WHEN HE WAS IN SECOND GRADE, Robert Reich was held upside down in the bathroom by bullies who threatened to put his head in a toilet. He was a small child and was teased a lot in school.

“It was pretty bad,” said Reich to an audience of 2,000 people on Tuesday night. “I didn’t want to go to school. I didn’t want to be on the playground, and I was so ashamed of myself. When you are the object of bullying, you are the one who is ashamed. This is important for understanding where the country is, because the country right now is being bullied and many of the people who are supporting the bully-in-chief are people who have in their heart felt bullied and felt disrespected.”

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.