February 20, 2018

As you probably know, the right is attacking the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School students who survived last week's massacre and are now calling for legislative action on guns.

Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrich [is] claiming that Hogg is a plant because he is the child of an FBI agent.

Right-wing cable news channel One America News Networkshared Wintrich’s post....

Hyperpartisan site True Pundit also ran with it....

Donald Trump Jr. liked tweets sharing the conspiracy theory.

Right-wing ex-congressman Jack Kingston said on CNN that the students' "sorrow can very easily be hijacked by left-wing groups who have an agenda.... Do we really think 17-year-old on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally? ... Organized groups that are out there, like George Soros, are always ready to take up the charge, and it's kind of like instant rally." (Video above)

On Twitter, he hinted that the rally organizing is Antifa's doing:

And now along comes Todd Starnes of Fox News, who blames the students' anger on the media and schools that are "indoctrination camps":

The mainstream media is cynically using a lot of traumatized teens from Parkland, Fla., in their latest shameful attack on President Trump and the National Rifle Association.

It's right out of the pages of "Rules for Radicals" -- turning innocent children into propaganda pawns to peddle a fake news narrative....

Honestly, we can't fault the kids. They have been through an unimaginable ordeal, and long before that, their minds were poisoned by liberals who believe there's something wrong with the Second Amendment.

So when you hear the youngsters spouting off about how the NRA should be destroyed and how NRA members are child killers -- take a deep breath and understand they have been brainwashed by government-funded indoctrination camps - pardon me - public schools.

Notice a common thread here? The smear merchants are avoiding direct attacks on the students. The sinister plots all involve outside agents who are using the students for their own nefarious ends.

As soon as I started watching videos of Emma Gonzalez's weekend speech and other media appearances by the teenage survivors, I assumed they'd be attacked by the right -- we all remember how opponents of children's health insurance funding smeared the family of Graeme Frost, a seventh grader who spoke up in favor of the funding, in 2007.

But the attacks on the shooting survivors aren't direct -- not even on Gonzalez, whose buzz cut I was sure would be the subject of endless ridicule on the right.

Did all of these smear merchants separately and spontaneously leap to the conclusion that the kids themselves are too sympathetic to attack? Did they all intuitively arrive at the same strategy -- attack them as innocents being used by evil men and women?

Or did word get around within the fever swamps that only indirect attacks would do? If we're going to get conspiratorial, that's the conspiracy theory I'm prepared to believe.

(Originally published at No More Mister Nice Blog)

Karoli adds: Convicted Felon Dinesh D'AssholeSouza has now weighed in with his particular brand of evil:

In response to the Florida legislature's refusal to even debate an assault weapons ban, Convicted Felon Dinesh D'Souza also tweeted this:

There is no depth too low for them to plumb.

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