The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss

repeat the facts: on February 14, 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida was the site of the most lethal mass shooting yet at a U.S. high school. The massacre claimed the lives of 17 students and injured 17 more. Following other shootings of staggering ←45 | 46→scale, the Parkland students commandeered the public discourse toward advocacy for stronger gun laws. A month later in the District of Columbia, Parkland students led the March for Our Lives, a name too chillingly literal in the light of the ongoing cascade of school shootings.

      The students’ actions readily qualify as activism, regardless of whether their families are affluent. As teens yet to graduate high school, they control no appreciable assets of their own beyond assuming the high moral ground. Moreover, the students’ actions can be called activism when compared with the resources at the disposal of the gun industry and its aggressive lobby. Although the activist encounter was asymmetric in power terms, the Parkland students’ registered material victories. Notably, a gun-friendly Florida governor signed restrictions into law in short order (Drobnic Holan & Sherman, 2018).

      The students’ articulate, uncontrived passion overwhelming impressed observers; just not all observers as the students were also subject to shockingly crass flak. InfoWars, Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, Russia-linked Twitter accounts, as well as Republican Party congressperson Steve King reported for flak duty against the students (Drobnic Holan & Sherman, 2018; Lopez, 2018). Trump-pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza merits special mention for his rapid efforts to dismiss the students by cuing deranged flak mood music. D’Souza tweeted a photo of the shell-shocked victims in the immediate aftermath of the massacre with the caption: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs” (quoted in Nakamuta, para. 2).

      Then, the flak got uglier. As noted, flak-in-discourse often takes the form of delegitimization in part through denigration and belittlement. The students’ authenticity as students was demeaned, as they were accused of being “crisis actors” and deep-state plants reading an anti-gun script. The flak memes lingered even at the epicenter of the massacre. One Parkland teacher told Politifact, “I had legitimate friends asking if [student activist] David Hogg is a real person—it was crazy” (quoted in Drobnic Holan & Sherman, 2018, para. 33).

      Flak at the teenagers got personalized indeed. Emma Gonzalez was derided by a Republican Party candidate for Maine’s State House as a “skinhead lesbian” (Bremmer, 2018). Her Cuban heritage was problematized as well as (in “damned if you do/do not” terms) whether she speaks Spanish. In the weeks after her school was attacked with bullets, she was also attacked anew with comparisons to Hitler Youth (Lopez, 2018).

      The aforementioned David Hogg was mocked by Fox News performer Laura Ingraham for not being admitted to college; he has since been accepted ←46 | 47→at Harvard. Hogg’s response to these cheap, demeaning jabs once again rallied to the register of activism against the millionaire Fox News factotum and the globalist conglomerate that employs her. Going activist with success, Hogg invited his Twitter audience to pressure top advertising accounts that supported Ingraham’s program to decamp from it. Further stabs at delegitimization were arrayed against Hogg. Other persons who shared his name—such as a mug-shotted 26-year old with a criminal record in South Carolina and no resemblance to the Parkland student—were asserted to be the “real” David Hogg (Garcia, 2018). In what may be a flak rite of passage, Hogg was also accused of Nazi affinities. More chilling, Hogg’s residence was “swatted.” In swatting, an armed Special Weapons and Tactics team is summoned by an anonymous phone “tip” alleging a situation (e.g., hostages taken) in order to trigger quasi-military intervention. People have in fact been killed in swatting incidents by innocently opening the front door (Ohlheiser, 2018).

      Alongside emphatic praise for their activism, the tasteless vehemence of the flak efforts to discredit the students returns to the power asymmetries that characterize flak; in this specific case, issues-oriented flak on gun control that was cross-hatched with personalized flak at particular Parkland students. The pre-standing power symmetries that tilted against the students signified that they made difficult-to-fathom sacrifices of personal security and peace-of-mind to engage with gun control activism.

      Keep Activism on the High Road

      #MeToo may also be construed as activism. The movement presents dispersed activism that has blasted through millennia of male power and impunity protected by silence. Previously unassailable figures, most notably in politics and the entertainment industry, have been brought to heel by #MeToo’s methods. However, it must also be noted that a figure like the heinous Bill Cosby was not sentenced to prison by a series of tweets. Cosby met justice in a courtroom, with the full protections of a presumption of innocence and vigorous advocacy, before being judged as guilty of the crimes of which he was accused.

      As much as figures such as Cosby demand comeuppance with justice for the victims, it must be noted that a world run on #MeToo logics radiates the distinct possibility of being bent from activism to flak. While it is unequivocally laudable that powerful men’s patterns of abuses have been confronted, tweets are not a substitute for due process. In this view, accusation that collapses ←47 | 48→into conviction is a decisive step backwards from liberal, Enlightenment concepts of justice and toward a stepped-up flak regime. Twitter is not a justice machine—no technology is—and the public must be vigilant that accusations do not become coterminous with conviction in ways that can readily converge with flak.