BRING BACK BULLYING by Geoffrey Ingersoll, Editor at Large - the Daily Caller (Apr 2025) / State of the Day
" Good morning, Dear Reader,
I’ll admit I had a lot of trouble deciding what to write about this morning. There’s a lot going on. Hegseth is hurt at the Pentagon. Infighting at State under Rubio. Musk is “stepping back” from DOGE for a bit. Trump and Bessent are signalling they’re ready to talk to China.
Doom scrolling through the interwebs can be a bit of a drag, to be honest.
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently though …
BRING BACK BULLYING
What a lot of people don’t really seem to know about bullying is that it remains true across cultures, socioeconomic quintiles, even time.
Kids in prestigious boarding schools experience it just as kids in entirely disconnected indigenous tribes do.
The universality of bullying across human experience and history suggests it’s evolutionarily coded. It’s literally in our DNA.
As with anything, bullying has its downsides. There are edge cases. God knows I wouldn’t want to be a teenage girl on Instagram who’s been singled out by a pack of middle school hyenas.
(I was, however, a red-headed step-child who moved schools quite a bit, so you can draw your own conclusions there.)
But in most cases, I’d argue, even as bullying is juvenile, it acts as a social control. It also builds mental and social fortitude. The village idiot who burned down the windmill should in fact be in the stocks, surrounded by scamps hurling rotten vegetables and laughing. The kid who confronts the bully in the schoolyard is much more likely to do so down the road in the boardroom.
And so on.
Bullying is scrutiny. It proves efficacy. It acts to hold together a community under social norms.
Take, for example, an exchange between Justice Gorsuch and a lawyer representing a Maryland school district. Montgomery County schools believe they should not allow an “opt out” for teaching – and I’m not joking about this – books about marginal human “sexuality” to students as young as three years old.
The suit was lodged by a Muslim parent who said the lack of an opt out is a state encroachment on religious liberty.
Gorsuch has just established for the record that Montgomery County uses “English language” curriculum as a backdoor to teach kids as young as three about drag queens, prostitutes, and other marginal sexual experiences.
“And you’ve included these in the English language curriculum rather than the human sexuality curriculum to influence students, is that fair? That’s what the district court found,” says Gorsuch.
In other words, they hid it in a place where it was unlikely to be found in order to continue their influence campaign.
“I think that the extent the district court found it was intended to influence them was to influence them toward civility. The natural consequence of being exposed to … ”
“Whatever,” Gorsuch interrupts, “but to influence them.”
“In the manner which I previously stated, yes.”
“Okay. And responding to parents who were concerned, you would agree there was some intemperate language used?”
Gorsuch is referring to county officials saying Muslim parents “were on the same side as white supremacists and bigots.”
If you catch the subtle drift here, Gorsuch is teasing out that while Montgomery County officials are busy introducing children to these subjects at stupefyingly young ages in order to build a culture of “civility,” they’re bullying parents who object. Literally name-calling them. Parents who represent religions that have billions of followers. Normal people in other words.
If this were my regime? Dust off your rotten cabbage folks, we’d be throwing it all at them. We don’t introduce three-year olds to marginal human sexual experiences (DUH, IDIOT!).
Bullying, on the other hand, isn’t just restricted to enforcing norms in schools. It’s also a function of business, competition, even geopolitics.
Nobody embodies this more than the one and only Donald Trump.
China is convening a UN meeting today titled, “Bullying and Unilateralism,” aimed at that very same Trump. Their contention is Trump is a big meanie for pushing China around and attempting to reorder global trade in ways that are more advantageous to US interests.
Just like the county officials bullied parents, China is no different. They swing their heft to reorder things to their advantage all the time, both inside and outside their own country.
Try to be a member of the UN and recognize a Democratic Taiwan, see how that goes over with Beijing. Be a Muslim Uyghur in China. Good luck not getting castrated! Or, be a person victimized by the US pharmaceutical regime. Addicted to opiods? China’s got your back. The CCP openly brags about shipping fentanyl across our borders to kill our people.
Yeah, I think we need to reorder some global trade, guys, don’t you?
Outside of those Montgomery County officials, it’s hard for me to imagine a group of people more in need of bullying than the den of thieves in China.
But alas, there is. Harvard.
Trump is bullying the ivies right now to ditch all their overtly racist coursework and administrative policies. Harvard decided to “stand up” to Trump, winning the favor of drool-faced liberal elites everywhere.
Ironically enough, while Harvard has roughly <100 courses on “Social Justice,” it recently teamed up with China’s XPCC, the paramilitary group most known for building forced labor gulags for a particular native religious group.
Weird, right?
It’s almost as if there isn’t enough bullying in the world. And while traditional bullying has largely been culled as a result of a neoliberal, decades-long campaign, the vacuum it left is being filled with the worst kinds of people.
Everyone from blue-haired, “Black Lives” freaks hurling molotov cocktails and county officials perverting young minds to hulking bureaucracies like Harvard and its Chinese pals poisoning the fabric of our country.
They’ve all been wielding the bully stick lately.
Time for the normals to dust off their own bully sticks, I say. The world will be a better place as a result.
