Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., does not believe survivors of school shootings are professional actors or that massacres like the one that occurred in Parkland, Fla., are part of some larger conspiracy to undermine the Second Amendment. It was especially puzzling then, that the Virginia Republican’s campaign Twitter account liked a bizarre tweet that accused Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior David Hogg of being a crisis actor.
Also @DaveBratVA7th is really into the #CrisisActor theory. He has liked several tweets. Go see for yourself. pic.twitter.com/c8IgCf3VFQ
— PJ Sykes (@pjsykes) March 1, 2018
Brat quickly undid the like but not before Virginia voters pointed it out, churning up the kind of outrage that could go viral quickly and become a bothersome election issue. When reached by the Washington Examiner, the Brat campaign blamed the errant like on a campaign staffer, reiterating that the congressman has never supported “any alt-right views or individuals.”
While the like was real, Brat tells me, it wasn’t genuine and neither is the subsequent outrage. He pans them as “totally false attacks to keep attention away from the hard work I am doing up in D.C.”
“I particularly welcome input from all constituents especially high school and college students who I taught for 20 years regardless of political views,” says Brat who taught as an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College for more than 15 years.
How’d the like happen in the first place then? A staffer, the campaign said in a statement to the Washington Examiner, liked the tweet when they thought they were logged into their personal account.
“This was against our policy of Dave approving Twitter content. Dave did not approve the ‘liking’ of these tweets nor would he approved of liking the question about Mr. Hogg,” the campaign said in a statement. “As has consistently been his position, neither Dave nor his staff, support any alt-right views or individuals.”
The campaign says they’ve taken steps to keep it from happening again.
