Parkland teens, new media and the ‘Breakfast Club’
A year ago Thursday, Cameron Kasky and Kyle Kashuv were everyday high-school students. A horrifying act by a deranged gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School made them news subjects. Their passion made them outspoken political activists. And our national news cycle made them famous.
Since then, both teens have wrestled publicly with their political views and personas. Their story is part John Hughes, part “Black Mirror,” defined by an idyllic sunny Florida day shattered by trauma, and the full force of modern media and politics that descended after.
America’s coming-of-age cinema doesn’t offer a lot of guidance for the young political activist. “The Breakfast Club” famously features a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal, grappling with their identities, but not a viral video star.
Reese Witherspoon’s dark and driven Tracy Flick (“Election,” 1999) may be the most applicable, though not terribly admirable, example.
But these days, we are in danger of making politics, and the public scrutiny that comes with it, another rite of teen passage. Even when teens don’t intend to be public figures, what were private musings or dormroom bull sessions a generation ago are now posted for much of the world to see.
Kasky was one of a trio of students who emerged from the devastation in Parkland onto the national media scene with a visceral message about gun control. Along with David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, Kasky famously appeared at a CNN town hall, confronting Sen. Marco Rubio with a demand to reject NRA funding, adding “it’s hard to look at you and not look down the barrel on an AR-15 and not look at (the shooter).”
These days he hosts a podcast titled, “Cameron Knows Nothing,” the description for which reveals lessons learned since getting “weirdly famous.”
“Chances are when you suddenly have 400k twitter followers, you’re gonna think you’re hot s---. I sure did. But then, last summer, I realized something – I don’t know everything. Turns out, I have an awful lot to learn.”
Regretting mistakes made in the public eye
His Twitter feed is a mix of Trump criticism and liberal policy preferences with a sprinkling of gut-check admonitions to his own side. He looks back on some of the early, emotional days of his activism with misgivings.
“I’m very regretful of a lot of the mistakes that I’ve made along the way,” Kasky told Fox News Contributor Guy Benson on his radio show, “Benson & Harf” in September 2018, among which he counts the Rubio jab.
Kasky left the board of the “March for Our Lives,” and is focusing on “efforts to encourage bipartisanship or at least discussion that is productive and help a lot of people avoid the mistakes that I made,” he said.
Kashuv followed a similar arc to Kasky, from trauma victim to spokesperson to media star, at least in conservative circles.
At first, he sought attention reluctantly, feeling that the pro-2nd Amendment position had been unfairly marginalized by media in the wake of Parkland. But once he got a platform, he says he succumbed to temptations he had promised to reject.
He became a mirror image of Kasky, to a mirror-image crowd, garnering headlines like the Miami Herald’s “Parkland’s ‘most hated pro-gun advocate’ thrills conservatives.” He now does high-school outreach for the conservative group Turning Point USA, founded by pro-trump figure, Charlie Kirk, but he hasn’t shied away from self-reflection and tough love.
High tempers and teenagers don’t mix well
“While my intentions were pure,” he told a crowd of thousands of young TPUSA activists at a conference in December 2018, “Somewhere in between owning the libs and appearing on national TV shows, I lost sight of the devastating tragedy. … Within weeks, I went from passing legislation, from being a voice of reason, to being a Grade-a Twitter troll,” he said to laughter before promising to rededicate himself to “school safety, bipartisanship, and fighting for the families of the fallen.”