I’m not keen to slam the March For Our Lives kids. They’ve legitimately lived through a horror most of us can’t even imagine, and so I’m inclined to keep my disagreements with their strange, community organizing-inspired political positions to a minimum.

But David Hogg, angling as he currently is, to fight capitalism by engaging in a pillow war with MyPillow and its decidedly Trump-supporting founder Mike Lindell, makes it hard not to comment. Primarily because his new activist “business” Good Pillow is just funny. It’s got a “manifesto” instead of a mission statement, and apparently the pillow doesn’t actually exist. It’s just a website and wait list to be notified when — or maybe if — a product is available .

We have announced the name of the company it's called #GoodPillow and you can sign up to be notified when preorder is available go to https://t.co/ENhFNdFWRO

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) February 9, 2021

But complicating my desire to just let the kids be kids is the new revelation from one of Hogg’s cohort, Cameron Kasky, a Parkland shooting survivor himself, that he and Hogg are both grifters — just not quite at the same place on the grifter continuum. From Breitbart:

To those of you who marched, donated, lobbied, and called for change… I’m so sorry this is what it turned into. This is embarrassing.

— Cam (@cameron_kasky) February 10, 2021

Kasky also noted, “To those of you claiming I’m ‘jealous’ about the pillow grift, I was actually offered free shares as soon as I started tweeting about it. I just declined because while I’m kind of a grifter, I’m not that much of a grifter.”

Oof.

The Guardian suggests that the other March For Our Lives organizers believe Hogg needs to get his head straight about where his loyalties lie. The anniversary of the Parkland shooting is just days away, after all.

David Hogg has been accused of “grift” by other leaders of the March for Our Lives group for his new Good Pillow venture, which the former Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school student launched this week just days before the 14 February anniversary of the massacre that took 17 lives.

In a tweeted statement, March for Our Lives (MFOL) announced that Hogg, 20, was taking a leave of absence as a board member “to take some time for himself to reflect and recommit to the mission”.

Perhaps division in the ranks was inevitable for a group led by people so young trying to sort through the repercussions of a truly heinous act. But Kasky’s final tweet is a better insight into why these kids’ admirable will to survive, channeled into a fight for gun control, often seems like an attack on American values rather than the horrific circumstances that led to their activism.

But, welcome to America, everything ends up a grift.

— Cam (@cameron_kasky) February 10, 2021

If young Cameron actually believes that, and we’re to take him at his earlier word, perhaps it should be pointed out that he is an admitted part of the problem he professes to hate.