Back in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, starting about the time of the televised show trial and character assassination of Dana Loesch and Marco Rubio hosted by Jake Tapper, a group of kids sprang onto the scene spouting off noxious, libelous, and counterfactual bullsh** about guns, gun owners, and Republicans. They all wrapped themselves in the cloak of the shooting though some of the loudest mouths were only tangentially involved. Throughout the right-o-sphere a consensus developed that no one could criticize these people no matter what they said and who they slandered. I know that here we were forbidden to mention them.

Today Instapundit asks, “HEY, REMEMBER WHEN NOBODY WAS SUPPOSED TO CRITICIZE DAVID HOGG BECAUSE HE WAS JUST A HIGH SCHOOL KID?”

Good point. Taken in its least favorable light, all the kids from Covington Catholic did was to try to drown out hateful invective with school chants and one kid failed to move his face from in front of a beating tom-tom. Even if everything alleged in the first burst of reflexive anti-male Trump-hate that hit them was true, they were rude. Period. (Trick question, do you have a teenager at home?) None of them accused anyone else of being complicit in murder. None of them accused millions of people engaged in a lawful and Constitutionally protected act of being spree killers in waiting.

But, somehow, while the Parkland gun-grabbers were given a pass, kids whose greatest sin was wearing a MAGA hat while waiting for a bus are doxxed, their personal information is spread about the internet, their families are threatened, the security environment is sufficiently dicey that their school is closed today.

This is just an example of the right being complicit in its own demise. Don’t fool yourself. This isn’t a “we are better than that” situation because, empirically, that is not the case. Those kids were accused of all manner of things by people on the right–you can check the apologies and the, in one case, unpublished diatribe against these kids if you doubt me. This is a case of “we want the left to think nice thoughts about us.” The only difference is that the left did not want the Parkland kids held accountable for their action and they want these kids punished for the MAGA hats, for being Catholic, and for going to the March for Life. And so we let them have their heroes and keep silent no matter what they do. And we attack the people they are attacking for having the wrong look on their face or not getting out of the way of some deranged lefty whanging away on a drum or wearing a MAGA hat. Their guy gets a pass into Harvard while left-wing activists are calling colleges where some of these kids have been accepted and trying to get them disenrolled. And we keep losing. I can’t imagine why.

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