Social media has become a cesspool of animosity and nastiness. Time and time again, public figures will post something they would quickly regret. This time, it was Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who taunted Parkland survivor and prominent gun control advocate David Hogg on Twitter for being rejected by four colleges he applied to despite having a 4.1 GPA.
There’s no defense for Ingraham’s tweet. It was petty, childish, and mean-spirited.
David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.) https://t.co/wflA4hWHXY
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 28, 2018
That being said, Hogg’s reaction to her tweet took it to the extreme when he essentially launched a boycott campaign aimed at her advertisers. At least eight companies have already pulled their ads from her shows.
These boycott campaigns have become far too common. The most successful one to date took down Bill O’Reilly after he was exposed for sexual harassment almost a year ago.
As advertisers began dropping, Ingraham issued an apology on Twitter, saying that any student with a 4.1 GPA “should be proud” and that she was sorry for the “upset or hurt” her tweet caused him and the other victims of the Parkland shooting. Hogg rejected her apology, tweeting that it was an effort to “save her advertisers” and that he would only accept her apology if she denounced the way Fox News “has treated my friends and I in this fight,” adding that “it’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children” and that she should “focus less on fear and more on facts.”
He then appeared on CNN Friday morning and insisted that Ingraham should “stand down,” and said that while she is an honest opinion host, she needs to be “more objective.”
Look, if Hogg doesn’t want to accept Ingraham’s apology, that’s his decision. But the rest of us need to stop pretending that he’s the beacon of moral authority.
It’s ironic that he’s calling on everyone to “love thy neighbor” and to end the “mudslinging” because he certainly hasn’t practiced what he’s preaching. Over the past several weeks, he has referred to the NRA as “child murderers,” called Dana Loesch “disgusting” and accused her of not caring about children’s lives, smeared Republican Sen. Marco Rubio by claiming he’s bribed by the NRA in exchange for the lives of Florida students, and blasted Republicans as “sick f–kers” for not meeting his standards on gun reform. And judging from his boycott campaign, Hogg’s solution to save children’s lives is to bully the opposition into silence.
Hogg believes that he can get away with playing two roles at once: a teen victim of a mass shooting and a vocal gun control activist. One minute, he’s a brave young man who is leading the fight against the gun lobby and in the next minute, he’s crying that a lady was mean to him on Twitter. And with the help of the leftwing group Media Matters, he and his cult following have pressured over a half a dozen advertisers to part ways with the Fox News host. It’s worth emphasizing that they’re using exact punishment on Ingraham for this one tweet that they used on Bill O’Reilly for being a sexual predator. In other words, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime at all.
But when you enter the arena of public discourse, especially when it pertains to politics, no one is or should be shielded from criticism.
Oh no someone was mean to him on social media, run Hogg run, the advertisers get 1 tweet from a flash in the pan and dump space on a popular show pissing off all her audience for folding like pop-up tents.
The only criticism of it is that is was exactly what the left dishes out on a routine basis. Nevertheless, she should not have apologized. And apology to garbage accomplishes nothing but making the apologist appear weak.
The cowardly advertisers that kowtow to liberal fascists should be boycotted.
She never said it on her show.
She put it on Twitter.
Why didn’t he go after Twitter’s sponsors?
Oh, because he uses Twitter so much he doesn’t want to hurt himself with the backlash.
But he probably never watched Fox News (nearly pure opinion after 5 pm) in his little life.
As these sponsors cave watch for the backlash against them.
Laura manned up and apologized to the child who promptly threw a tantrum and said it would not be enough.
What a bully that kid is!
I think what she said was completely fine. That you can be ruined for doing a little of what your opponents do is called oppression. The Left is literally oppressing their enemies.
What needs to happen is for a real thinker to “debate” this coward and fix this nonsense for good. I’m rather confident Hogg’s handlers will never allow him to talk to Shapiro or anyone else.
I wish we’d get some good quotes from Trump/s twitter on this kid.
@Nathan Blue: I think they call that “BULLYING”, don’t they?