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I would have loved to have sued that fucking school. Not that I could afford a lawyer. Maybe I'd start a GoFundMe.

I feel like the monkey's paw outcome here is public schools closing because no one (read: conservatives) wants to pay for it, or change the schools to be better about the underlying problems.

Dude it's been this way since the 90's, at least. It has been turbocharged due to technology is the main difference. Ask me how I know.

American culture is abusive in general, it's not shocking that abusive behavior has become the norm.

In societies where the law has broken down and failed to make an orderly society, people turn to mob mentality to "punish" those they see as in need of punishment.

In American society law has been broken since at least the Reagan era, and we're seeing the societal effects in real time. The people doing the bullying are just as under the thumb of America as anyone else, but like classic mob mentality, they've simply chosen people they don't like to abuse as opposed to real criminality. Why? Because most humans are stupid, base motherfuckers, and they always assume that they are a "good" person, and by extension their friends are "good" people so why should they do any introspection, it means that the other people are "bad" people. It's the same tribal fucking bullshit it has always been and this is exactly why we started trying to build orderly societies with law enforcement and justice you could count on. Now that that's squarely out of the fucking window, you have a society that is all too ready to dole out mob violence which rarely equates to "justice." The worst is that the mob is often in the wrong and also in the majority as evidenced by the above anecdote.

When justice fails, when justice is delayed, when justice is deferred, when the cops have special rights to brutalize you but are not held to the same standards and are allowed to break the law, this is what you fucking end up with. A society ready to fucking eat itself alive. It's not fucking rocket science (although it is social science).

Bullying goes unpunished even outside of Trump’s sphere of influence.

I'm guessing a lot of abuse and neglect. And/or evangelical Christianity in the case of the people bullying her trans friend. But clearly they have had it pushed into their brains that anyone who isn't "normal" needs to have "normal" beaten into them.

My daughter's friend for obvious reasons. My daughter because she likes dressing like a punk rocker and they decided she's a furry because she wears leather collars. Then we made the terrible mistake of allowing her go as the anime catgirl character she wanted to dress up as for Halloween. My wife, who is great at this stuff, made a costume that was exactly like the picture my daughter showed us. She went to school that morning and an eighth grader asked to take a picture with her... which she then put on Tiktok with some nasty messages and shared with the entire school. We didn't even wait for the administration to make her apologize again. That was the end of her time in school.

And honestly, if I could, I'd pull her friend out of that school, pick him up every day and put him in online school with my daughter. My wife joked that I'd start a school here for queer kids (my daughter is also queer, but that wasn't the bullying that bothered her, it was the furry stuff). Honestly, if I could, I would.

Bullies come from all walks of life...

Mean as shit. I've actually met the parents of two different guys that bullied me. They were poor white trash that smoked and drank and gave you that sense of fight or flight that usually only kicks in when a goddamn bear attacks you.

I suppose it's easy to ignore any signs of it happening from that point of view. Their kids have friends (the clique) who can represent the facade of everything being just fine, which every parent desperately wants to believe in in advance. If they catch a glimpse of it, they'll write it off as the bullied kid being the problem.

And that's best case. In worse cases, the parents will encourage the bullying directly or indirectly and see nothing wrong with it.

It's the same way that things like racism or sexism are taught from one generation to the next. It's not that anyone wants their child to be so, they just don't see it happening themselves.

These kinds of behaviours don't happen because they want to hurt someone. It happens because they want to protect themselves (even if it's at the cost of others) so they can fit in with the popular people. The desire to fit in comes from fear (or acknowledgement) of not being able to solve stuff on their own. So instead of teaching their children algebra or whatever is necessary to perform, they teach them to fit in at all cost, because that's what worked for themselves.

So in short, it's ignorance paired with herd mentality.

Free speech doesn’t end inside the school door. Pretty hard for a school to ban messages on school shirts.

Most high schools in those states, I'd imagine, have rules about bullying and walking out of class, and I'm quite sure all of those states have laws about murder.