Of all the vile Republican responses to the horrific Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting last week — during which seventeen people were killed and fifteen wounded when a young man entered the school and opened fire with an AR-15 style rifle — by far the grossest is the absurd conspiracy theory that the survivors speaking out for gun control are in fact “crisis actors” hired to pretend to be students to push a left-wing agenda.
Donald Trump Jr. himself endorsed a tangent to the absurd theory earlier this week when he liked a tweet that impugned student survivor David Hogg by implying that he had been told by his former FBI employee father to speak out against guns. It’s an indefensible act made all the more egregious by his proximity to the most powerful office in the world.
As has become increasingly common, one of the brave student survivors from Stoneman Douglas decided to step in and put a stop to the harmful behavior. A Twitter user purporting to be Lauren Hogg, a student of Stoneman Douglas, tweeted at First Lady Melania Trump.
Hogg pointed out that Melania claims that she wants to fight cyberbullying, but has said nothing publicly about her son-in-law’s shameful behavior. Hogg says she and her family are being harassed by people from all over the world, which is the last thing she deserves to be subjected to after the horror she’s already endured. She ended her tweets by assigning blame squarely where it belongs: the Trump family.
Hey @FLOTUS you say that your mission as First Lady is to stop cyber bullying, well then, don’t you think it would have been smart to have a convo with your step-son @DonaldJTrumpJr before he liked a post about a false conspiracy theory which in turn put a target on my back
— Lauren Hogg (@lauren_hoggs) February 23, 2018
&created a safe space for people all over the world to call me and my family horrific things that constantly re-victimizes us and our community. I’m 14 I should never have had to deal with any of this and even though I thought it couldn’t get worse it has because of your family.
— Lauren Hogg (@lauren_hoggs) February 23, 2018
The Stoneman Douglas students are planning a massive march on March 24 to demand gun control and challenge the NRA’s stranglehold on the Republican Party.
Here’s the speech from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzalez at an anti-gun rally happening today in Fort Lauderdale https://t.co/CyfMnPDAvW // https://t.co/hgewZy4Cxf https://t.co/gssAmGczuH
— Joshua Chavers (@JoshuaChavers) February 17, 2018
David Hogg, the Florida school shooting survivor who called on lawmakers to "take some action" on guns yesterday, responds to Sen. Marco Rubio saying gun laws won't stop shootings: "I absolutely disagree … I say we implement whatever programs we can" https://t.co/hF26jAP9NA pic.twitter.com/L3gpViIFDa
— CNN (@CNN) February 16, 2018
Massacres like this have become a fixture of American life, and it’s far past time Congress take action to prevent the murders of more children. It’s absolutely pathetic that the GOP is so beholden to its gun lobbyist donors and firearm fetishists that it’s willing to ignore the wholesale slaughter of American children. They must be shamed into passing gun control legislation, and brave kids are leading the charge.
