In a discussion of the election, our reader Ponderosa wrote the following comment:

“I’ve thrown away my anti-bullying curriculum. From now on I’m teaching kids how to bully.”

Categories Education Reform

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2old2teach says:

November 6, 2016 at 12:03 am

It is rather depressing to see an accomplished bully as the Republican candidate for President. I guess it probably helps to be rich, too. It’s much easier to ignore bullies once you get past the cruelty of middle and high school. Keep teaching your students how to handle bullies, Ponderosa. There can’t be too many fates worse than being under the thumb of a one.

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Cheryl says:

November 6, 2016 at 12:03 am

That is food for thought. If we teach how to be a bully, how can everyone be one?

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dmbremenstuhl says:

November 6, 2016 at 12:30 am

Perhaps, Henry A Giroux, the Canadian scholar and academic, is correct that we do live in a “culture of cruelty” !!! We cannot give up, though, because we have a culture with too much cruelty and bullying !!! We cannot give up because there are too many dishonest and bullying models in our political class !!! And, we cannot give up because there is so much confrontation and hate and intolerance in our society !!!!

We must foster and enable the qualities not just of taking learning seriously, but to teach our children the qualities of caring and compassion and kindness and empathy to enable them to reach the fullness of their potential in learning AND as human beings !!!! Perhaps, this is the lesson of this “political nightmare” ~~ to teach ourselves and our children how to become a culture of caring and kindness and understanding AGAIN !!!!

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- ciedie aech says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 1:08 pm
  
  I support your optimism: Historically, generations of children react against the generation in front of them. Where one generation is self-indulgent, the next is likely to be more other-aware.
  
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Michael Paul Goldenberg says:

November 6, 2016 at 12:45 am

That’s satire, yes? Because I’m hard-pressed to imagine your citing that to praise its wisdom, Diane. Kids bully precisely because they get bullied at home and/or see it modeled by important people in their lives who appear to profit thereby. I doubt anyone in the current generation of school bullies is emulating Donald Trump.

Or maybe the spate of campus rapes and other sexual assaults since the late ’90s really IS inspired by Bill Clinton’s White House and Governor’s Mansion escapades. That’s what my former principal cited as his reason for voting for GWB in 2000: the Democrats needed to be taught a lesson. I’m sure everyone who died or was maimed for life in Iraq appreciates the hell out of that lesson. It’s grand that it apparently didn’t prevent a few rapes at home. 😦

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- Norwegian Filmmaker says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 5:52 am
  
  The two candidates are both big time bullies; one is an elegant bully who is discrete and hushed about her and her husband’s bullying, and the other is an overt, crude, look-at-me- bully.
  
  Bullying is bullying, to me.
  
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  - John Ogozalek says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 7:02 am
    
    Nope, nope, nope. Trump does NOT equal Clinton…he’s FAR worse. See Diane’s comments on this site since, well, it seems like forever now…. And, why do some people keep making Hillary responsible for Bill’s behavior? What?
    
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  - 2old2teach says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 1:01 pm
    
    It’s an age old tradition, just updated. After all, we are just appendages of our husbands, fathers, boyfriends, right? Servants, scapegoats and/or eye candy.
    
    Ask me if I understand why women are supporting Donald.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 1:20 pm
    
    2Old2teach:
    
    I can’t understand why so many women are supporting Donald.
    
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  - 2old2teach says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 7:32 pm
    
    I made an incredibly ignorant statement in my young and know it all days that came back to bite me. I made a comment about how I could not understand why someone would stay with an abusive spouse. Little did I know that one of the women in the group where I made this comment was in an abusive marriage. By the time I saw her again, several years later, she was divorced. She reminded me of my remarks and revealed that she had been in such a relationship. For reasons which I will not reveal, she had struggled with believing she was worthy of love; she had married him because she wanted someone to love her. It was a miracle to her that someone could, and it took a long time before she could give even the illusion of love up. Fortunately, I had grown up enough and learned enough by that time to honestly apologize for my incredibly stupid proclamation. She is gone now unfortunately; I don’t think she ever quite understood what a remarkable person she was.
    
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  - Eleanor says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 7:38 am
    
    I agree with you, Norwegian Filmmaker. Hillary was slick enough to have the Correct the Record trolls bully Bernie supporters. Recently, I’ve notice that on other boards the usual troop of CTR trolls have toned down their taunting of Bernie supporters …. they must have gotten the word from Podesta and DWS to back off until Novmber 8.
    
    I will not be in the least bit surprised when Team Clinton reverts back to disparaging the left once she has the election in the bag.
    
    Who knows? We may even have another illuminating Rahm Emanual moment ….
    
    (I could have used far stronger links, but I did not want to see the f-word show up on Diane’s site.)
    
    http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2010/02/palin-goes-after-emanuel-on-retarded-slur-024754
    
    http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/rahm-emanuels-lessons-for-hillary-clinton
    
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  - Joel Herman says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 8:04 am
    
    Eleanor
    
    If I have to chose between a slick bully and the a fascist . I’ll take the slick bully .
    
    Slick bullies did a number on Bernie by using their media connections and surrogates to discredit him, agreed .
    
    Fascists use their connections with the state police to subvert an election. Threaten to jail their opponents . Convince their base that the evil other( Hispanics Muslims , Jews are a threat to their physical and financial well being . Tell their supporters not to accept the results of an election .
    
    If there was a “Slick Bully ” in Wiemar Germany 40 million people would not have died.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 11:02 am
    
    Joel,
    
    The slick bully and the fascist are the same person.
    
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  - Norwegian Filmmaker says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 10:56 am
    
    I agree with all of you. If you read my components on this blog, which are not as often as I’d like them to be, I have always said that Clinton is the better choice of the two by many means.
    
    I was feeling sorry for Americans, but I also see this epoch as a wonderful opportunity for personal and societal growth.
    
    And I agree that if Hitler were a slick bully maybe there would have been millions of lives spared. It’s all so speculative.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 11:04 am
    
    NF,
    
    Nope, don’t agree. Hillary is no bully, slick or non-slick
    
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  - Norwegian Filmmaker says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 11:43 am
    
    I agree with almost all of you. I have always said on this blog that Hillary is the better of the two and if one is going to vote . . . .
    
    I have said this several times.
    
    I won’t feel sorry for Americans nearly as much as I used to, because I see this election as a wonderful opportunity for growth.
    
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  - Michael Paul Goldenberg says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 3:29 pm
    
    Norwegian FM: agreed. And the rationalizations and misconstructions of what you wrote (and my point previous) just underscore the blindness (willful or otherwise) of some people lining up behind Hillary because, well, TRUMP!!! And every time I or someone else points this out, we are accused of sexism, false equivalence, naivete, historical ignorance, and a host of other conveniently invented errors. The fact remains that I have not tried to suggest that Trump = Clinton but that whichever you pick, you’re screwed (unless, of course, you’re not really progressive, in which case, by all means pick your preferred enemy of the people).
    
    I’m still waiting to read that Diane or the author she cites was offering a little satire. But now I’m sensing that such was not the case. And if THAT doesn’t worry the “liberals” on this site, I don’t know that there’s anything Hillary Clinton will do to people in the mid-East that will give pause. After all, it’s just a little “bullying,” with the force of the US military behind it. Everyone else is doing it. Trump would have been worse. The dog ate my homework.
    
    Screwing the will of the people? Disenfranchising Sanders voters? It’s all good fun in the charade of electoral politics, where what matters most is that your “team” wins. It seems the inmates really are running the asylum.
    
    If Trump wins, as I’ve said before, it won’t be hard to mount opposition against him here and in similar places, at home and abroad. If Hillary wins, which of her triumphant supporters will have the courage to call her out when she’s deeply wrong, ideologically, and practically? We covered for Obama for so long because of all the obvious racism fueling attacks on him. But he still did much evil overseas and at home, and we didn’t want to be with the “bad guys,” so we ignored it for the most part (it was safer to criticize his educational policies, and we were mostly ineffectual in that regard).
    
    But Hillary? We already have a quarter-century of excuses for her. We already have been told about that vast right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons. We’ve been told that everyone left of center who decries her neoliberalism is a sexist (or an empty-headed millennial, the females just responding to their hormonal mating instincts, according to several PROMINENT Clinton-supporting pseudo-feminists). That we just fear a strong woman in power (well, yeah, Indira Gandhi, for starters, Maggie Thatcher, Bhutto, Meier, Merkel, . . . ). Not exactly my favorite world leaders or people I hope POTUS Clinton emulates. Yet I fear that she will be more like them than Trump will be like Hitler. And few here will complain.
    
    No, they aren’t the same. But how you decide which is “worse” (would you prefer liver cancer or brain cancer?), try to explain to me how a Syrian child would answer. Or an elderly woman in Tripoli. I wonder, too, if Pat Tillman felt better being killed by “friendly fire” in Iraq.
    
    Well, I’ve been physically bullied. It’s never pleasant. It doesn’t matter the motives or who does it. I have no tolerance for that from kids to their peers, from teachers and parents to kids, from anyone. Maybe some people here can excuse or rationalize it when they think it’s done in a righteous cause, and that would also explain how some here confuse strong disagreement with “bullying.” You just don’t know what it is. Ask the folks in North Dakota. Ask people who marched against the war and for civil rights in the ’60s and were punched, spat upon, arrested, etc. Then think about whether you’re more concerned about police, armies, bombers, etc., or harsh language.
    
    And you find Trump supporters crazy and dangerous?
    
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  - Michael Paul Goldenberg says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 3:40 pm
    
    NF: you’re right, the apologists here are dead wrong. And the world will suffer as the bombs fall on people who “don’t matter.” You know: Muslims, the poor of oil-producing lands, etc. But we’ll have kept the world safe from a theatrical, moustache-twirling villain, so it’s okay!
    
    John Ogozalek: Hillary is only responsible for her own behavior, but she’s also got to be held responsible for trying to deflect, excuse, deny, or rationalize Bill’s bad POLITICAL actions, particularly as she was so actively involved not only in his administration but because she continues to parlay Clintonism into increasing positions of power. She’s not him. He’s not her. She’s not Trump. These are stupid attempts to muddle the issues. Each is responsible for her/his own actions. And each has plenty to atone for. The problem is, one of the latter two will be getting 4 – 8 years to pile up a horrifying number of increasingly heinous crimes. You’ll be happier if it’s HRC? I really don’t understand why. And if I lived in some of the countries she’s already helped attack (and seems unashamed about her regime-change plans down the road), I’d be hoping for some sort of deus ex machina on Tuesday. Hell, I don’t live in one of those, just this one, and that’s what I hope for.
    
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  - Norwegian Filmmaker says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 3:51 pm
    
    To Mr. Michael Paul Goldenberg,
    
    Yours was a very insightful analysis. Thank you for taking such time and effort to think so critically and articulately.
    
    And in between this Scylla and Charybdis will be amazing opportunities for personal and social growth, I think.
    
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- David Bremenstuhl, Education Laureate says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 3:49 pm
  
  Regardless of how negative things may become, we must teach and model the qualities that we would like to instill in our children !!! We must continue to model and teach what we respect and admire and love as human qualities, rather than just reacting to those qualities we believe will hurt children and diminish our society !!!
  
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John Ogozalek says:

November 6, 2016 at 5:15 am

I read somewhere that bullies like to make up demeaning or downright nasty nicknames, for people. George W. Bush did this sort of thing but he was a piker in that regard compared to Trump, who has bequeathed to our nation’s history books, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco and Crooked Hillary.

For a hilarious spoof of Trump’s schoolyard-style nickname making, check out this link to Stephen Colbert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cra47Pdok2g Love it!

Funny thing is, I googled the phrase “Trump’s nicknames for Hillary” and it seems like it took Trump a while to settle in on “Crooked Hillary” He test marketed “Rotten” and “Unstable”. It looks like he even tried out “America’s Angela Merkel” for HIllary -but I doubt that one played too well down at the local bar with Joe Six Pack.

So, what nickname will Trump come up with next??? He’s already calling Washington, D.C. a “swamp”, and our electoral system, “rigged”.

I can imagine a “President Trump” coming up with something catchy like “Damaged Democracy” or “Retarded Republic” as he brazenly subverts the Constitution and the rule of law -much to the delight of his more civics-challenged supporters. Meanwhile, G.O.P. stalwarts like “Low Energy Jeb”, “Lyin’ Ted” and “Captured McCain” continue to go along with Trump -in varying degrees- standing there like deer caught in the headlights.

Of course, I can just hear some people saying “All politicians do this” or “Look at the nickname Bill Clinton gave his hairdresser back when he got his $200 haircut and held up air travel around the globe.” (It was called “Hairgate” back in 1992, believe it or not. And it might not have even been true but, hey, let’s face it, people have been lying about the Clintons for decades now. Who even bothers to fact check anymore?)

For an interesting discussion of Trump and his penchant for bullying nicknames, see Elizabeth Preza’s thoughtful article on Alternet.com: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/donald-trump-bullying-his-way-presidency Preza concludes, that, “…. Trump has certainly elevated the indecency to a level not witnessed in decades.”

Yup, “indecent”. And, to that thought, I’ll add one more word: “tragic”.

Now, I gotta go do school work. Yup, at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Enough of this procrastinating. Enjoy your Sunday,folks.

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- John Ogozalek says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 5:17 am
  
  BTW On the Colbert video you can skip to about minute 3 have a laugh….or a cry, as it were.
  
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- Duane Swacker says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 9:32 am
  
  “why do some people keep making Hillary responsible for Bill’s behavior? What?”
  
  See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwBirf4BWew
  
  From wiki:
  
  Derided by the Feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wynette in later years defended the song as not a call for women to place themselves second to men, but rather a suggestion that women attempt to overlook their husbands’ shortcomings and faults if they truly love them (and in fact, the last line in the final verse says “after all, he’s just a man”). Wynette always defended her signature song. The song remained contentious into the early 1990s, when soon-to-be First Lady Hillary Clinton told CBS’ 60 Minutes during the ‘Gennifer Flowers’ interview that she “wasn’t some little woman ‘standing by my man’ like Tammy Wynette.” The condemnation from the public was immediate, even coming from Wynette herself.
  
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  - John Ogozalek says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 10:54 am
    
    Like most oldies, I like the original version (you linked above) better. Thanks for the tune, Duane. Always appreciated.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 10:58 am
    
    Duane,
    
    The bad behavior was Bill’s, not Hillary’s.
    
    The real double standard is ignoring Trump’s sexual assaults while complaining about Hillary, who has never been accused of any sexual assaults. Trump has successfully manipulated people into agreeing that whatever he said was locker room talk and did not reflect his attitudes, behavior, and values re women.
    
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- Lloyd Lofthouse says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 11:49 am
  
  Snopes fact checked many of the claim’s against the Clintons and found most of them false, some mixed, and a few true.
  
  If you click the link to discover what was true, you might end up roaring in laughter.
  
  http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/clintons.asp
  
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- Michael Paul Goldenberg says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 3:31 pm
  
  So every Hillary backer who used demeaning, ageist attacks and names for Bernie Sanders and his supporters is . . . a bully. But it seems increasingly that some here suffer a strange selective deafness and blindness. As Barry Goldwater once said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Yeah, well. . . bilge.
  
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m4potw says:

November 6, 2016 at 7:40 am

To some educators who are sarcastic or intentional to research and to teach the art of bullying from DT or about D.Trump:

Realistically, low class in human beings is the animal class in human body where their animal instinct is to kill or to harm the weaker opponents for a selfish satisfaction/ desire OR GREED, NOT ONLY JUST FOR SURVIVAL.

It is not worthy effort to compare crude Trump to other politicians who never sell out or invite America to Russia and China to hack American cyberspace.

In short, please re-examine Donald Trump’s low class tactic in order to understand his nature as well as to examine all of his confident advisers’ background like Paul Manafort and Roger Jason Stone, Jr. ( who is an American political consultant, lobbyist, and strategist, noted for his use of opposition research, usually for candidates of the Republican Party.)

I hope that Republican Party and Republican voters WILL NOT accept or forgive Trump’s attitude of a traitor. Back2basic

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m4potw says:

November 6, 2016 at 7:43 am

Sorry, it should read as:

It is not worthy effort to compare crude Trump to other politicians who never sell out America to Russia and China or to invite Russian to hack American cyberspace. Back2basic

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RaiseTheBarHigher says:

November 6, 2016 at 7:54 am

I hope this teacher and other commenters on this blog remember to treat all children with kindness, no matter how their parents vote. I did not vote for Trump, but I understand why he has supporters. To the people who continuously post disparaging comments about a whole segment of society who are truly suffering, get out of teaching if you can’t open your mind and behave appropriately.

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- Joe says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 8:39 am
  
  There are a chunk of Trump supporters who are not suffering at all, who are well off (I have seen some luxury cars with Trump bumper stickers) and there is a contingent of billionaires for Trump.
  
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  - Joel Herman says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 9:21 am
    
    The overwhelming majority of Trump voters are not working class Americans . The problem is some idiots in the Democratic establishment decided to abandon those working class Americans for Wall street money ,gender and identity politics . So here we are days away from the election and democrats are scrambling in the INDUSTRIAL MIDWEST the heart of the northern Democratic party of old to keep a fascist cabal out of office.
    
    http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/democrats-cant-abandon-white-working-class
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 10:59 am
    
    Joel,
    
    One must also ask why working people in the Midwest elect and re-elect the likes of Scott Walker, rice Rauner, and Rick Snyder.
    
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  - Duane Swacker says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 12:41 pm
    
    I ask that question myself, Diane.
    
    Needless to say living out here in the Midwest I have seen this phenomena for years, starting with Unca Ronnie and his appeal. Was just talking with a neighbor who voted early and voted for the Trumpster (needless to say I called him a commie bastard-ha ha for doing so!). He just couldn’t bring himself to vote for Clinton (which I thoroughly understand). He’s not uneducated, an engineer by study, very liberal on most social issues but also conservative on some others, which I find to be common around here, a “live and let live” philosophy, just don’t flaunt your choice of lifestyle, and, perhaps that is answer to the question. These folks see the Dims and Clinton as the party of “we’ll tell you how to live” (whether that is true or not is debatable) and therefore in their eyes vote the lesser of two evils in regards to civil liberties.
    
    For an interesting take on this presidential campaign and its “side effects” read the following (its a tad long but it will give a flavor of the progressive opposition to the Clintonites):
    
    http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/04/difference-american-style-of-high-horse-riders-and-low-hanging-fruit/
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 12:57 pm
    
    Duane,
    
    Trump will tell people how to live.
    
    No abortions.
    No rights to marriage equality.
    No regulation of fracking, coal mining or drilling.
    Lower taxes for the 1%.
    It all depends where you sit.
    
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  - Duane Swacker says:
    
    November 7, 2016 at 11:03 am
    
    Oh, I understand what you say and agree. That’s part of why I could never vote for him.
    
    At the same time I could never vote for someone who gloated over such a horrible death that a fellow human suffered as did Ghadaffi and who appears to want to prove her “macho bonafides” by continuing and escalating the illegal wars of aggression of this country.
    
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  - Joel Herman says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 12:50 pm
    
    Jay Gould once quipped , he “could pay half the working class to kill the other half”.
    
    Which Thomas Frank Book do you want to talk about.” Iowa” or “Liberal ”
    When these people had decent Union jobs they had a more liberal world view. Even if they were low information voters they could be reached by Union leadership and convinced of their long term interests . De industrialization and de unionization have changed the dynamic.. Yes that was Republican policy. That Democrats have participated in the de-industrialization is criminal. (TRADE NAFTA TPP). It ain’t the Robots
    
    I am not going to quote Mike Lofgren again. But that 2011 article nailed it. I believe the Times had an interactive yesterday that showed the change in voting districts over election cycles .
    So remember that 96 Clinton commercial “IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID” .
    
    But if “Black lives are going to matter” at all they better pretend Obama is on the ballot. The worst thing Trump said the whole election wasn’t on a that show buss. It was what he said the same day about the Central Park Five.
    Attorney General Ruddy Giuliani will assure the rights of minorities .
    
    The problem is not those of us who criticize her but vote for her and encourage others to do the same. Perhaps the bigger problem has been the failure of many to see this steam roller coming. Including the President who kept pushing the TPP till a few weeks ago.
    Hopefully we aren’t conducting an autopsy on Wednesday morning .
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 12:53 pm
    
    Obama is still pushing TPP
    
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  - Michael Fiorillo says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 1:12 pm
    
    A range of polls do show a large contingent of Trump supporters among the petit bourgeoisie in the Republican Party and among Independents.
    
    Regarding the white working class part of Trump’s base, what would the situation be if those voters were working in full-time, living wage-and-benefit-paying, unionized jobs? What if the minimum wage was $15.00 (or more) an hour, a policy yet to be endorsed by Hillary Clinton?
    
    Unionized workers vote Democratic at significantly higher rates than unorganized workers, yet the modern Democratic Party has largely abandoned organized labor and working people, except at election time. Thus, Trump’s political resonance among people who are certain to be harmed if he becomes President.
    
    West Virginia is a perfect example: as a once-solid union state – environmental and occupational safety issues related to coal mining aside – it reliably voted Democratic for decades, until Third Way Democratic policies, which strategically sacrifice traditional constituents of the party to political triangulation, became dominant.
    
    Deindustrialization and the policy-driven precariousness of working class life, represented and accelerated by the kind of trade deals the Clinton wing of the Democratic party has long supported (and secretly continues to support, as Podesta emails suggest) have contributed to these voters’ and communities’ disaffection from the Democratic Party. And that is not an entirely irrational response, even if seeing Donnie as the remedy is.
    
    As Thomas Frank and others have pointed out, the white working class is absolutely correct in sensing the (at best, indifferent; at worst, contemptuous) ways in which an increasingly affluent, “meritocratic,” cosmopolitan, urban, coastal and affluent Democratic Party has written it off.
    
    Public school teachers should be able to empathize with this, since what is the smug contempt that organizations like TFA (“the best and the brightest, unlike those loser union lifers in the classroom”) have long shown us, but our industry’s variant of the same?
    
    The fact that this abandonment of the working class occurred simultaneously with the Party’s decision to substitute Identity for Class politics – social liberalism has lower costs and has shown itself to be less threatening to deep power structures than a living minimum wage – fertilized the soil for Trump’s emergence as a viable candidate, and also gives resonance to his white fear and white supremacist messaging.
    
    Even if Hillary wins, this toxic dynamic will continue, since she is both a product and an enabler of it. That the election is as close as it appears to be is also proof of what a flawed and weak candidate she is.
    
    The cosmic irony is that the only way to change this dangerous process is to vote for her, and then immediately move on many popular fronts (health care, housing, education, trade, international relations, banking and finance …) to force her and the Democratic Party to the left.
    
    Successfully doing so would deny fascistic tendencies the oxygen they need to spread. Absent that, Hillary’s election will just lay the groundwork for a more dangerous and competent demagogue in the future.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 1:19 pm
    
    Michael,
    
    I have heard Hillary endorse $15 an hour minimum wage many times.
    
    Could she get it past a Republican Congress?
    
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  - Joel Herman says:
    
    November 6, 2016 at 2:15 pm
    
    Thomas Frank = “Whats the matter Kansas” not Iowa Another screw up
    
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  - Michael Fiorillo says:
    
    November 7, 2016 at 6:14 am
    
    CNN’s fact ratings judged Hillary’s claim to support a $15.00 an hour minimum wage as “True, but very misleading.”
    
    Not cause for much confidence there…
    
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  - Lloyd Lofthouse says:
    
    November 7, 2016 at 12:21 pm
    
    This is for Joe. Those rich-white people that support Trump are racists who want to “Make America Great Again”, just like the good old boys wearing white hoods in the KKK that wanted to keep American a racist nation.
    
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  - Norwegian Filmmaker says:
    
    November 7, 2016 at 7:03 am
    
    Diane et al,
    
    I am totally lost here too! How can anyone in the Midwest vote for someone like Scott Walker or Rick Snyder?? Does ANYONE have a psycho-socio explanation of this phenomenon? There must be some mass psychology to all of this.
    
    It’s as though the sheep led the farmer to the slaughterhouse, handed him the knife, and actually instructed him how to commit the slaughter.
    
    What gives?
    
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Joe says:

November 6, 2016 at 9:28 am

Under the right circumstances, we all have the capability to be bullies. Or possibly we were bullies at one point in our lives. Most of us see the error in our bullying ways and make the proper corrections and hopefully atone for our bullying.

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Duane Swacker says:

November 6, 2016 at 9:36 am

Currently, public schools are bullying factories from the top administration down. “If you don’t do what we want you’ll lose your job. Implement the educational malpractices or else!”

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- NoBrick says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 10:17 am
  
  Holy repression Batman. Does this mean the engineered lines of division rest
  on contemptuous authoritarian marginalisation? OUCH. I would
  never have guessed the institutional mechanisms established by
  power worked that way. Maybe the concentration of wealth and
  political power is the outcome of deliberate policy, rather than a
  natural and inevitable “event”.
  
  I must reread the tea leaves and have my crystal ball recalibrated.
  
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- Abigail Shure says:
  
  November 6, 2016 at 11:44 am
  
  I am being bullied at my place of employment.
  
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m4potw says:

November 6, 2016 at 9:51 am

It is sad that losing job, losing freedom, losing a meaningful living, or losing human decency so that we must become savage and the beast to live in fascism.

What will drive people from being civilized to being barbarous so that just to live in fear?

We should blame on our own gullibility and cowardice in accepting fascism in the beginning without fighting it back and exposing it publicly. Back2basic

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Ponderosa says:

November 6, 2016 at 10:20 am

How surreal that one could use a sitting president to copiously illustrate for kids every feature of a bully. The fact that he’s president undermines the curriculum’s premise that bullying is aberrant behavior.

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