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Should Conservatives Have Turned Kyle Kashuv Into Our Own David Hogg?
Over at Vox, Jane Coaston has a thoughtful and in-depth profile of Parkland student and survivor Kyle Kashuv. Kashuv is likely familiar to Ricochet readers and podcast listeners; we featured him recently on a podcast discussing his experiences and beliefs following the shooting that took the lives of seventeen classmates and left Kashuv himself hiding in a utility closet for two hours.
Kashuv is a thoughtful and highly intelligent teenager, and has made a sincere effort to become familiar with the issues he is discussing. But the question with Kashuv, as with his counterparts on the left, David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, is why we are listening in the first place. Being the teenage survivor of a mass shooting does not grant one automatic authority or knowledge about guns; that is true of supporters of the Second Amendment and opponents.
What makes Kashuv valuable is his ability to be a counterpunch to his liberal classmates, who have used their fame since the shooting to start a nationwide gun control movement. Kashuv is articulate and has taken pains to speak to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. He is clearly behaving in a more even-handed and calm manner than his liberal classmates, who have endeared themselves to the left by calling the NRA and the politicians who support the advocacy group murderers.
In her piece, Coaston correctly pinpoints a point of extreme hypocrisy on our side:
Immediately after the shootings, many on the right decried the teen activists from Parkland, with Fox News’s Todd Starnes calling them “propaganda pawns [used] to peddle a fake news narrative.” But now it seems they have decided that if they can’t beat teenagers lobbying to stop school shootings, they needed to get their own teen.
Disturbingly, our media and our society at large has decided the best way to deal with an event like Parkland is treat children who have experienced extreme trauma to Gladiator treatment. The gun control Left have elevated the profiles of students, putting them at microphones at rallies and on covers of magazines, and the Right has done the same with Kashuv, putting him on our pages, and yes, on our podcasts too. We’ve pitted these children against each other; neglecting to consider how nationwide media exposure would hinder their personal healing after the trauma they experienced.
The conservative movement’s decision to elevate Kashuv is much like its decision to nominate and then elect Donald Trump. The Left decided to make the expert voices on school shootings its teenage victims; and immediately banned any critique of their rhetoric. How can anyone criticize a child who has just been through trauma? Precisely why the gun control Left decided to make these children their spokesmen. In response, the conservative movement have decided to latch onto the only person who could possibly fact-check and criticize Hogg and Gonzalez; a fellow teen survivor of the massacre. If the Left was going to play dirty, so too would the Right, giving them a taste of their own medicine. While Trump and Kashuv employ different rhetoric, the fact remains Kashuv is the only spokesman for supporters of the Second Amendment with whom the Left cannot argue, as per their rules about Hogg and Gonzalez.
The elevation of Trump and Kashuv is a troubling sign for our political rhetoric: the Right feels the need to have a defensive lineman in the form of a bully or the child survivor of a massacre, respectively. That is not without justification; the Left has given plenty of reasons for the Right to feel as though they are being ganged up on in the public square.
If we want our politics to be better — and we should — both sides need to recognize the reasons for and ramifications of the decision both sides made turning these child survivors into their own personal Gladiators, battling each other in the media since the moment they survived a mass shooting in the halls of their own school.
Published in Guns
No. The right just feels a need to fight back. Send someone who is far more knowledgeable on the subject than President Trump. But don’t then attempt to grab some cheap grace by backstabbing us with words like “both sides need…” when we give some CNN commentator the vapors or make that punk Hogg cry.
Having read both Mandel’s original post, and the Vox article she linked to, and David French’s article that Vox linked to, I see a lot of concern about Kashuv, and the other students. All to the good. What I don’t see is any indication Kashuv has gone off the rails, like Hogg, or that he’s being used in the same way Hogg is. It’s good that we’re concerned, and we’re trying to police our side of the line. And it appears to be working. Kashuv seems to have acquited himself well.
So is there really a problem on our side?
“They invaded Poland!”
Are we perhaps looking at this backwards?
Hogg and Kashuv both have First Amendment rights, both wish to use them, and both have a message that a sizable amount of Americans want to hear that can thus be monetized by our free press.
They have protection in the form of parents and, presumably, truancy and child labor laws.
That they are being used is the nature of the world as it is. They are nevertheless not only willing but somewhat eager to do the Joan d’Arc tour.
I make no apologies for preferring Kashuv’s message to Hoggs. While I admit that they are both young, I doubt either is significantly less informed on the issues of school violence and gun control that the majority of our polity or the talking heads that tend to do the interviewing.
Having a lot of people hang on your every word – being ‘celebrated’ is no doubt addicting and unhealthy. I’d like to imagine that I wouldn’t let this happen to my kid.
Someone else’s kid is not my problem, or my business (I’m not Hillary’s Village) and I decline to do a lot of hand-wringing over it.