A tearful, unscripted moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has unleashed a flood of praise and admiration – but also prompted ugly online bullying.
Gus Walz, who has a nonverbal learning disorder as well as anxiety and ADHD, watched excitedly from the front row of Chicago’s United Center and sobbed openly Wednesday night as his father, the Democratic nominee for vice president, delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.
…
Conservative columnist and right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter mocked the teenager’s tears. “Talk about weird,” she wrote on X. The message has since been deleted.
Mike Crispi, a Trump supporter and podcaster from New Jersey, mocked Walz’s “stupid crying son” on X and added, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.”
Alec Lace, a Trump supporter who hosts a podcast about fatherhood, took his own swipe at the teenager: “Get that kid a tampon already,” he wrote, an apparent reference to a Minnesota state law that Walz signed as governor in that required schools to provide free menstrual supplies to students.
I mean, Republicans are usually deep in the throes of toxic masculinity these days, so as shitty as it is that they’re responding this way, it’s not surprising.
Of course their reasons weren’t love…
Jones has some Chester A Arthur vibes going with that facial hair. WTF?
Wow Republicans are weird. I was watching that and could only think what a beautiful moment it was. It was touching how incredibly proud Gus is of his dad, which suggests to me that they’ve probably got a pretty healthy family.
I love Anne Coulter tried to call him weird and then had to delete her Tweet because making fun of kids it’s actually the weird thing.
Instead republicans cry when the oligarchs take all their money via inflation and increased housing costs
All this culture nonsense is such a distraction
“Fellas, is it gay to be proud of your parents?”
Repubs are bullying this kid for being proud of his father because they’ve never experienced it themselves. In either direction. They are weak and pathetic losers.
Well my son hates me, so these guys are pretty wEIRrRrRd
Don’t listen to the “we didn’t know he had a disability” crowd. They knew what they were doing.
Give them a few terms in power and that kid advances from “having a disability” to “being euthanised for the good of the nation”.
I didn’t know he had a disability, and all I thought was “That kid is really proud of his father, good for him”
I’m more irritated that so many people use his disability as an “excuse.” If he were the most average, neurotypical boy in the world, it would still be perfectly normal and acceptable to get excited and emotional about his father potentially being the next vice president.
Maybe, maybe not.
It’s irrelevant because that’s not what happened.
I get what you’re saying, but I find comparisons like this - although founded in fairness- to be ultimately unhelpful because they draw consideration away from what did happen: bullying and otherism. This isn’t about what might have been, it’s about what happened. And we can say how it would have been unacceptable under this or that circumstance, but that, I feel, detracts from us all uniting behind saying that THIS, under THESE circumstances was wrong.
I’m not trying to criticize you at all, your intentions are good here. I just don’t think that we should lose focus of criticizing the bullies for the reason why they were bullying in the first place. They were bullying this kid because he is different. Because he is an other. If he wasn’t, they probably would not have, or they would not have attacked his otherness.
The person you replied to wasn’t disagreeing that they would bully him for being different. I just see them as saying no matter who or how someone is it should be ok for anyone to cry while being proud of their parent. I wish I could cry for being proud of mine but they’re on the other side and probably mocked him as well.
I don’t think you need to try to be dismissive of the commenters opinion, it’s perfectly valid just as yours and mine. You can get yours out without having to say “I think you’re wrong.” Anyways 3rd party perspective over.
I wasn’t dismissing or even criticizing them— I think you misunderstood my comment.
Well not to be overly pedantic just because you say you’re not trying to criticize them doesn’t mean you weren’t. As for your message it seems to be lasered focused the kid’s level of ablelism which is a valid point but it doesn’t invalidate the above comment.
If you’re claiming to know my intentions and thoughts better than I, myself, do, then I suggest you open a psychic hotline.
Otherwise, perhaps acknowledge that, perhaps, you might just be wrong.
Or just become hostile and defensive that works too. Hopefully the rest of your day goes better.
Isn’t that a post birth abortion?
Excellent. The press have a story they can jump up and down on for a day or two and leave Harris alone.
Excellent work, Gus. You did good a hundred different ways, sir.
Let them get all this alpha/beta male crap out if they want to. Nothing says “weird” better than applying to people what was initially intended (and is now widely rejected) as a description of social dynamics among canines.
I feel like that’s not the win they think it is. A young man is passionate and loves his father dearly, and has been raised in a loving environment that allows him to express himself openly. The cum cups and diapers are fine, but genuine emotion?: “Weird.”
Says a lot about these people and is honestly kind of tragic they love their lives this way.
Some would even say “live”
Left or Right, anyone who can cry on cue to a speech they’ve likely rehearsed a hundred times in their head, isn’t worth paying attention to. Unpopular I know.
For example, I adore John Stewart and agree with almost everything he does, except when he made that emotional impassioned tearful speech a few years back, never once mucking his lines.
Its just a trust thing. Tears sway people, and if its in the moment and captured ad-hoc then I am likely moved, but if all lenses are on it and the speech sounds forced, I switch off.
I don’t think I understand. Are you suggesting that it’s impossible to prepare a speech about something you care deeply about?
Or are you saying that people only cry the first time they tell an emotional story?
I’m sure there are people with those experiences, and maybe you’re one of them. If it helps, I can attest that there are “well rehearsed” stories that I’ve told dozens of times, and I still cry during each telling.
A little bit of everything, I think.
To me, if you care deeply about a topic, then you should be able to communicate that by merit of your expertise in it and not by how emotionally invested you are in it.
Or to put it another way: if crying is literally part of the story, then maybe don’t tell the story when the cameras are rolling, unless of course the story was less about the speech and more about the emotion.
Let’s just take emotions out of politics. It educates absolutely nobody, and the only people won to your side are won by the depth of your professed emotion and not by the validity of your words.
Interesting, thanks for explaining. I agree with the aspiration but maybe not the practicality?
In a perfect world elections would be about hard policy discussions, but in 2024 policy barely matters. Campaigns don’t even release real platforms any more. The first party to take the emotion out of politics would lose horribly, because so many voters respond to it.
Personally, I also like when people acknowledge that policy discussions impact real people. I think there’s an important role for displayed genuine emotion in rational discussion.
I also don’t think that what we’re discussing is relevant to Gus Walz. We have every reason to believe that was a genuine and beautiful apolitical moment.
I agree, this is 2024 and the quickest way to win voters is appeals to emotion/nostalgia rather than punctuating a platform that no one will read. It’s a sad truth.
The kid seems nice, and for what it’s worth I do believe it was genuine. I just wish neither side will wield it for their own political motivations.
If bullying a kid is all they got, they don’t got much.
You’re telling me the gutter of humanity couldn’t lift themselves out of the slime of division, hate, and bigotry to see a son who loves his father vibing and letting the love go in a great moment of high emotions?
Color me shocked. Fucking weirdos.
There are honestly few things in this world more weird than the idea of mocking pure expressions of love.
These people have lost their humanity, and are drowning in their own “alpha culture” cruelty. To make things even more weird, the “alpha” they follow is an amoral, senile man with a low IQ and a propensity to wear diapers in public.
Yeah, how is this a headline? Bullies continue to bully. These are not swing voters, I don’t want to think about them anymore. I hate how much of Kamala’s speech I spent veering from sobbing joy to wondering how the right is going to snippet the moment.
That fucking boy, the reflection on that loving father and mother, instilled in me once again, a feeling that society is progressing, the way I felt from 07 to 16. He cracked the broken frozen part of my heart right open.
I want this fucking maga Nazi bullshit to go away so we can get back on track to loving one another more openly and inventing cool future shit to stop climate change. Not giving my taxes to babies who want to play with my infrastructure like it’s their toys.
They don’t understand kids loving their parents.
Specifically their own kids loving them.
No, they don’t understand sons loving their fathers.
They’re weirdly into daughters loving their fathers though.
Yeah would have loved if it was an attractive 15 year old girl instead, probably would have invited her on a jet to a private island…
Ann coulter literally said “talk about weird.”
“That kid really loves his dad. Is no one else seeing this?! What a strange relationship.”
The conservative mindset in a nutshell.
I like how the one lady tried to flip the “weird” label onto it and failed so spectacularly she had to delete it because it turns out normal people don’t think it’s weird for guys to cry or to love your parents.
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The summary doesn’t even mention that the poor kid has a nonverbal learning disability, anxiety, and ADHD, and these clowns are mocking him.
And on top of that it shouldn’t even matter. I hope that one day my kids admire and love me the same way Gus showed.
Most probably don’t even think those things are real.
Correct. I am older than 10 years old.
I can’t believe that the sudden rise in diagnoses’ is being seen as anything other than the first generation of adults that take mental health seriously finally reached a point in life where they had health insurance and disposable income to focus on their own mental health.
I have had ADHD all my life. When my mom died, I found letters in her things from my school counselor advising I be tested. I found letters from pissed off family members telling her to get me tested.
She didn’t do any of that. But I do remember the time she told me she never got my sister tested for dyslexia because she knew “none of [her] babies were retarded.”My dad would rather think he had a lazy, stupid, worthless kid than that mental illness was real.
Parents would find their baby child had been replaced by odd beings who were almost but not quite human.
However strange appearances aside it was their behaviour that marked them out - changelings were said to be either extremely badly behaved - constantly crying and prone to violence, or at the other end of the spectrum strangely docile, often mute and seemingly unable to comprehend anything about the human world they had been left in.
https://www.hypnogoria.com/folklore_changelings.html
Yep, totally a brand new thing that hasn’t appeared throughout human history.
It shouldn’t matter whether he is LD. No one should be bullied.
Research shows that bullying behavior often stems from a combination of factors such as a desire for social dominance, a lack of empathy, or modeling of aggressive behaviors at home, said Kristen Eccleston, a former special education teacher and advocate for children with social-emotional needs.
Be best.
Too bad some people just don’t know about or choose to not follow the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I think many people in fact actively get a high from feeling powerful, and therefore doing the exact opposite of what they want done to them, and then are usually the people to whine the loudest when anything of the sort happens to them.
For example Trump’s speeches are like 85% insulting people, whining about those critical about him, etc. Huge middle school bully energy.
Yes and there was recently a speech he gave whining about how he was treated.
Recently? I can’t recall a speech he’s given since he started running for president where he didn’t whine about perceived mistreatment
Lol. You’re right
That’s because they’re “Christians” and nowhere in the Bible does it say to be kind to others, or to have empathy, or to respect each other… /s
Love thy neighbor
Edit: I stopped reading before the /s. My bad. This one’s on me
I almost didn’t add that /s at the end figuring “surely nobody would think I’m serious”. Apparently my comment wasn’t dripping with enough sarcasm!
Case of not seeing the wit for the trees. In the topsy-turvy landscape of the last 8 years or so, the problem is that “dripping with” part. The weirdos do always go for the double-down after all, so adding more starts risking confusion with that tactic of theirs.
When you’re a narcissist, “others” is nonsensical, because the only person worthy of agency and empathy is you. That’s why the golden rule doesn’t work - it’s like if they were colorblind, they lack the capacity to even understand it.
You emphasized lack of empathy, but I think we also need to focus on “a desire for social dominance” because it describes exactly what these fascists have planned for America.
Agreed. It’s interesting to me that normal, healthy people just go about their business, and those not so healthy want to impose their sickness on the rest of us. It’s contagious, for the weaker among us, too, apparently.
It absolutely matters. It’s like the difference between hitting someone who’s weaker than you, and hitting someone in a wheelchair. When you’re bullying, you’re punching down. When your victim is an even more vulnerable member of society (disabled, poor, elderly, neurodivergent, etc), you’re punching way down and are a piece of shit.
you’re punching way down and are a piece of shit.
Bullying still makes you a piece of shit even if the victim isn’t disabled, though.
The article mentioned a conservative talk-show host who called Gus a “blubbering bitch boy” and then retracted the statement when he found out the kid has a disability. No, either way, that is not okay!
Bullying makes you a piece of shit even if the victim isn’t disabled.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting otherwise. But like everything in reality, it’s not black and white. If you can’t see how it’s worse when the person has disabilities, then I don’t know what to tell you.
I suspect you understand it just fine though.
I do understand, and I think if the only reason a person isn’t bullying someone is because that person is differently abled, that doesn’t make the person who refrained only because the potential victim is differently abled a genuinely decent person, just that they know they are less likely to get away without consequences, if anyone else finds out.
Who are you arguing with? Nobody here (that I’ve seen) has said or even suggested that.
Yeah, we’re on the same page: bullying is bad no matter what. But surely you agree it’s worse to bully someone with a disability…?
There’ll sadly be a lot of MAGA people who think those conditions don’t exist.
Good catch. I’ve added it to the summary. Thanks.
It shouldn’t even matter. The kid should be allowed to express his emotions without being mocked for it. Even if he didn’t have any disability, he behaved perfectly fine. Most folks actually found it touching. While it is cruel to mock someone with a disability, I also don’t want the disability to become a way for the media to “justify” his way of expressing himself. There is no need to justify it at all.
Does that mean he’s not verbal?
No he is verbal, he said “that’s my dad!” the same way dads say “that’s my boy!”
I think one of us should look up the labels of his disabilities and what they mean, but I’ve so far been too lazy.
