David Hogg has been in the news ever since  — on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day –  a 19 year old man walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and murdered seventeen people and injured fourteen more. This was one of the most deadly school massacres in American history, and it’s obviously caused much reflection on the gun control advocates and 2nd amendment advocates.

Hogg, and other liberal students from Parkland, have gotten much attention from the main stream media, which is falling all over itself to push their anti-gun rhetoric down our collective throats.  Charlotte Alter’s Time magazine article, for example, featured five students who wanted to attack our Constitutional rights, while leaving out students who supported solutions that didn’t trample those rights. RedState’s Brandon Morse noted the double standard, by pointing out there’s a “completely ignored part of Parkland” on Time’s cover, because a student like Kyle Kashuv was missing.  He “has been largely ghosted by the media currently fawning over his anti-gun peers.”

Meanwhile Hogg’s irresponsible, crass, fiery rhetoric is being blasted from every media outlet, which is doing nothing to heal this nation.   For example, he claimed adults don’t know how to use a democracy:

“It’s like when your old-a** parents are like, ‘I don’t know how to send an iMessage,’ and you’re just like, ‘Give me the f**king phone’ and you take it and you’re like, ‘OK, let me handle it,’ and you get it done in one second,” he said. “Sadly, that’s what we have to do with our government because our parents don’t know how to use a f**king democracy, so we have to.”

Then, he called pro-second amendment lawmakers as “pathetic f***ers” and said “they could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs.”

This weekend, he attacked Marco Rubio in a grossly unfair manner. “I’m going to start off by putting this price tag right here as a reminder for you guys to know how much Marco Rubio took for every student’s life in Florida,” he said. “If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking. They’ve gotten used to being protective of their position, choosing the safety of inaction. Inaction is no longer safe, and to that we say no more.”

Here’s the thing. I love seeing young people getting involved in political activism.  I recently wrote about James Nelson, for example, who holds conferences to educate his fellow students about their rights and responsibilities as Americans.  However, people like Nelson wouldn’t get the time of day from the media.  Journalists cover the liberal student activists with a blanket of polite protection as they lie our political leaders and our Founding Father’s intentions for what this nation should be.

And part of me understands why people are hesitant to criticize these survivors.  These kids have been through serious trauma.  No one wants them to suffer more than they already have.

But shouldn’t we, as a nation, pause a moment before thrusting very recent, young, trauma victims into the national spotlight?  As Jonah Goldberg wrote, “maybe bookers and producers should stop being dazzled by Hogg’s — and these other kids’ — ability to say exactly what they want to hear, and think about whether turning a bunch of traumatized teenagers into overnight political celebrities — never mind the conscience of the nation — is good for the actual kids.”

In fact, I’d go even further and say that to really respect the students and their message, we must criticize their message.  You can’t have it both ways.  If we are really supposed to take these students seriously, that means we need to take their arguments seriously.   And their arguments are the same old liberal deception we’ve heard for years.

Which, as the media knows, is exactly why they’re currently on every news show in America.

Hat Tip: Townhall

Credit Image: By Barry Stock [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

About The Author

Mark was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and served as the national coordinator. He left the organization to work more broadly on expanding the self-governance movement beyond the partisan divide. Mark appears regularly on television in outlets as diverse as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and the BBC. He’s highly sought after for the tea party perspective from print and electronic media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Examiner, Politico and the The Hill. Mark blogs at MarkMeckler.com, and his opinion editorials regularly run in many of the leading political newspapers both on and offline. Mark has a BA in English from San Diego State University and graduated with honors from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1988. He practiced real estate and business law for almost a decade. For the last eleven years of his legal career he specialized in Internet advertising law. When not fighting for the future of our nation, Mark is an avid horseman, and lives in rural northern California with his wife Patty and two children.

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