They called Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas student David Hogg a “crisis actor.”
They said MSD student Emma González was a communist who has ties to Cuba.
They accused her of ripping up the U.S. Constitution.
They claimed Hogg was actually brought in from California and wasn’t even at the school that day.
These were all lies.
They lied. Repeatedly. About children who had just suffered a horrific act of violence.
“Donald Trump Jr. liked a tweet by a conservative TV show host Graham Ledger that linked to a story by the Gateway Pundit website stating that David Hogg was ‘coached on anti-Trump lines.'”
So says PolitiFact, the Pulitzer prize winning fact-checking group created by the Tampa Bay Times (it’s now owned by the Poynter Institute). PolitiFact has just named the “smear machine” that attacked the Parkland Students its “Lie of the Year.”
They write: “the lies against the Parkland students in the wake of unspeakable tragedy were the most significant falsehoods of 2018. We name them PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year.”
PolitiFact attempts to claim the push back to these lies was “bipartisan,” offering up remarks from Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio was proof, but that’s at best a stretch.
The lies, the attacks, the smears all came from the right and the far right.
In the month after the Valentine’s Day massacre at Parkland that stole 17 lives and forever changed those who survived, The Guardian published a report: “How rightwingers have attacked Parkland students with lies, hoaxes and smears.”
A sampling:
Alt-right social media company Gab was one of many that disseminated a doctored animation of Gonzalez in which she falsely appeared to be tearing up the US constitution. Cartoonist and Trump sycophant Ben Garrison depicted Hogg as an assault rifle, wielded by CNN, and loaded with Marxism. Breitbart re-published a round of tweets accusing Hogg of throwing a Nazi salute.
On Front Page – an outlet led by David Horowitz, whose main stock in trade is virulent Islamophobia – Bruce Thornton decried Hogg’s “profanity laced tantrums” and reduced him and his fellow students to political “shock troops” being manipulated by a progressive “ideology of melodrama and moral exhibitionism”.
Alex Jones thought it wise to continue his dispute with Hogg over whether chemical additives in water really turn frogs gay. The website WND simply called him “Vile Hogg”.
Image by Phil Roeder via Flickr and a CC license