were soaking up so much out there: organizing techniques, messaging, what was working, what was falling flat, what kids out in the trenches really needed, and how their tweets were rippling out into local communities in unforeseen ways, good and bad. Time to change the fear dynamic. All that local contact crystallized their phase two strategy long before the march: Leverage all that enthusiasm. Organize it.
Young voters have long been a sleeping giant of American politics, because most of them stay home. If they ever turned out in percentages to match their older counterparts, they could swing most elections. Trouble is, they never do. Millions of students were answering the call but were unsure what to do. Most of them were new to all this. The message from MFOL was simple: Get started. Start small. Grab a clipboard, grab a friend, start a sibling march in your community. A prominent link on the group’s website spelled it all out. They were stunned by how many visited the site.
Every event, big or small, modest or glamorous, came with one demand: voter registration—a table or booth or preferably a clipboard team hitting up the venue and the parking lot. David Hogg was frequently seen working the crowd. They had to walk the walk, demonstrating the imperative “You can’t vote, if you don’t register.”
All those local kids would have to shoulder the long, hard grunt work of sending teams through their neighborhoods to register voters, and staffing booths at their schools. They would have to continue connecting and recruiting and expanding their networks, every day until Election Day, to keep excitement high and turn out the vote. MFOL provided guidance, structure, publicity, and talking points. Local organizers from half a dozen states whose groups had been jump-started by MFOL were radiant. Often the biggest things the Parkland kids brought was validation: most kids didn’t believe they were qualified to do these things until the Florida activists paved the way. Early on, the Parkland kids noticed something significant: every high school visit required a student to invite them, to win faculty approval, and recruit classmates to execute the event. The simple act of visiting these schools was activating young leaders and giving them a first taste of organizing. MFOL couldn’t hit 435 US House districts. They could not hit hundreds of thousands more state and local electoral regions. The kids they connected with could. The MFOL kids brought attention, excitement, talking points, and a template. A network was taking shape in their wake.
4
The NRA had lain low after the shooting. That was its MO. A New York Times story called it “a well-rehearsed response”: keep as quiet as possible until the gun control conversation cools down. But it always cooled down quickly. What if Parkland was different?
NRA leadership stuck to the plan. No public statements, and they pulled way back on Twitter. In the two weeks before the attack, NRA posted about twenty original tweets a week. For the five days immediately after, that dropped to zero. But then it roared back: more than thirty each of the next two weeks. This signal to resume attack came eight days after the shooting. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO, broke his silence at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where his name was initially kept off the program to mute protest. He carefully avoided attacking MFOL directly, but hammered “elites” and “socialists” who “don’t care not one whit” about saving kids. “They care more about control, and more of it,” he said. “Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms. . . . They hate the NRA, they hate the Second Amendment, they hate individual freedom.”
The Twitter account followed the same rules, for months afterward, generally training its fire on media stories about gun safety. There was not one tweet attacking David Hogg by name until August 4, and still nothing tagging Emma as of early fall. But to the NRA’s own tight audience, it was a very different story. The Times described a furious debate that first week on NRATV, the organization’s online video channel. Hosts of its shows “spoke chillingly of leftist plots to confiscate weapons, media conspiracies to brainwash Americans,” the Times reported. “With broadcast television–quality production and three dozen original series, NRATV has the ability to reach millions of people through the channels that distribute it like Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV.” NRATV had deep resources, as part of