Apparently, the mass hysteria gripping school officials has swayed a presiding judge — three years later — to also confuse a Pop-Tart as a “dangerous” weapon.

Back in March of 2013, then seven-year-old Josh Welsh ran afoul of school bureaucrats when he supposedly chewed his strawberry breakfast pastry into a “gun” and allegedly wielded it, saying, “Bang, bang,” to a fellow student. This “boys being boys” behavior earned the second-grader a two-day school suspension from Baltimore’s Park Elementary School. Today, this ludicrous decision has been upheld by Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Judge Ronald A. Silkworth. (Or is that Silkworm?) This authoritarian Wonderland Queen of liberal bleeding hearts wrote: “[A] suspension was appropriately used as a corrective tool to address this disruption, based on the student’s past history of escalating behavioral issues.” How is this lily-livered judge not obviously drunk with a fascist’s power? Did he cower behind his bench when ruling against the now ten-year-old?

In America, “land of the free, home of the brave,” this pronouncement is anti-American madness. During the original incident, Josh’s father said, “I would almost call it insanity. I mean with all the potential issues that could be dealt with at school, real threats, bullies, whatever the real issue is, it’s a pastry.” Even the Florida legislature added to the lunacy by passing a bill that “protects” against the act of “brandishing a partially consumed pastry or other food item to simulate a firearm or weapon.” If these radical responses aren’t “1984” style thought-crime — punishing children for their imaginations — what is?

The real issue here is the systematic emasculation of boys by progressive statists: it’s fascism run amok in the public school system. Last time I checked, the purpose of educators is to enlighten, not to engage in radical beyond-the-scope hard left social engineering. This situation exactly depicts the irrational intention to punish typical, masculine “tough guy” behavior in favor of that of the wussy, subservient pajama boy: an archetype that has defined the disastrous Obama years.

As the Sandy Hook massacre tragically and definitively demonstrated, schools as gun-free zones facilitate danger while promising the illusion of safety. The zero tolerance policy should not be directed at boys and their pretend “weapons of war,” it should censure kangaroo court judges for punishing them for normal “manly” conduct.

David L. Hunter is an associate editor at Capitol Hill Outsider. He’s on Twitter and blogs at davidlhunter.blogspot.com. He is published in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Patriot Post, FrontPage Mag, and extensively in Canada Free Press and American Thinker.