Conservative attacks on March for Our Lives leaders are getting very personal

Fox News host Laura Ingraham is taunting one of the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting for getting rejected from colleges he applied to. And now the student is calling on her sponsors to boycott her show — to some big success.

The controversy began with a tweet on Wednesday, when Ingraham linked to an article from the Daily Wire about how David Hogg, an organizer for March for Our Lives, didn’t get into UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, or UC Irvine despite his 4.2 GPA. (Ingraham mistakenly said he had a 4.1 GPA.)

Ingraham had previously been critical of March for Our Lives, which formed in response to the Parkland shooting to push federal lawmakers to pass new restrictions on firearms. After Saturday’s march, she described it as “political theater lacking in substance” and criticized calls to ban assault weapons.

But her new tweet went further — seemingly attacking Hogg for a personal issue instead of one related to politics or substance. Many people on Twitter were not having it. Here’s a small sample of the responses:

Hogg, for his part, responded on Wednesday night by calling for a boycott of Ingraham’s show, targeting her top advertisers:

Then, on Thursday, Ingraham apologized:

Nonetheless, several advertisers said they would dump Ingraham, including Expedia, Hulu, Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, Nutrish, Stitch Fix, TripAdvisor, and Wayfair.

“As a company, we support open dialogue and debate on issues,” Jane Carpenter, Wayfair’s head of public relations, told CNBC. “However, the decision of an adult to personally criticize a high school student who has lost his classmates in an unspeakable tragedy is not consistent with our values.”

What Ingraham did with her initial personal attack, however, isn’t totally new.

Many conservatives have naturally been critical of the political and policy stances of the Parkland survivors, as would be expected given that they generally oppose gun control.

But some, like Ingraham, have gone further than that — attacking Parkland students, who are still kids, for unrelated and often personal aspects of their lives. Just consider the fact that Ingraham could post an article about how Hogg was rejected from four universities. Why did the Daily Wire, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro’s outlet, find that news worth covering in the first place, besides the schadenfreude the outlet knew it would provide conservative readers who don’t like Hogg and his movement?

It’s not unusual for politics to get personal. But it’s particularly glaring when prominent pundits and even lawmakers are going after teenagers in such a personal way.

Conservatives have attacked March for Our Lives organizers in a personal way

Here are some examples of other false, bizarre, and personal conservative attacks on March for Our Lives leaders:

• Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the host of Infowars, has pushed conspiracy theories that the March for Our Lives organizers are “being funded” and “given scripts” — insinuating that they’re actors.
• Conservative documentarian and noted troll Dinesh D’Souza tweeted in February, “How interesting to hear students who can’t support themselves for one day giving us lectures about American social policy.”
• The campaign of Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who has a history of racism, posted a meme on his Facebook page mocking March for Our Lives organizer Emma Gonzalez for her Cuban heritage. The meme stated, “This is how you look when you claim Cuban heritage yet don’t speak Spanish and ignore the fact that your ancestors fled the island when the dictatorship turned Cuba into a prison camp, after removing all weapons from its citizens; hence their right to self defense.”

• On Twitter, conservative figures, including actor Adam Baldwin, have shared fake images of Gonzalez tearing up the US Constitution. In the real image, she was tearing up a gun target.
• The conservative outlet Breitbart rounded up tweets that falsely suggested Hogg performed a Nazi salute during the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC.
• Infowars’ Jones also put out a video of Hogg’s March for Our Lives speech dubbed with an Adolf Hitler speech, and a separate video that depicted Gonzalez as a member of the Hitler Youth.

• Leslie Gibson, a Republican candidate for the Maine state House, called Gonzalez a “skinhead lesbian” and Hogg a “moron” and a “baldfaced liar.” The comments drew so much criticism that he dropped out of the race.
• Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, argued that instead of advocating for gun control, Parkland survivors should take personal responsibility for preventing deadly shooters — and learn CPR: “How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that.” Santorum later said he misspoke.
• Several conservative outlets falsely suggested that Gonzalez admitted to bullying the Parkland shooter. This is part of a broader victim-blaming campaign: It has become a common talking point to insinuate that the shooter only carried out the attack because he was socially isolated, so students should have tried to befriend him to prevent the shooting. (A Stoneman Douglas student wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in response to the claim, detailing the time she tried to befriend the shooter to no avail.)

Ingraham’s comment, then, isn’t a one-off incident of a conservative attacking one of the Parkland survivors. It’s part of a broader character assassination campaign against these students.

Correction: This article originally used the wrong pronoun for Leslie Gibson. We apologize for the error.