Parkland - Dave Cullen Page 0,22
announced they were matching that pledge. Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw quickly followed. They applauded the kids for “demonstrating their leadership with a confidence and maturity that belies their ages.”
All afternoon, the three buses snaked up the Florida Turnpike carrying Jackie’s hundred Douglas emissaries to Tallahassee, with a caravan of news vans trailing behind. At four p.m., NPR’s All Things Considered took the air, and led with the story of the journey; they hadn’t even gotten there. Right about the same time, Sean Hannity’s radio show was playing on another Florida station, running a gun promotion. At 6:36 p.m., Oprah tweeted a fourth half-million-dollar pledge, which drew nearly half a million likes. “These inspiring young people remind me of the Freedom Riders of the 60s who also said we’ve had ENOUGH and our voices will be heard,” it said.
The two-million-dollar celebrity windfall came with a price. Conservative critics took it as confirmation the kids were pawns—and added Decadent Hollywood to the list of puppet masters. “Crisis actor” charges leapt from right-wing websites to mainstream media. A growing conspiracy theory contended that school shootings were hoaxes cooked up by the Liberal Media as a pretext for a government gun-grab. It escalated when The Internet discovered that David Hogg had been photographed thousands of miles away in summer 2017. David’s friend got into an argument with a lifeguard at Redondo Beach, California, and David was interviewed about it on local TV news—“proving” he didn’t even live in Florida. That was airtight evidence for the fringe Right. They scoffed at the explanation: the Hoggs moved to Parkland from Torrance, California, in 2014, and David returned to spend most summers with his friend there. Sometimes, they went to the beach. The conspiracy sites howled. Crisis actor, obviously.
Marco Rubio actually tweeted in support of the kids Tuesday evening, labeling the charges “the work of a disgusting group of idiots with no sense of decency.”
“Thank you,” David tweeted back.
His friends responded with humor. Wolf Blitzer asked Cameron about the crisis actor charges live on CNN. “Well, if you had seen me in our school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof, you would know that nobody would pay me to act, for anything,” Cameron said. Wednesday morning, he tweeted: “@davidhogg111 is smart, funny, and diligent, but my favorite thing about him is undoubtedly that he’s actually a 26 year-old felon from California.”
The kids also responded with the facts, and assurances. The first $1.5 million came from more than 18,000 individual donors. “Donations will be used to pay the expenses associated with the March for Our Lives gathering in Washington, DC, and to provide resources for young people organizing similar marches across the country,” a spokeswoman said. “Any leftover funds will go towards supporting a continuing, long-term effort by and for young people to end the epidemic of mass shootings that has turned our classrooms into crime scenes.”
They even used their parents. The kids rarely sanctioned that, because they understood the power of images. Parents at the microphone would undercut their message that this was all them. But they faced a countervailing narrative: Should two dozen high school kids really be handling $3.5 million, an amount growing by the day? And they did need help—not in planning, but in execution. An excellent New York magazine piece a few weeks later captured it well: “To handle the logistics alone, the kids desperately need grown-up help—even as they guard the specifics of what help they’re getting.” They had their guard up about that. I was constantly astounded about their candor in just about everything: what they were doing, how they were grieving, breakdowns and screwups and their own privilege. But one thing they were consistently cagey about, straight through summer and into fall: adult assistance. The only time I ever felt a smarmy talking point thrown at me was on the Tallahassee trip, while they were most sensitive about the issue and still new at handling their roles. Every time I asked about outside support, kids repeated the line “This is for kids, by kids.” That lasted only a few days. They despised talking points, and corrected the error quickly. After that, when they didn’t want to answer my question, they just told me so. It didn’t happen much.
Clooney mostly texted with the kids directly. But he also spoke to their parents on Tuesday, to allay concerns on all sides. The kids let Cameron’s dad, Jeff Kasky, make a statement. “These people putting their money in—not a single one of