🙄 NY Times: A Campaign to 'Bring Back Bullying' 🙄 [View all]
“If I’d never got bullied, I don’t think I’d be where I am today,” said Mr. Harris, who has since deleted his TikTok video. “I don’t think I would have the motivation to prove people wrong.”
A chorus of people online has been arguing, with varying levels of sincerity, that today’s young people could stand a dose of adolescent viciousness. Plenty of these posts read as outrage bait; still, they have alarmed mental health professionals who say that bullying is far too serious a problem to be laughed off or recast as a character-building exercise. News reports of teenagers’ suicides following intense bullying are published with regularity.
Yet the videos are just one manifestation of a cultural pendulum swing away from gentleness and accommodation and toward provocation and hostility. Online and at the highest levels of politics, sensitivity has given way to name-calling; wokeness is out and strongmen are in.
Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told military officers at Marine Corps Base Quantico that his department would review its definitions of “bullying,” “hazing” and “toxic leadership” to make sure that the terms were not “weaponized” to weaken the military.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/style/bullying-tiktok-social-media.html
https://archive.ph/awKG5
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