“Can you believe these kids?” It’s been a recurring theme of the coverage of the Parkland school shooting: the remarkable effectiveness of the high school students who created a gun control organization in the wake of the massacre. In seemingly no time, the magical kids had organized events ranging from a national march to a mass school walkout, and they’d brought in a million dollars in donations from Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney.
The Miami Herald credited their success to the school’s stellar debate program. The Wall Street Journal said it was because they were born online, and organizing was instinctive.
On February 28, BuzzFeed came out with the actual story: Rep. Debbie Wassermann Schultz aiding in the lobbying in Tallahassee, a teacher’s union organizing the buses that got the kids there, Michael Bloomberg’s groups and the Women’s March working on the upcoming March For Our Lives, MoveOn.org doing social media promotion and (potentially) march logistics, and training for student activists provided by federally funded Planned Parenthood.
The president of the American Federation of Teachers told BuzzFeed they’re also behind the national school walkout, which journalists had previously assured the public was the sole work of a teenager. (I’d thought teachers were supposed to get kids into school, but maybe that’s just me.)
In other words, the response was professionalized. That’s not surprising, because this is what organization that gets results actually looks like. It’s not a bunch of magical kids in somebody’s living room. Nor is it surprising that the professionalization happened right off the bat. Broward County’s teacher’s union is militant, and Rep. Ted Lieu stated on Twitter that his family knows Parkland student activist David Hogg’s family, so there were plenty of opportunities for grown-ups with resources and skills to connect the kids.
That’s before you get to whether any of them had been involved in the Women’s March. According to BuzzFeed, Wassermann Schultz was running on day two.
What’s striking about all this isn’t the organization. If you start reading books about organizing, it’s clear how it all works. But no journalist covering the story wrote about this stuff for two weeks. Instead, every story was about the Parkland kids being magically effective.
On Twitter, I lost track of the number of bluechecks rhapsodizing over how effective the kids’ organizational instincts were. But organizing isn’t instinctive. It’s skilled work; you have to learn how to do it, and it takes really a lot of people. You don’t just get a few magical kids who’re amazing and naturally good at it.
The real tip-off should have been the $500,000 donations from Winfrey and Clooney. Big celebrities don’t give huge money to strangers on a whim. Somebody who knows Winfrey and Clooney called them and asked. But the press’s response was to be ever more impressed with the kids.
For two weeks, journalists abjectly failed in their jobs, which is to tell the public what’s going on. And any of them who had any familiarity with organizing campaigns absolutely knew. Matt Pearce, of the Los Angeles Times, would have been ideally placed to write an excellent article: not only is he an organizer for the Times’s union, he moderated a panel on leftist activism for the LA Times Book Festival and has the appropriate connections in organizing. Instead, he wrote about a school walkout, not what was behind it. (In another article, Pearce defined Delta caving to a pressure campaign’s demands as “finding middle ground.”)
But it’s not just a mainstream media problem. None of the righty outlets writing about Parkland picked up on the clear evidence that professional organizers were backing the Parkland kids, either. Instead, they objected to the front-and-centering of minor kids as unseemly, which does no good: Lefties aren’t going to listen, and it doesn’t educate the Right to counter.
The closest anyone got was Elizabeth Harrington at the Washington Free Beacon, who noted that Clooney’s publicist was booking the kids’ media interviews pro bono, and said that a friend (not Clooney) had asked him to do it. The result of all this is that the average righty does not understand what’s going on in activism, because all they see is what the press covers. The stuff that’s visible. It’s like expecting people in the Stone Age to grok the Roman army by looking at it. Conspiracy theorists happily fill this ignorance vacuum.
On one hand, sure, the issue with people who believe in crisis actors and various other kinds of conspiracy theories is that they’re susceptible. If they didn’t believe in crisis actors, they’d believe in something else (and they probably do). But on the other hand, I think one reason there’s an opportunity for righty conspiracy types to get all hopped up on goofballs with respect to protests and such is the abject failure of the Righty establishment to explain to its people how protests actually work.
Why, it’s like they had this organized and ready to go just in case a school shooting occurred.
Rahm Emmanuel once said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
The Left is nothing, if it is not organized into sub-community groups.
These kids who “led” the Parkland protests will fade because they are puppets, useful idiots whose brains fall out if you listen to them for long.
It was really odd that, from practically the 1st interveiws done with the selected group of students, their talking points were front and center.
It was the NRA’s fault, the gun’s fault, the GOP’s fault.
The shooter quickly became just another victim.
Later, when it was learned that police refused to go in, they, too, were excused.
The only blame was centered on political enemies: the NRA, the GOP and guns in general.
Hopefully, George Clooney’s publicist will tell who encouraged him to give FREE publicity work to these kids.
Investigative or undercover reporters are needed.
Where are they?
@Nanny G: Why would they investigate something they probably already know the answer to and don’t really want to know the details of?
I dont know anyone who took these kids seriously really except the media in the afterglow of another 24/7 constitution bashing opportunity. Reality is such a foreign concept to them. The think they create the world and each time they are rejected it becomes a dangerous personal attack on THEIR first amendment right.
Doing just what Lenin,Marx,Stalin and Kruschev wanted a totaly Soviet America lead by the leftists leaning National Education Association (NEA) and the AFT and with young bolshevek David Hogg just picture his image right about with Marx,Stalin and Lenin
@kitt:
Those who groomed them and kept them at the ready thought they would be effective. The governmental failures that made the tragedy possible have sort of spoiled the left’s little agenda party.