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.

  • @djsoren19
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    1120 days ago

    The problem is when you start getting into what a therapist is actually meant to do. A therapist isn’t meant to just be someone you go talk to for an hour, they’re meant to help you really work on your mental health. For a lot of these conservative men, the issue is their worldview. In order to help heal them and get these men what they would deserve out of therapy, you would need to show them how their negative worldview is built upon a mountain of lies, and get them to let go of their irrational hate. A therapist that buys into and feeds their worldview is just an enabler that would be effectively scamming conservatives.

    • @[email protected]
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      20 days ago

      I guess the problem with that argument is that it doesn’t consider there are a variety of approaches to therapy that don’t all work on some “core function”.

      Of course, Hank Green to the rescue once again!

      Some therapy is designed to ignore deep trauma and rather focus on the most surface level things. We could go in circles all day about how 9/11 made you terrified of flying, but even if you found some answer, it wouldn’t necessarily help. Instead maybe some exposure therapy or psychedelics or idk some other strategies can be used here and now.

      I also think that even conservatives have differing worldviews within their own, so lumping it all together as a bad worldview doesn’t work. Not all conservatives are angry and pissed off at everything and everyone. Not all liberals are the embodiment of enlightenment. When it comes to therapy, I think there is no one size fits all, and a conservative therapist may help a conservative patient in ways that a liberal therapist couldn’t.