Rolling Stone Crows about Using Emotion and Children to Push Irrational Agenda

Rolling Stone magazine crows about what is "different" about this iteration of the anti-Second Amendment movement. It isn't because students are involved. That has been tried before. What is different this time is that anti-Second Amendment billionaires built up a network across the nation. A network of paid activists that was ready to spring into action when the "right" emotional moment presented itself.

From rollingstone.com:

Everyone wants to know why Parkland was different. And the reason, says Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, is how quickly the community coalesced around a clear purpose: "Within hours of the shooting. We had never seen that before."

"Typically, you see a survivor here or there or a family or a community member coming out and saying, 'Stronger gun laws are needed,' but in this case, it was almost as though it was all the survivors, all the families, all of the community, and they were very, very clear in their call to action and it has helped keep this issue in the spotlight," Watts says.

The other thing that has helped keep the issue in the spotlight is infrastructure Moms Demand Action, its parent organization, Everytown, and Giffords have spent the last several years putting into place – a vast network of supporters, legislative experts, PR professionals and large amounts of money available to put behind the students' spontaneous efforts.

The Rolling Stone shows that the "student movement" is only a foil for the anti-Second Amendment movement.

Shannon Watts, the Bloomberg paid spokesman for the anti-Second Amendment left, says "You have to create momentum on the ground that then points the nation in the direction it needs to go on."

This is the way Progressives have always operated. They do not believe in rational argument. They have lost the rational argument on gutting the Second Amendment. They believe most people are too stupid to understand how smart Progressives are.  They use the elite media to manipulate people into forwarding their agenda.

Shannon Watts said the Everytown organization, paid for by Bloomberg, pledged 2.5 million dollars in grants to pay for "operational expenses" of the anti-Second Amendment marches.

The students are convenient tools to create momentary public opinion to push a legislative agenda.

Rolling Stone seems to believe this use of children to push the anti-Second Amendment agenda will be the magic tool they could not find before.

They are likely wrong. If adults could not gut Second Amendment protections under President Obama, what chance is there of children passing more severe infringements with President Trump in the White House? Some wealthy Progessives will donate to the anti-rights movement. At the same time memberships in the NRA soars, and donations to defend the Second Amendment flood in.

The extreme rhetoric used by children exposes the danger of their agenda to moderates and conservatives. Liberals are generally ignorant about conservatives positions. They are unwilling to allow that there *are* conservative positions. They rule out the possibility of anyone disagreeing with them in good faith. But moderates and conservatives tend to know liberals' positions. Evidence and sources are well summed up by quillette.com:

“The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse. Rather, they seemed to put moral ideas into the mouths of conservatives that they don’t hold.

This explains the portrayal of the NRA as an organization that gladly uses the deaths of children to gain profits for gun manufacturers, instead of a civil rights organization protecting Constitutional rights and the rule of law.

The demonization of the NRA pushes moderates and conservatives toward the NRA. They see the children using the images and symbols of the extreme left. David Hogg gives a Black Panther salute, modeled on the NAZI salute. Emma Gonzalez wears a military style jacket with a Communist Cuba flag patch.

The children call for an end to debate, for immediate drastic action, right now!

I suspect most are sincere. They are only parroting what they have been taught, and only the anti-Second Amendment side is allowed to speak at these events. Dissent is not allowed. Children and young adults have always been more susceptible to the allures of totalitarian movements.  They have less to lose, and have little real-world experience from which to gain skepticism.

The United States is not Germany in 1925, Cuba in 1959, or Venezuela in 1998. All of those countries had much large percentages of young, disaffected men who were outside the power structure, with many poor people struggling to survive.

In the United States, poor people have a standard of living that makes them upper middle class in most of the world. Due to contraceptives and abortion, there is a much smaller percentage of young people in the United States than there was in Germany, Cuba, or Venezuela. The children of Parkland are children of affluence.

I doubt those pushing for a disarmed population think this group of children will be successful in their legislative push. More likely, they believe, with some justification, that it will help with voter turnout of Democrats in November of the mid term elections. It will likely do that.

It will also aid in turnout of Second Amendment supporters in November. Historically, that has not worked out well for Democrats.

The mid-term elections will have the impact. If Republicans gain seats in the Senate, Trump will be able to appoint more originalist and textualist Supreme Court justices, securing the Second Amendment.  If the Senate is lost, that will not happen.

©2018 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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