So, we’re now up to multiple videos from multiple states over a matter of days showing grown men, conservative adult men, attacking children on the sidewalk or in the streets over political differences, and I’m left asking a very simple, furious question:
Why the fuck is none of this getting national-level news coverage?
What to Know…
This is no longer isolated behavior – Multiple incidents across states show a disturbing pattern of adult men physically confronting or assaulting minors during political protests, particularly around ICE.
Media coverage is wildly uneven – National outlets amplify conservative grievance stories while largely ignoring documented cases of conservatives committing violence, even when the victims are children.
Rhetoric has real-world consequences – Dehumanizing political language and grievance-based messaging can normalize aggression, leading some adults to feel justified in attacking minors over political expression.
Let’s talk specifics. About a week ago in Buda, Texas, 45-year-old Chad Michael Watts was caught on camera engaging in a physical altercation with high school students protesting against ICE. In at least one clip, Watts appears to grab a teenage girl by the hair before multiple people intervened. He was later arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault after video of the scuffle spread locally, but outside of local outlets, there’s been shockingly little follow-up or national framing of what this attack means in a broader context.
Meanwhile, this is happening against the backdrop of widespread anti-ICE demonstrations, including protests involving children, in cities like Minneapolis and Portland, where videos have circulated showing federal law enforcement using tear gas and flash bangs that have harmed multiple young children. In Minneapolis, a family says federal agents rolled a tear-gas canister under their SUV, exposing six children, including a baby, to chemical agents that forced them to the hospital.
Let me be clear – I’m not talking about a single isolated skirmish. There’s a pattern here.
We have a named adult, Chad Michael Watts, age 45, physically attacking high schoolers protesting ICE policies in Texas.
Videos from protests in other states capture the dangerous, sometimes chaotic way law enforcement and adults have interacted with crowds that include children.
And yet?
Crickets.
Here’s why it matters.
It’s not being treated as a national story in any serious sense. Yes, local outlets might run it. Yes, social posts spread. But there’s no sustained national narrative about the fact that fully grown men are physically assaulting minors in public because they disagree with the minors’ politics.
Contrast this with how the media covers, say, a conservative influencer complaining about a Starbucks cup, which is followed by three straight days of MSNBC, Fox, CNN, Wall Street Journal, opinion columns, think pieces, panel discussions, and “culture war” framing.
But a named adult man assaulting teenagers during an ICE protest? Not so much.
This isn’t teens and adults having a heated argument. Watts was charged with misdemeanor assault causing bodily injury after a video showed him attacking children participating in a peaceful protest.
This isn’t a random outburst.
This is what happens when a subset of adult conservative men are fueled by rhetoric that dehumanizes political opponents and elevates grievance to moral justification, which makes them feel so empowered that physically attacking kids over their political expression feels defensible.
That should be treated like a national crisis. It should spark an investigation into how rhetoric correlates with real-world violence. It should be debated in the editorial pages and on the nightly news.
Instead, it’s mostly been buried in the corner of local coverage.
So again: What the fuck counts as news?
When a Starbucks cup “offense” gets wall-to-wall coverage, but a named adult assaulting protesting minors barely earns a mention, there’s something profoundly wrong about the priorities of our national media.
And until that changes, until major outlets start calling this what it is, the silence itself becomes part of the story.