Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
talk about unhinged..
The Right-Wing Attacks on Parkland Survivors Are Totally Unhinged
And also utterly predictable.
the conservative media machine would soon mobilize to do what even a few years ago seemed fairly unthinkable: outright attack the underaged survivors of the brutal massacre. To my disappointment (but not my surprise), that second one has also come Extremely True. It’s not that I’m Nostradamus or any shit like that, it's just that the conservative script for these things has become just that depressingly predictable.
Way back in 2012 when the Sandy Hook shootings happened, everything felt strangely similar yet very different. Having a president capable of demonstrating even a basic level of empathy went a long way, but outside of Alex Jones (who was a vastly more fringe character back then) and some anonymous online morons, there wasn’t much of an effort to malign the survivors of the shooting or their families. To be honest, after a year of the 2016 campaign and another year of the Trump presidency, that low-ass bar feels like some Andy Griffith–style nostalgia.
As has been covered on many occasions by writers more journalistically inclined than I, there is now a pretty well-trodden path from the online fringes of the far right directly to the cable news network our demented big boy in chief spends 60 percent of his waking hours watching. Hell, if the conspiracy theory about an antifa rebellion can make it to Fox & Friends, who’s to say what won’t break through? What starts as trolling and genuine dumbass credulity in the darkest corners of the web all too often makes this journey to the mainstream, and watching this occur in the weeks following the Parkland shooting has ended up being a pretty great, and terrible, case study.
While the first to jump on any “crisis actor/false flag/soros plants” sort of theory always ends up being a MAGA mondo-weirdo on Twitter, they are usually joined by fringe right-wing sites like realpatriotnewseagle2016.info or some URL like that. From there these theories make the leap to the right wing’s most beloved blue checkmark accounts, who lend them just enough air of legitimacy to be discussed by real people.
The Right-Wing Attacks on Parkland Survivors Are Totally Unhinged