Donald Trump is a toxic waste of threats, insults, and ignorant, wacko ideas. But I didn’t know he was such a bad influence on America’s children.
According to the always entertaining Southern Poverty Law Center, an online survey asked 2,000 teachers about the 2016 presidential campaign. Their responses were unique, to say the least.
Teachers across the U.S. “reported an increase in the bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates,” the release said.
Titled “The Trump Effect: The impact of the presidential campaign on our nation’s schools,” the report found that GOP front-runner Donald Trump was of particular concern to scores of teachers who cited his comments about deporting undocumented immigrants, building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and banning all Muslims from entering the country.
Out of 5,000 total comments in the survey, more than 1,000 mentioned Trump, though the survey did not identify any of the candidates by name in its questions, the report said. In comparison, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were named fewer than 200 times together, according to the report.
More than two-thirds of teachers said students — mainly immigrants, children of immigrants and Muslims — “expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their families after the election.”
“My students are terrified of Donald Trump,” said one teacher from a middle school with a large population of African-American Muslims, according to the report. “They think that if he’s elected, all black people will get sent back to Africa.”
Another teacher said that a Latino child in her kindergarten class has been asking every day “Is the wall here yet?” after being told by classmates he would be deported and blocked from returning by a wall.
The report also noted that more than a third of the teachers who responded “observed an increase in anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment.”
A number of teachers said Muslim students were being called “terrorists” or “ISIS,” and one teacher noted that a fifth grader told a Muslim student “that he was supporting Donald Trump because he was going to kill all of the Muslims if he became president!”
Another problem instructors noted was that this kind of rhetoric isn’t just coming from other students at school but also from social media, TV, radio, newspapers and rallies, so the sources of kids’ “fear” and “anxiety” are coming from many different directions.
So Trump’s words are not only instilling fear in kids — aided no doubt by exaggerating and even lying teachers — but also inspiring kids to bully others. That’s quite the power Mr. Trump commands.
It makes you wonder what else Trump can do. Besides routinely causing liberals’ heads to explode, perhaps he can cause the rise of the oceans to slow. Oh…wait. That’s been done already. Perhaps he will be able to create the most transparent administration in history? Oops — already taken.
He can always promise that if you like your doctor…forget it.
It’s balmy to think that kids pay any attention at all to politics, except to what their teachers tell them. The responses in this survey are either outright lies or the result of brainwashing by educators.
But honesty is one virtue not possessed by the SPLC. They are poisonously partisan, fingering mainstream conservative individuals and organizations as “hate groups.” The results of this survey should surprise no one.
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