Far right attacks Parkland gun control activists with smears, lies

Measure the effectiveness of the Parkland kids by the very viciousness of the response. By the attacks they’ve endured these last few weeks, lowdown and steeped in mendacity.

Consider the denigration of Emma González, @Emma4Change, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre survivor who delivered that wrenching speech at the March for Our Lives. Standing before that giant crowd in Washington, Emma named the Parkland murder victims, then stood silent, stoic, until she had been on stage for six minutes and 20 seconds — the very amount of time Nikolas Cruz took to wreak his horror.

The gun nuts and right-wing crazies had no rebuttal to that epoch of silence. The power of it. No wonder they’ve reacted like cornered animals.

“Six minutes and about 20 seconds. In a little over six minutes, 17 of our friends were taken from us, 15 were injured, and everyone, absolutely everyone, was forever altered,” she said. “Everyone who was there understands. Everyone who has been touched by the cold grip of gun violence understands.”

Then those moments of quiet. With a seismic shift in the body politic. As if America was finally awaking from its languorous resignation.

@Emma4Change and the children who marched through the city streets last weekend simply refused to accept their parents’ defeatist assumption that even a 75 percent majority in want of stricter firearm legislation (according to an NPR poll released last week) was impotent against the wishes of an all-powerful gun lobby.

The #NeverAgain kids were too idealistic to know better.

So, of course, the gunslingers panicked. They’ve gone after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivors like a frenzied mob. They’ve slandered, belittled and taunted Emma in particular with such malicious fervor that the crimes of the actual Valentine’s Day killer have been relegated to an afterthought.

An alt-right website filched a GIF from Teen Vogue showing González ripping apart a gun range target. The image was photoshopped to make it appear, instead, that she was desecrating the U.S. Constitution. The deceit didn’t stop there. Her nose was widened on the doctored GIF. The skin around her eyes was darkened. Teen Vogue editor Phillip Picardi described the artifice as “proof of how democracy continues to be fractured by people who manipulate and fabricate the truth.”

The deception spread like a virus through far-right websites, desperate to obscure the truths these kids were spreading.

Meanwhile, the Cuban flag patch on the jacket Emma wore during her Washington appearance was described by Iowa Congressman Steve King as proof of her allegiance to the Castro regime — an absurd notion in South Florida, where anti-Castro exiles proudly display the flag of the old country. Meanwhile, a Republican candidate for the Maine Legislature attacked Emma on social media, saying, “There’s nothing about this skinhead lesbian that impresses me.”

Fellow survivor David Hogg, perhaps the most vocal leader of the #NeverAgain movement, has been slandered on the Internet as a gun-seizing Nazi, “Hogg Hitler,” and as a “crisis actor” who had graduated from a California high school in 2014.

Fox news host Laura Ingraham gleefully mocked Hogg after his college admission applications had been rejected by some highly selective schools in California. She tweeted, “David Hogg rejected by four colleges to which he applied and whines about it.” (Ingraham apologized Thursday after several of her program’s sponsors threatened to cancel their ads.)

The NRA characterized the student protesters as mindless pawns doing the bidding of “gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites.”

An aide to state Rep. Shawn Harrison, RTampa, was fired after emailing a Tampa Bay Times reporter his grammatically challenged theory that neither Hogg nor González were enrolled at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. “Both kids in the picture are not students here but actors that travel to various crisis when they happen,” the aide wrote.

On Monday, the right-wing website RedState, based on lies gleaned from the Internet claimed that Hogg hadn’t been at school at the time of the shooting. RedState later corrected the error but that hardly kept the smear from proliferating across cyberspace, nudged along by the deplorable Hollywood-based conspiracy mongering site Sandy Hook Hoax which posted RedState’s original assertion without bothering with the correction.

Donald Trump Jr. offered his own prestige, such as it is, to conspiracy theorists when he “liked” Facebook posts claiming David Hogg, son of a retired FBI agent, was only drumming up gun protests to distract attention from FBI scandals.

A barrage of lies, insults, slander, the dissemination of doctored photos and crackpot conspiracy theories seems to be all the rebuttal the crazies can muster against the Parkland kids. Against Emma4Change. Against her six minutes and 20 seconds.

Fred Grimm