On Wednesday, Laura Ingraham tweeted out an ill-advised knock on Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg. She tweeted that she believed Hogg had been whiny in discussing his rejection from certain colleges:
The tweet was gauche.
So Hogg called for a boycott on all her advertisers. That was, in and of itself, somewhat ridiculous — after all, this was by political standards a mild attack at best. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory, it wasn’t a “crisis actor” lie. It was a mean interpretation of an interview Hogg did with TMZ.
Hogg’s boycott was overkill. But advertisers dropped Ingraham’s show anyway, fearful of a public manipulated by the media to believe that anything said about Parkland survivors was some sort of dire breach of basic morality.
Then Ingraham apologized.
Problem solved, right? Lesson learned. Don’t say silly, mean things about Parkland survivors. But Hogg quickly rejected the apology, and called for an increased boycott on Ingraham and other Fox News hosts until they “stand down” and start acting “objective” — by which Hogg presumably means “until they start agreeing with all of my rhetoric and proposals.”
And the Left continues to humor the boycott effort, astroturfed by Media Matters.
So, here’s a simple question: what’s the point of this boycott? Does anyone even remember what this debate is about at this point? Fox News is being boycotted because a host said something about a student’s college admissions. That has nothing to do with gun control or gun rights. It has nothing to do with legislation or law enforcement.
And it doesn’t have anything to do with restoring civility to politics, either. Hogg has viciously attacked his political opponents over and over and over again.
So, what is this all about?
Demonization. Ingraham never should have tweeted what she did. But the advertiser boycott was overkill from the beginning, and it’s particularly overkill after she apologized. I started writing my syndicated column at 17 years old. The most popular nickname for me on the Left was “The Virgin Ben.” I was smacked about routinely. But I was speaking publicly, and that’s the way things go. I never called for my political opponents to be boycotted because my feelings were bruised.
It’s obvious now that the boycott had nothing to do with protecting the feelings of Parkland survivors, and everything to do with destroying a political opponent. Ingraham opened herself up, and the Left charged on in. But let’s not pretend that this boycott effort is anything but political.