A group of students attacked a 12-year-old Missouri boy on a school bus for wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.
A cellphone video of the incident was obtained by KMOV News 4, which showed students arguing with the sixth-grader over politics.
“You want to build a wall? You want to build a f**king wall?” yells one student, as the battle of words escalated into pushing and hitting the boy.
The sixth-grader told the news station that the other student backed him up by the window and continued to hit him.
“At one point, he just got so frustrated he pushed me,” he said. “And then he kept hitting me and backing me up by the window of the bus, and so I just had to push him out.”
The boy’s mother, Christina Cortina, says that she never anticipated something like this would happen to her son over the hat.
“As a parent, it’s so unsettling. I feel like my son was made an example of, it was a tricky situation—it was politically charged.”
The Parkway School District says that everyone involved in the fight has faced “consequences” over the melee.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.