by Dave Cullen
David Hogg in particular struggled. When DeAngelis and Christy released their statement, David retweeted it in support. He was up to 800,000 Twitter followers, and few of them had an inkling what the discreet statement was driving at. But enclaves in Colorado and Connecticut understood, and David had just publicly taken a side. He ultimately deleted the tweet, returning to neutral.
“When he tweeted that, we all were so thankful and excited,” Adams said. “And then it was honestly really insulting when he deleted it. You know I’m not attacking him or anyone at MSD or Connecticut—they’re all trying to do the right thing. I’m just saying. It’s frustrating. It’s really frustrating.”
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The second walkout also raised some cautionary flags. Thousands of schools had sanctioned the first protest, but many were taking a hard line against the prospect of making this a habit. Local organizers from around the country said punishment had risen from nothing following the first walkout to detention or suspension following the second.
Diego Garcia and a friend organized both walkouts at Mansueto High School, in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood. He was a senior there, one of the Latino kids working with MFOL since early March. “My school’s like super strict, so the first walkout they said, ‘Fine you guys can walk out but you can only stay behind the school, you can’t chat or anything,’” he said. “About a hundred and twenty kids walked out.” That was a quarter of the student body, and he was thrilled with that number, considering the cultural resistance. A lot of people were undocumented. That meant staying out of trouble. Preferably invisible. “They like to stay quiet, because they feel like they’re going to put their lives in danger,” he said. And anyone around them causing a ruckus could bring trouble too. “In the beginning, people would tell me to be careful,” Diego said. His co-organizer actually chose to remain anonymous. “Sometimes it’s better to work from the shadows,” he said.
But Diego was tired of watching his community hush itself. The Parkland kids had taken threats and abuse, but they weren’t letting it silence them. “You’ve seen it with Emma, you’ve seen it with Cam, they become a target,” Diego said. “David especially. He’s just like a big lightning rod for hate mail. People bash David Hogg specifically.” Diego was ready to take that chance. Meeting them in person made a huge difference. He chuckled trying to describe David. “He’s a great guy who’s just got ideas coming out like a conveyer belt out of his head.”
Diego kept pushing. He convinced his pastor to fund a group of fifteen students to attend the march in Washington. But he hit a roadblock from the school administration on organizing the second walkout. “They said, ‘You know what, you guys are getting too out of hand; if you walk out you’re going to get suspended,’” he said. “So I still tried to plan it and I got three other kids to walk out.” It was demoralizing, but he earned a lot of respect for resisting.
Coverage of the second walkout was also slightly ominous. The Trace’s analysis indicated it bumped gun topics back up to 2 percent of all news stories for a few days. That was great by the standards of previous shootings, but far below the 5.4 percent of the first walkout. It was the first big event to lose coverage. You couldn’t ring that bell twice.
Was it the lack of originality, or was this shooting doomed to be like all the others? Was the country losing interest after all?
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Occasionally, blowback hit MFOL directly. That same day in Arizona, things were going a bit awry. Bad time and place for a hiccup, because all eyes were on the Phoenix suburbs.
The president’s daily antics and “the Resistance” were the full-time obsession of the American media. MFOL had erupted at exactly the right moment to ride that fury. And Arizona was their first chance to harness it. It was just one US House seat, but the implications were enormous. The midterms were seven months away, an eternity in politics, but talk was already bubbling about a possible “blue wave” developing that might sweep the Democrats to victory, overturning the House of Representatives. No one would know until November, but two special elections offered an early glimpse. The first had been a shocker, just five weeks earlier. Conor Lamb, a Democrat, had flipped the US House seat in Pennsylvania’s eighteenth district, which had been so reliably Republican that the Democrats had not even fielded a candidate in 2016. However, Lamb had refused to make gun safety an issue in the race. The second special election was coming to a climax now.
Arizona’s eighth US House district was a bigger reach. The Republican margin in 2016 had been 37 points. With no local scandal or outbreak of war, that was generally an impossible margin to reverse. Polls showed the Democratic challenger, Hiral Tipirneni, trailing but within striking distance. Winning would be a political earthquake. Even coming in close could be a powerful harbinger for the fall. Politics can be a momentum battle, so both parties had invested vast sums, and the media was all in.
It was also the first big contest since Parkland on guns. And it had landed on the NRA’s turf, in the heart of gun country. The Republican candidate, Debbie Lesko, proudly cited her NRA endorsement, and ridiculed gun reform advocates. She promised to protect the Second Amendment from “reckless and irresponsible legislation that attempts to undermine this precious civil right.” Tipirneni came out publicly for most of the MFOL agenda. She also voiced support for the Second Amendment, as did they. MFOL was hungry for candidates like that: out and proud on gun reform. Just the sort of race they wanted to energize young voters—or anyone angry about lax gun laws. A strong showing might embolden cowardly Democrats to quit hiding from the gun issue. It might even coax a few swing-district Republicans to embrace their side. So Alfonso and Charlie Mirsky, another MFOL activist, headed to Phoenix for the walkout, and much more. There was also lots of spadework to be done for the fall. Arizona had been a solid red state for decades. It had gone Democratic in only one presidential election since 1952. Chunks of the Southwest had been drifting into the purple range, and Arizona’s demographics suggested it was headed that way, though perhaps a full shift was several elections away. There was an open US Senate seat, which seemed like another long shot for Democrats, but they were going for it. Their leading candidate was a bisexual woman unabashedly supporting gun reform. A multitude of local races were also at play. Every voter Alfonso and Charlie registered could help turn that tide in November. They had to win the registration battle first.
They landed in Phoenix a bit before midnight Thursday, and went straight to a late-night strategy session with the coalition of different groups they were partnering with. It was very late when Geraldine Hills, president of Arizonans for Gun Safety, affectionately known as Momma Bear, said enough: the kids are going to bed now.
They had an early wake-up, and organizers had packed their schedule. At ten a.m., Alfonso and Charlie walked out with students at Metro Tech High, and marched the two and a half miles with them to the state capitol. They staged a rally and gave speeches there, and that got dicey. Arizona is an open-carry state, and there were a lot of counterprotesters berating the kids, toting AK-47s, and waving bright yellow Gadsden flags. There were state troopers, armored Humvees, and a SWAT team. It was tense. Hundreds of students staged die-ins on the floors of the House and Senate lobbies, and outside the governor’s office for several hours. Officials warned them that arrests were imminent, so Alfonso and Charlie took the advice to leave. Alfonso later said he could afford to get arrested at home, where he had friends to bail him out, but they felt exposed in Arizona.
More disturbing for Alfonso and Charlie were the headlines. The Arizona Republic, the state’s largest newspaper, ran a big story titled “Parkland Student to Campaign for Hiral Tipirneni in Arizona Special Election.” Huge problem. Endorsing a candidate was verboten. Campaigning for them was worse. Of course MFOL hoped that candidates backing their issue would win. But they could campaign only on the issue, not the person. It was a subtle distinction, but that made it more important, not less. And the inherent confusion made it all the more vit
al to keep the distinction clear. They could write off future Republican partners if they were seen as Democratic flacks. They might begin attracting Republican candidates if they could demonstrate power to move a race on issue advocacy, and coax them with that voting block.
Before flying in, Alfonso had released a statement to the press to make MFOL’s intentions clear: “Our only goals are to register, educate and inspire people to vote on the issues of gun control.” The Arizona Republic quoted that in its story, but contradicted it in both the headline and the lede, which were quickly retweeted and re-reported everywhere. The story also quoted a named Tipirneni spokesman saying the campaign was “honored by the student’s offer to help.” This apparent endorsement was huge news in Phoenix, and it drew major national attention as well.
For Alfonso and Charlie, this was a disaster. “The boys got very upset: ‘We can’t be here; we can’t do this,’” said a member of the coalition that brought them to Arizona. “They were being misrepresented,” she said. “That’s not what they came here for.”
That source spoke on condition of anonymity, because it was such a touchy issue among her team. When I first asked Alfonso about it a month later, he was reluctant to cast it in a bad light. He’d had a great experience with most of the activists there, and he didn’t want to burn any bridges. But months later, he confirmed that her account was accurate, and that they had been deeply upset.
More events were booked for Saturday. Alfonso and Charlie “were tired, they were really overwhelmed, overloaded, and people are pushing them to do things outside their comfort zone,” the local activist said. She said at least one of the handlers tried to strong-arm them, pointing out that his group had paid for their plane tickets home. They felt a little like hostages. Others in the coalition were appalled, and felt the boys needed to be rescued. So someone called Gabby Giffords’s office and she got them out of there and bought them plane tickets home.
Tuesday, Tipirneni lost, but her 47.4 percent of the vote was seen as a rosy indicator for the fall. Arizona hadn’t elected a Democratic senator in thirty years. Could this be the year?
Arizona was a rough trip for Alfonso and Charlie, but also a symptom of a much bigger problem with the group: a growing appearance of alignment with the Democratic Party. That was a violation of their prime directive: to be a force for change outside the tribalism that had separated the country into sniping factions. That was a losing game. They had to stay nonpartisan—in appearance as well as fact.
That was the only hope, but was it feasible in the political climate that birthed them? They were right about all the Republicans supporting them, but naive about how toxic they were to that tribe. The crux of the red/blue divide, which the country had ossified into in the 1990s, was that most voters had picked a team, and the teams picked their issues, and then fought to the political death for each one, whether they agreed with their team or not. Some touchy issues, like guns, had been chosen by only one side. Republicans had embraced the NRA agenda and run with it, despite the opposition of most of their constituents. When Al Gore lost West Virginia and hence the presidency in 2000, guns were blamed for it. An absurd proposition for his loss, but for Dems already skittish on the issue, it had been a full retreat ever since. Hence two decades of unabated losses on gun legislation. MFOL had reinvigorated three constituencies on gun reform: Democratic officials, Democratic voters, and Republican voters. Polls showed majorities of Republican voters backing their demands—plus huge majorities of the crucial independents. In theory, that fourth quadrant should follow. More important, in swing districts and battleground states, gun reform drew huge majorities of Republican voters. Theoretically, that should have drawn a huge swath of Republican senators and congresspersons over to their side, for pure political expediency.
But that was the old system. In the red/blue world, representatives no longer responded to their constituents, they responded to their team. The red team backed guns, and the NRA dictated its terms. Its terms were absolutist: no reforms, no matter how sensible, or how many kids would die. Hold the line. Any red team member who peeled off to support his or her constituency risked being branded a traitor and primaried out.
None of that shocked the MFOL kids. They hoped to chip away at the stalemate by appealing to voters to demonstrate the political peril of opposing the vast majority so aggressively for so long. What did surprise them somewhat was that the red team wouldn’t even talk to them. They were toxic just by association—at least that was still the calculation in Washington. That might change if they could turn an election, but certainly not in round one.
But here’s where it got really tricky, and they hadn’t counted on this: Democrats embraced them, eagerly inviting the kids to their big events, and posing for every possible selfie with them, plastering their images together over social media. So as Republican officials rebuffed them, by allowing their images to be co-opted, the perception became that they had sided with the Democratic Party. That alienated Republican voters, endangering the crucial third quadrant that was central to their strategy. Lose the Republican electorate, and they would lose the war.
“We are doing everything we can to remain nonpartisan and anything that screams Democratic we’re trying to stay away from,” Dylan Baierlein said. “We can’t continue to show up to Democratic events, because the Democrats are inviting us and the Republicans are not.” They made a bigger point of saying in public statements that they welcomed talking to Republicans but what they really wanted to do was talk openly with politicians from both parties who disagreed with them, and try to find common ground. But as Dylan explained, “People who are against us generally are afraid to talk to us. That’s just the world that we live in—people don’t like listening to each other. But that’s what we’re trying to change.”
It felt like a no-win situation, a political system that had boxed them out. What it did was strengthen their resolve on a few key fronts. The midterms were growing ever more vital: the only hope for breaking this gridlock was a powerful electoral victory to jump-start a very long process. They had to convince swing Republicans to release guns from the all-or-nothing litmus test list. Health care, abortion, and immigration were all currently nonnegotiable on both sides, but the two parties were still working across the aisle on some issues, like the need for a sweeping infrastructure plan, digital privacy, and terrorism. Long term, the MFOL kids wanted guns on that cross-party list.
In the short term, the Arizona debacle proved incontrovertibly that they had to turn their attention to gun country. They had always intended to go straight to voters there, to bubble up momentum on guns from the red grassroots. But as their perception problem rose, gun country was an obvious antidote: forget Nancy Pelosi and Clooney and Obama too. Start showing up all over Instagram in South Carolina, Texas, and Utah. But the third reason was perhaps biggest of all. Listen to these people in the red states. Why did most of the population of Texas support their agenda but reject the idea of their cause? Texans were their best hope of understanding Texas. Time to get their butts there.
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Their media coverage had taken a disconcerting turn. Early on, it was mostly about the movement: their demands, their insurgency, and especially the march. The news value of all that had been mined, and the media had moved on to profile pieces. That made the group uneasy. “We don’t want to be celebrities,” Dylan said. “We were kind of riding that line, affiliated with all these celebrities who were at the march. We’re not celebrities. We’re activists just trying to make a change.”
They didn’t like the personality pieces at all, but there was a much bigger problem. Nearly all the profiles were about David or Emma, especially Emma. It was a touchy subject, and most of the kids shied away from going on the record about it, but they were discussing it. No one wanted to reverse that more than Emma. “She is our face,” Dylan said. “She doesn’t really want to be. She doesn’t want to take the credit for all of the work that we’re all doing. She doesn’t
want it to become the Emma Show. So she’s backed away. She’s having the time of her life, and she’s still doing amazing things, just at a lower profile.”
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Internet trolls kept at them, viciously, though that didn’t really bother them. (Threats did, and those continued, but that was another matter.) It was the sniping within their own school that hurt the most. Much of that was about them squeezing out their 3,200 classmates from media coverage. That was true, and unique among mass shootings. The media always did its best to create celebrity victims and survivors. Columbine had produced the mistaken Christian martyr Cassie Bernall; “The Boy in the Window,” Patrick Ireland; and the heroic teacher Dave Sanders. There were usually several, but even taken together, specific individuals formed a tiny fraction of the coverage. With Parkland, the national media honed in on these twenty-plus kids the vast majority of the time. The MFOL kids acknowledged that, but made no apologies. They were on a mission, and exposure was the fuel.
But there was another accusation against them, growing in pitch, and they realized their accusers had a point. It went back to how MFOL had come together—so organically and so perfectly, it had seemed to them at the time. They had decided early to govern by consensus: meeting together, talking together, deciding together. That required the group to stay small. And every passing day, the bonds grew stronger, the trust greater, which was perfect, except . . . they were still a bunch of white and brown kids.
Nobody was quite hashtagging them #MOFLsoWhite, not yet, but the pushback was gathering force. David Hogg actually helped bring it to a head with a few interviews leading up to the Washington march. In a livestream interview, Axios’s Mike Allen asked what the media’s biggest mistake was in covering the shooting. “Not giving black students a voice,” David said. “My school is about 25 percent black, but the way we’re covered doesn’t reflect that.”
