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Like many people, I have been immensely impressed by the students of Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. Following the murdering of 17 people at their school many students have been politically and socially active, refusing to play the victim role and questioning politicians and the NRA, sometimes directly to their faces.
I am so relieved that things have finally flipped around and the perpetrator of such a horrific act is getting less attention than the survivors. These young people are worthy of admiration and respect. Cameron Kasky, Emma Gonzalez, and Delaney Tarr, to name but a few of them, have created a national movement in March for Our Lives. They are the leaders of tomorrow, taking action and leading today!
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Not everyone has been proud of these teens as they’ve come under attack for being coached, prodded and used by adults. Some, especially David Hogg have been dubbed “crisis actors.” That is a term I first heard around the Sandy Hook, CT shooting and is as mythical as unicorns and leprechauns. If you need to see this nonsense debunked, have at it.
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The charge seems to be rooted in being well-spoken and comfortable on camera. Combined with David previously being on the news in 2017 while in California. Some people have been struck by lightning multiple times, and others have won the lottery more than once, but a teenager being on the news twice in his life somehow makes him an actor in service to a grand conspiracy. If these are the sort of things you profess, I encourage you to seek the support of a mental health professional.
David’s social media history alone proves he’s a genuine high school student in Parkland. He’s also a budding journalist and has been interviewing people and creating videos for years.
I’ve worked as a professional actor, no actor as good as these kids would take these jobs. Nobody could afford to pay for your lifetime acting and silence. If “crisis actors” were a real thing, wouldn’t they be smart enough to use an alias at each crisis?
People who think any talk of gun control means that all their guns are about to be taken away from them throw out distraction after distraction. They want to make anything else the focus of the story and avoid the fact that gun deaths are high due to the high number of guns and the far too easy access people have to assault weapons. If Nikolas Cruz only had access to handguns, fewer people would be dead. If he only had access to knives, even fewer people would be dead.
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While our president continues to rail against fake news, he and many conservatives were furious with Twitter this week. That is because Twitter deleted thousands of Russian bot accounts overnight. And the people who noticed their followers went drastically down overnight were furious. Fake news is bad, but fake followers are good. Fake followers who help spread complete bullshit are even better.
I find myself wondering, how many arguments on social media this week were started by bots and foreign governments? Did any right-minded American citizen start the rumors of these teenage survivors of a mass shooting being anything but their honest and authentic selves? Do human beings that we all know believe in conspiracies that kill children, or somehow fake the killing of children, for political advantage?
God, I hope not. But these days I just don’t know what I can believe.
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