After the Florida legislature voted down a bill to ban so-called "assault weapons" with victims of the Stoneman Douglas high school shooting present, Dinesh D'Souza was trending all day yesterday for tweeting a link to the story with the comment: "Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs."
Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs https://t.co/Vg3mXYvb4cFebruary 20, 2018
The media– mainstream and social– swiftly castigated D'Souza for mocking the victims of a school shooting.
He later apologized for it, admitting it was insensitive.
While it aimed at media manipulation, my tweet was insensitive to students who lost friends in a terrible tragedy. I’m truly sorryFebruary 21, 2018
But all the people who thought they were brilliant to retweet some version of "Hellooooo! They were just in a school. shooting. Maybe THAT was the worst news they've ever had!" are literally insane. Yes we know that. Dinesh D'Souza knows that. These kind of comments are even more insane than virtue signaling.
They're wrapped in smug sanctimony over the fact that you are at the absolute bare minimum standard of human decency that you think murdering a bunch of children is evil. Buddy, we all are. "Well not the guy who did this!" See you're insane. Thanks for signaling that you are more virtuous than a school shooter. This absolutely nuts. And these people are trying to imply that conservatives who support gun rights don't feel as strongly about this as they do.
Which is the actually insensitive, unfeeling thing to do with this tragedy: politicize it and make it into another way to demonize and hate half of America. I have some words unfit for print to describe how angry it makes me that people are making this tragedy about their partisan bigotry.
And anyone capable of taking just one calm moment of critical thinking about what they're reading online can tell that D'Souza wasn't mocking the students. He was mocking the political opportunists who are USING these students and their personal tragedy to push a political agenda by exploiting the strong emotional response to this tragedy and a reliable partisan wedge issue.
He's mocking the notion these shameless political opportunists are pushing– the notion that what these students have been through somehow means they now have the answers to how our society should be constituted. But they don't. They've just suffered. That doesn't make them any wiser. They're still kids. And this notion is so absurd that it absolutely should be mocked.
And it also should be mocked because it's vile. It's vile because it's manipulative. It's manipulative of the students and of the public. It's manipulative and dishonest to imply that conservatives who want to exercise their right to own rifles and resist any encroachment on that right somehow are less compassionate than you about the suffering these students have been through. And it's using these students as props in a cynical attempt to bully others into being afraid to speak up for their right to bear arms.
And while these smug liberals are tripping over themselves to bear the mantle of compassion for these students, and therefore some privileged understanding of how to constitute society, they are in fact carelessly adding to their trauma. We all know they've been through something truly horrific and evil, but the worst thing we can do to add on to that is now lean on them for leadership and make them feel like it's up to them to come up with the answers.
If they didn't already feel like the adults have failed them because this happened, what are they supposed to think about a bunch of 60 year olds now saying it's up to them– a bunch of high schoolers– to fix this for us??? This is literal insanity. They're not ready to lead society. They're kids. And they're BEING USED as props.