While many people would like to attribute misogyny, climate change, and terrorism to the POTUS, BuzzFeed reporters are here to tell you that Trump is causing your child to bully or be bullied.
In a report released on Tuesday, BuzzFeed News “confirmed more than 50 incidents, across 26 states, which a K-12 student involved Trump’s name or message in an apparent effort to harass a classmate.” Since the news source had no statistics to cite, they reviewed bullying reports that were submitted to the Documenting Hate project, set up by ProPublica.
ProPublica has its own relatively unclear origins and sources, and the Documenting Hate project ignores any attack on white people and is significantly biased in its output. So it’s a perfect source for Buzzfeed.
The article by BuzzFeed then went on to describe most of these incidents, which all involved a white child bullying one of his classmates. The article painted an image of a teacher confronted with the question, “Why can the president say it but I can’t?”
According to one Washington teacher, in the past years, her students were, to say the least, extremely disinterested in elections and political personas. However, between 2016 and this year, she heard her students saying “far more vitriolic” than they’ve ever done. BuzzFeed then told readers, “For kids, there is no escaping Trump.” The article had no mention of how in previous elections years kids had less exposure to the media, less technology, and most likely were not subjected to political topics as much. Trump is depicted as the ultimate hate mongerer, encouraging “playground bullying.”
One occurrence had boys in Trump t-shirts singing racial slurs to a black teenage girl. The only reason Trump was involved at all was because his name happened to be on the clothes the boys were wearing. No other reason. To say that Trump is responsible for that incident is a bit of a stretch. Yet another incident had a “Trump supporter” saying anti-Semitic phrases to another student. How Trump was involved or responsible for that situation is completely unclear.
Some of these alleged bullying reports could hardly be classified as bullying. For example, the article cited a situation where white teenagers were “holding pictures of the Confederate flag and Trump.” A significant incident of hate speech, apparently.
In another supposed example, when two teachers played a skit at a school dressed as Clinton and Trump, they were astonished to hear the students chanting “Build that wall!” According to one teacher at that school, “Many of our students feel unsafe and disrespected.” But there is no acknowledgment of the teachers, who were encouraging political talk by performing that skit. It’s almost as if they expected the students to be completely oblivious to their own references to Trump.
BuzzFeed then followed up this description with the statement, “Kids, like the president, enjoy a good troll.” And parents “are caught off guard,” with no idea that their children were anyway involved in political hate speech.
The teachers and educators interviewed mentioned that this alleged phenomenon “reflects a wider climate of hate that we’re seeing,” according to an Oregon school superintendent. BuzzFeed itself stated that the supposed trend is “a possible window into a disturbing future.” But the only issue that BuzzFeed has reported on is that students are making references to Trump, which means that they must be racist bullies. Because of course Trump is the embodiment, sole cause, and source of all hatred.
