Wow, incredibly sad and makes one feel so helpless.

She survived, right?

[I_UndergroundPanther]

17. Bullying

Gave me ptsd and here I am 40 years later on meds have night terrors still getting triggered. Bullies break the soul.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

18. OMG, I am so so sorry.

[IngridsLittleAngel]

19. I share your pain...

And I'm sorry you too have had to go through such horrors.

[IngridsLittleAngel]

21. Things like this are, to me, the worst part of Drumpf's reign of terror.

Don't get me wrong. Comrade Covfefe himself is awful, horrible, and just plain evil. There has not been one good thing about his reign of terror since he took over the White House - hell, maybe ever. I thought he was an asshole as far back as the 80's, when the media was trying to sell us on him being the coolest real estate tycoon ever. I didn't like him then, and I've come to like him even less the more I've gotten to know him.

But as bad as he is, it's his followers that have been even worse. It's people of all ages - kids, adults, alleged adults - and the cruelty and abuse they have inflicted upon others because they hear the evil he spews, and figure it's okay to repeat it.

I deal with and live with my own scars thanks to years of bullying, abuse and bigotry. Needless to say, people - even family members - can be downright rotten to people in the LGBTQ community back when I was growing up. Even now, I have doubts on the wounds and scars healing. PTSD, anxiety, paranoia and even agoraphobia have part of life after all of that. I have very real issues in my now very adult life because of enduring this kind of hell when I was younger. "Kids will be kids"? "You'll be better off surviving this"? Naw. The only people who benefited from it were the monsters who hurt me and others.

But what gets me the worst - both personally and in general - is that it feels like after taking a few steps forward, we've taken several steps back in the name of "MAGA". No, I'm kidding myself: Assholes have always existed. But it now seems they feel emboldened, protected, and have gotten louder and meaner over the last 4 1/2 years. Where such hatred and bigotry seemed to be spoken in whispers and kept beneath the surface, it now seems to be in our faces - and nowhere seems safe and many of us seem to be in the crosshairs.

I've lost a great many of my friends in the last few years. I've watched people who were once "proud Democrats" become red hat-wearing, rabid Trump supporters - spewing the same tired old lines of "He's making America great again" and "People expected too much, too fast" and "We're tired of being scared". What? Expecting equality and human respect is "too much"? Tired of "being scared" of who - people who aren't like you? I've lost count of how many of these "friends" went from allies to basically telling me to STFU, get back in the closet and quit "asking for special rights".

Most of the once-sane Republicans I once knew have gone totally off the deep end. Many of them were sending mass-emails that bordered on threats when I finally blocked them and cut them out of my life. "We're taking our country back!" and "The south shall rise again!" - even though most of them had never lived in the south. They heard Der Leader speak and happily decided to openly hate everyone who is not white, straight, male and conservative.

No, Donald Drumpf didn't create this hateful environment by himself, and only a fool would think all was well prior to 2015. But he took the seeds of hatred and bigotry and a desire for fascism that were planted by the likes of Limbaugh and Savage and Hannity and dumped Miracle Grow all over them. There's a huge difference between some fat blob spewing bigotry into his golden microphone, and the president doing so. Just like how millions of people used "You're either with us, or with the terrorists!" at us opposed to the war - because they heard it from Bush - millions now feel just fine expressing misogyny and racism and homophobia and xenophobia because they hear Der Leader saying it.

School is hard enough, especially as a teenager. Kids could be awful enough to each other, without being inspired by our alleged president to be so openly hateful and bigoted. I've seen what it can do. I've endured it. No one should have to go through that. Thanks to President Reality Show, we are going to have quite a few kids growing up to become adult Trumpbots. Worse, is how many kids are going to grow up terrified and scarred from this abuse - because, hey, "if the president says it, it's okay for me to say it!"

Shame on the idiot in chief for what he has sown. Shame on the parents who can't bother to teach their kids right from wrong. And shame on the teachers and administrators doing nothing to stop it - or worse, joining in in some cases.

There are many things I wish we as a country and a society would outgrow. Bullying is near, or at, the top of that list. But there's no fucking chance of that happening when the world's biggest bully - literally and figuratively - sits in the Oval Office, giving us The Apprentice: White House.

I don't know what articles like this make me feel anymore. Anger? Fear? Sadness? All of the above? Whatever it is, it's not positive.

Drumpf needs to be fired in November for many, many reasons. The biggest reason is his vile fan club. As long as he's put on camera and microphone every day, nothing will get better and we'll just hear more stories like this.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

22. Thanks for sharing all this. I am sorry for your pain. How

did you know trump was an ass in the 1980s? So curious. Great documentary on Netflix about him that goes way back. You could see everyone fawning all over him. They said he was the best self-promoter ever.

[IngridsLittleAngel]

23. You're welcome, and, thank you for your kind words

My dad used to work in real estate, so, someone gave him The Art of the Deal in the late 80's. The person who gave it to him figured it'd be right up his alley: A book about a "successful" real estate tycoon for someone who had been working in real estate for 15 years.

Well, Dad got through about 35-40 pages before he gave up reading it. Despite Tony Schwartz's attempt to co-write it into something glowing and positive and bigly, my dad's quick impression is "This guy is a phony, stupid jackass". So, the book sat on his shelf after that.

A year or so later, I got bored enough that I decided "What the hell. I'll try reading it." This was shortly before everything hit the fan with Twitler and Ivana and Marla, and, it was back when I'd read anything (even all 1,100 or so pages of The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, despite being left-leaning even then, figuring "What the hell".). Well, I got through about 40 pages and also had the same impression. "This guy is a phony, stupid asshole.", and put the book back on the shelf. Then, here came Affair Scandal #1 and Divorce #1, and I went from unimpressed to extremely unimpressed.

Even before the dreaded trip down the escalator in 2015, my reaction everytime I've seen him since is "Not this fucking guy again!" Drumpf talking to Macualay Culkin in Home Alone 2? "Not this guy again!" Jabba The Trump getting back together with Ivana to sell pizza? "Not this fucking guy again!" President Reality Show gleefully firing people on The Apprentice? "Not this guy again! And worse yet, another reality show!"

So, yeah. I totally expected the worst come 11/9. And, somehow, this guy has "won" and exceeded my worst expectations. But, let's hear it for the media spending 25 years rehabbing his image from a blowhard joke to "presidential". Thanks to them, we're all paying the price.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

24. You and your dad, very astute!

[ck4829]

25. Disgusting

[Fyrefox]

26. A toxic model...

Trump seldom brings out the best in his followers, but rather the contrary...and to think, there are actually supporters who regard him to be a better president than Lincoln was!