The world turned upside-down.
The children are acting like adults.
And the adults are acting like children.



‘I am not a crisis actor’: Florida teens fire back at right-wing conspiracy theorists

Welcome, Parkland shooting survivors, to the ugly world of politics in 2018.

In the aftermath of last week’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla., some of the most powerful testimonies have come from the teenagers who survived the rampage. They have repeatedly detailed their harrowing experience to national news networks, many calling for stricter gun control laws while decrying President Trump for not doing enough to protect students. Others have merely wept with grief while telling their stories again and again.

The students have become a mobilizing force unlike any seen after previous mass shootings, planning marches and rallies in Florida and Washington, D.C. — all while mourning the friends they’ve so recently lost.

They have also become a target of right-wing smears and innuendo.

Some prominent figures in the right-wing media are suggesting that the students are making it all up, or that the children are paid actors or that their talking points have been manufactured by public relations experts on the left.


An aide to a Florida legislator was even fired Tuesday after claiming two survivors who spoke to CNN were not students, but instead “actors that travel to various crisis when they happen.”

While these claims have no basis, they spread quickly in conservative circles on social media and among popular right-wing commentators.

The students proved quite capable of defending themselves Tuesday.

“I am not a crisis actor. I’m somebody who had to witness this and live through this and I continue to have to do this,” 17-year-old Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior David Hogg told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “The fact that some of the students at Stoneman Douglas high school are showing more maturity and political action than many of our elected officials is a testament to how disgusting and broken our political system is right now in American. But we’re trying to fix that.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/02/21/i-am-not-a-crisis-actor-florida-teens-fire-back-at-right-wing-conspiracy-theorists/?utm_term=.37403d735af7

2018 is going to be the year that the GOP will regret.