Gus Walz won over the internet wearing his heart on his sleeve at the DNC. But the bullying that followed is what kids experience every day, some say.

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.

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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.

    • @[email protected]English
      21•4 months ago

      Correct. I was not diagnosed 10 years ago.

      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.”

      • Jerkface (any/all)English
        14•4 months ago

        My dad would rather think he had a lazy, stupid, worthless kid than one struggling with mental illness, because somehow that would have been a greater reflection on him than my innate lazy, etc nature would.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•4 months ago

      Parents would find their baby child had been replaced by odd beings who were almost but not quite human.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.