Students from the March For Our Lives gun control movement are set to begin a 60-day summer tour, which will include a total of 75 stops including college campuses.
Their goal is to push the Left’s anti-gun agenda to the forefront and register new voters to support pro-gun control measures and legislators.
The tour will aim to hit all congressional districts in the state of Florida as well as advocate for universal background checks and bans on high capacity magazines and semi-automatic rifles.
These students have experienced a great tragedy. Of course they have a constitutionally protected right to express their political opinions wherever and however they choose. But, these activists do not speak for all Parkland students (Kyle Kushev is a prominent example). As public figures, they should be criticized on the basis of their political activism, not for the trauma they experienced.
First and foremost, the March For Our Lives highlights a disturbing new trend within liberal political movements: the use of tours and marches to achieve specific political objectives, rather than earnestly attempting to create an honest dialogue on contentious topics.
For instance, the flagship event for the second annual Women’s March was held in January in Las Vegas, Nev., for the sole purpose of increasing liberal voter turnout in the frequently volatile swing state. Unlike the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., this year’s march was not an organic and spontaneous demonstration, but a carefully-crafted and well-funded enterprise featuring pre-produced videos and an aggressive “Get Out The Vote” message. The march was even dubbed, “Power to the Polls.”
Clearly, recent left-leaning political movements are less about free speech and the free exchange of ideas and more about building up enthusiasm for the next election. This, in and of itself, casts doubt on the legitimacy of the intent of such movements, and makes it harder for concerned observers to discern which movements are truly an organic expression of public sentiment.
Secondly, this tour’s probable reception on college campuses reveals just how deep anti-conservative bias runs in academia.
Make no mistake, the Parkland gun control activists will not face the same opposition as conservative speakers. They certainly won’t face the sort of riots, university stonewalling, and harassment conservative student activists have faced in the past, even though the Parkland gun-control activists are launching an explicitly political tour which seeks to register new voters in favor of gun control. Ironically, conservative speakers who have been protested against extensively and violently (i.e. Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos) have never used their tours to register voters in support or opposition of particular legislation.
If anything, this reveals the blatant double-standard on college campuses when it comes to welcoming the free speech and political activism of students, the Parkland shooting survivors’ new tour takes the cake.
One can only imagine how a tour launched by student activists against gun control, actively seeking to register new voters to support legislation arming teachers, would be received. It’s unlikely that such a grassroots movement would receive any comparable backing from corporations, celebrities, and university administrations, not to mention the threats and intimidation its organizers would face from professors, students, and professional “anti-fascist” activists.
As long as this bias exists among our financial and academic elites, liberal students will always have a leg up on their conservative peers in terms of political activism. This is neither fair nor consistent with the values of a society which prides itself on equality. The upcoming March For Our Lives tour ought to make us question the current state of student activism, not unthinkingly praise it.
