I received the following press release today:
SOMERSET, NJ, March 2, 2018 — “The radical Left’s use of the Parkland student survivors to further its anti-gun agenda is disgusting and ghoulish,” New Jersey 12th District Republican congressional candidate Daryl Kipnis said Friday. “These traumatized children, after living through a horrific event that saw their friends, classmates and teachers killed, are now being used as political pawns by so-called ‘adults’ in various leftist political groups to gain sympathy for an agenda that threatens our U.S. Constitution.”
“While the students certainly have a right to take a stand, and we should listen to what they have to say, interference by groups like Moveon.org and members of the Hollywood elite to further their own political goals is abhorrent, and voters should remember this come election day,” he said. “Many in the media are also complicit in this travesty, focusing on only a small part of what took place on Feb. 14. While outlets like CNN push to ban weapons they do not understand, they provide little insight into how and why law enforcement agencies and others failed to act on this violent individual for months, including the day of the shooting.”
“To faithfully fulfill the governmental obligation to keep our children and schools safe, in addition to considering sensible gun safety measures, our elected officials at every level must look at all of the factors that came together that day, including mental health, societal values, and law enforcement’s lack of action, which led to the most disturbing failure of our government to protect American lives from a known violent threat since Benghazi. Never again is now.”
Forget for a second what you might think about gun control, the Second Amendment, school safety, etc. This press release has little to do with those questions. This is pure conspiracist nonsense.
The language is what’s important. We have the feigned respect for the students in Parkland, who survived a mass shooting at their high school and who have turned their grief and anger into a political campaign to alter the gun debate. This is how politics works, how engagement happens. We turn individual concerns and experiences into action. We use the hurt, the offense, the sleights, as motivation.
This goes for the Parkland kids, the civil rights pioneers, the anti war movement, and attempts at the local level to prevent development, fund schools, end violence, and so on.
But these are just kids. At least, that’s the underlying theme of the release, that these are kids, that they are innocent and easily taken advantage of, that they should be heard, but in the end not trusted. They are too malleable, too easily taken advantage of. They are “being used as political pawns,” Daryl Kipnis says. They are being victimized by “so-called ‘adults’ in various leftist political groups” — a line hat echoes McCarthyism and the Red Scare. These “leftist groups” and “professional leftists” obviously can’t have he nation’s best interest at heart, and head kids are dupes of some leftist conspiracy, controlled by outsiders, not in control of their own message.
This is what Richard Hofstadter mean by the “paranoid style in American politics ,” which describes a style of rhetoric that presses a “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”
The paranoia here, the fear, is of some liberal cabal. Kipnis rolls out all the usual suspects: moveon.org, the Hollywood elite, the media. He raises Benghazi — a favorite bogeyman of the conspiracy-minded.
The kids — not just in Parkland, but throughout he country, are not dupes or pawns. They have their own agency and are capable of making up their own minds and having their own political opinions.
Kipnis’ argument tracks much of the argument being pressed by Fox and Breitbart. In that way, it is pretty typical of the way the right is attempting to obscure the gun debate. There’s a conspiracy afoot, pushed by the professional left and CNN, to keep the facts of Parkland hidden from view so the left can be successful in its anti-constitutional agenda. It’s not about guns, never about guns, always about something else.