Called Out All the Bullshit

Fearless, Fed-Up Students Who Called Out All the Bullshit

March For Our Lives and the school climate strikes defined a new generation of witty, furious activism.

JAMES WEST

Furious, funny, and fed up. True heroes of the decade: the students who spoke up, walked out, and shook us from paralysis and moral complacency.

I’m talking, of course, about the recent youth movements—March For Our Lives and the global climate strike school walkouts. Each was a unique response to a monumental crisis, but they are linked by organizational prowess and by an unfiltered “We Call BS” ethos, the latter best embodied by student leader Emma González, who secured her place as an icon of this long American decade.

Enough is enough, they said, and their howls for action on guns and climate policy now define a new generation of activist: They ok-boomered the old guard with digital-native nuance that deflected even the most savage attack, making critics look precious and obsessed. When Fox News star and pious white supremacist Laura Ingraham smeared Parkland massacre survivor David Hogg for being rejected by some universities (he’d already been ultra-vilified by the right as a Nazi crisis actor), he arranged an advertiser boycott. TripAdvisor, Hulu, Johnson & Johnson, and Nestlé, among others, fled. Ingraham apologized. We love a David Hogg vs. Goliath yarn.

“Whenever somebody called you a ‘dick’, or whatever, just say, ‘I love you’,” Hogg told journalist Carlos Maza at Vox for this video on how Hogg beats back bullies. “We don’t need anybody else being super mean to each other, like Laura was to me, or anybody else. Point out the few that are just absolutely ridiculous. And after that, people will start fighting for you.”

And fight they did. In March last year, I went to DC as young Americans jammed the capital (and every other city) in a display of angry optimism, executed with the precision production values of a Beyoncé tour. “It’s all about making civic engagement cool,” 17-year-old March For Our Lives co-founder Jaclyn Corin told me during a roundtable discussion hosted by Mother Jones around the same time. “They see people that are the same age as them getting up there and actually doing amazing things around the country and say, ‘Oh, these kids are my age and are getting out there and doing all this amazing work, so why can’t I?’”

We caught up with David Hogg in the midst of the “Road to Change” bus tour, six months after the shooting. The movement had found an immediate target: registering and turning out voters for the 2018 midterms. “We’ve spoken in more congressional districts than almost any presidential campaign has in the same time span,” Hogg said—25 states in 60 days. “We know what America’s thinking right now.”