"This is going to anger a lot of people.... People say they want change in the Democratic Party, but really they want change so long as it doesn’t potentially endanger their position of power."

"That’s not actually wanting change. That’s selfishness.... 'What we are not saying here is, ‘Oh, you’re old, you need to go.' What we’re saying is we need to make room for a new generation to step up and help make sure that we have the people that are most acutely impacted by a lot of the issues that we are legislating on — that are actually going to live to see the consequences of this."

Said David Hogg, who is a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and also the president of Leaders We Deserve, which has a plan to back young challengers to Democratic incumbents in Democratic primaries.

Hogg is quoted in "A Top Democratic Official Plots to Take Down Party Incumbents/David Hogg, a young liberal activist and now a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, is leading an effort to unseat the party’s older lawmakers in primaries" (NYT).

At a private meeting last month, a “neutrality policy” was circulated asking the party’s top officers to refrain from any activity that would “call into question their impartiality and evenhandedness,” according to two people with knowledge of the pledge, which sought to cover officers “both in their D.N.C. capacity and in their personal capacity.” Everyone signed it — except Mr. Hogg.

"We’ve marched so much. We’re tired of doing the same thing over and over...."

Said David Hogg, "who was among the students in Parkland, Fla., who mobilized on behalf of gun control legislation," quoted in "'Get Somebody Else to Do It': Trump Resistance Encounters Fatigue/Donald J. Trump’s grass-roots opponents search for a new playbook as they reckon with how little they accomplished during his first term" (NYT).

“We need to be positioned to bring a new generation into office so we’re not just protesting and marching,” Mr. Hogg said. “We can’t be outside looking in.”

The NYT usually tells us how old people are. We're told a random "nurse from Virginia" is 45. But I had to look up how old Hogg is. It mattered to me, because he's going on about having done "so much... over and over." Hogg is 24. 

Interesting correction on this article: "An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a type of treatment that helped save the lives of many gay men. It was medications, not a vaccine." There's never been a vaccine for AIDS. The NYT ought to know that. This idea that people ought to be given what they want reasonably quickly if they get out and protest — life doesn't work like that. It's not as if those in power have all the solutions and are simply peevishly withholding them out of unjustified hatefulness.

To be fair to Hogg: He moves from complaining about the ineffectiveness of protesting to the topic of running for office. He says: "After the election, I got several texts saying, 'Screw it. People in power don’t know what they’re doing and I need to run.'"

"I feel the need to continue wearing my mask outside even though I’m fully vaccinated because the inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I’m a conservative 😬."

 Tweets activist David Hogg. (I got there via Instapundit.)

This tweet is so perfect that I thought it might be a fake David Hogg making fun of lefties, but it's the blue check mark David Hogg, so I'm trusting Twitter that it's really him. I'm saying it's "perfect" because it sounds exactly like someone without much comic talent doing some heavy-handed, obvious political humor. It seemed like what right-wing people imagine left-wing people are thinking. But it's the left-wing person himself, and I guess he thinks he's being funny.

"Strange branding. I don't associate him with the feeling of getting a good night's sleep."

"Maybe some slogan playing on the idea of 'woke,' like 'Now, the woke can sleep.' Or 'How the woke sleep.'" 

I write, over at Facebook, commenting at a post linking to an NBC news article, "David Hogg launching pillow company to 'put MyPillow out of business'/Hogg tweeted a list of goals for the future company, which included supporting progressive causes and hiring formerly incarcerated Americans."

In the photo NBC chose to illustrate its news flash, Hogg looks sleep deprived:

Why would anyone want political meaning in their pillow? Have you ever used politics to try to fall asleep? There's a reason the cliché falling-asleep method is counting sheep — not counting Senators. Though Senators are dull. But they not dull in the right way. 

ADDED: We're told that Hogg's company will sell pillows that are "American-made by union workers," and I see at least one commenter mocking him as stupid — "Can you imagine the cost of a unionized pillow?" That made me think of the old "Look for the union label" ad campaign, which urged Americans to buy American-made clothing and to feel good about paying the extra cost. I rewatched those commercials, and they might make you laugh, but they actually made me cry, and I was trying not to cry. 

"Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder..."

"... about something that hadn’t dawned on them since Kennedy’s oration.... It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it... Game’s over, NASA won, congratulations.... NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s.... As a result, the space program has been killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects ... Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station and the space shuttle.... [T]heir purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston’s Johnson Space Center — by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth. The shuttle program, for example, was actually supposed to appeal to the public by offering orbital tourist rides, only to end in the Challenger disaster, in which the first such passenger, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, perished. Forty years! For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require...."

Wrote Tom Wolfe, ten years ago, in "One Giant Leap to Nowhere," which I'm reading this morning because it was linked at Instapundit.

Wolfe thought that what was needed was "The Word" — inspirational speech about the "godlike" enterprise of space travel. Inspirational speech is what JFK had provided, with his famously effective challenge, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth." But Wolfe puts that in context. It was the Cold War, we were competing with the Russians, and they were impossibly ahead of us in space travel that orbited Earth.

The Soviet cosmo-champions beat our astro-champions so handily, gloom spread like a gas. Every time you picked up a newspaper you saw headlines with the phrase, SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... The Soviets had produced a generation of scientific geniuses — while we slept, fat and self-satisfied!

That's what was so inspiring, the fight with the Russians. And, yay, we won. And then the game was over. If it was a game, a sport, a battle... it was a feat to get a big majority of Americans caught up in it in the first place. But after it's over and won, what's to keep the crowd in the stadium? Wolfe's idea about new inspiration has nothing like the power of the old Cold War with the Russians. It's that one day the sun will burn out and human beings will need an alternative. That's 5 billion years from now! And it looks like the first billion years of that will still be okay for us. That's nothing like what JFK leveraged back in the 60s.

ADDED: Wolfe did not live to hear President Trump say NASA "should be focused on the much bigger things... including Mars." Since it was Trump who said that, I'm just going to guess that the Democratic Party candidates are all opposed to it. Has anyone said anything about it? I tried to google that, and the one thing that popped up was a tweet from — of all people — David Hogg:

I wonder if any of the presidential candidates support getting us to Mars by 2030

Projects like Apollo and others from NASA have to lead to the invention of tons of new products/technologies, employed over 400,000 Americans while doing so and helped unite everyday Americans.

"Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment."

Key phrase.

"Like so many young men in so many foxholes before him, Hogg discovered in himself a powerful drive not to leave this Earth without making a mark. "

"'We really only remember a few hundred people, if that many, out of the billions that have ever lived,' he told me at his house in a gated community in Parkland, ten days after the shooting. 'Is that what I was destined to become?'... 'It’s so funny,' says Delaney Tarr, Hogg’s good friend and a founding member of the #NeverAgain crew. 'The way David tweets is legitimately the way he is in person. If he has an opinion, he’s not going to silence it for a moment.' Unlike many of his peers, Hogg appears not to care much what people think about him. He’s been bullied before: 'I’m easy to pick on because I’m a string bean,' he says. 'I’ve had this shit said about me my entire life' — not death threats, but 'twig arms and shit like that. I don’t care.'... [H]e is dyslexic. He didn’t learn to read until the fourth grade and recalls teachers 'telling my parents I would amount to nothing, like I was some kind of broken toy.' He found a way to process their skepticism. 'They taught me not to give a shit about what other people think — all that matters is what you think.'... At 16, Hogg started waking at 3 a.m. to meditate, not with a guru or through an app but following the tenets of Metta meditation. 'I sat there in my room very creepily in the dark,' he says. 'I would hold on to this rock that I got in California the last time I was out there, when I was hiking with my best friend. You could tell it used to be really rough, but because it was in the ocean so much it was really smooth and soft. It fit perfectly in the palm of my hand, and then I would just hold that and try to focus. It’s really focusing on loving anyone, including those you hate.'"

From "David Hogg, After Parkland Furious and unflinching, an NRA enemy, an accused “crisis actor,” and a high-school grad trying to figure out what’s next" (New York Magazine).

"I don't think the guy can be fixed. ... This guy is a lost cause. He is consumed with hate. He is part of the problem, not the solution."

Unlike the frontman of The Eagles of Death Metal,Ted Nugent won't back down.

If we give immunity from criticism to children — such as David Hogg, et al. — then adults will rely on children to do what adults want done.

I don't know how much the post-Parkland protesters are acting directly from their own hearts — it's politically expedient to see them as saints! — but if they are protected from criticism, it creates a dangerous incentive to adults who want immunity from criticism.

There are so many children around, and it is the way of the world for millennia to seize upon these handy little creatures — they're everywhere! — and use them to do the work adults want done. I'm not saying that's what's already happened with the post-Parkland protesters, just that the kid-gloves treatment of these vocal participants in the public dialogue sends a message to conniving adults that there's a special benefit to using children.

There are consequences.

I'm thinking of the use of minors in criminal activities, which is facilitated by the benevolence of the juvenile court system. The use of children in drug commerce produced a backlash:

During the early 1990s, under a set of faulty assumptions about a coming generation of “super-predators,”* 40 states passed legislation to send even more juveniles into the adult courts for a growing array of offenses and with fewer procedural protections....

This tough-on-crime era left in its wake state laws that still permit or even require drug charges to be contested in adult courts. Scant data exist to track its frequency, but fully 46 states and the District of Columbia permit juveniles to be tried as adults on drug charges. Only Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, and New Mexico do not....

By the way, I was robbed once in my life. It was in Italy, by children who were, obviously, used by adults to ply the old pickpocketing trade. People near me caught the children, and the police came. There was much chatter in the police office, and then the children were let go. I received an explanation in English: "They're children!" But everyone knew that children were used (abused) precisely because the police would let them go.

Meanwhile: "Noor Salman, the widow of the man who gunned down dozens of people at the Pulse nightclub two years ago, was found not guilty by a federal jury on Friday of helping her husband carry out a terrorist attack in the name of the Islamic State" (NYT). Message: Use your women, because their role will not be taken seriously.

So what can we say — as we debate public issues — about the children (and the women)? How much, if at all, can they be criticized? And what is their fate if we treat them as innocents, tiny oracles of emotional meaning? Meaning well and thinking of yourself as a fount of empathy is not enough to keep them on a straight path of goodness and not enough to protect other decent enough people from harm.
_____________

* Here's Hillary Clinton trying to detach herself from her own "super-predators" statement, from 1994, which had become politically inconvenient in 2016:

I thought Laura Ingraham had called David Hogg a "mother."

I'm reading "‘You’re a mother’: Laura Ingraham faces boycott for taunting Parkland teen over college rejections" at WaPo.

I didn't want to put this in the headline, because I keep getting email from Google Ads saying they're punishing me for failing to stay within the bounds of good taste, but I come from a time when "mother" was an epithet that meant "motherfucker." Based on Urban Dictionary, I think that usage is dead.

But so what did Laura Ingraham say about David Hogg if she didn't call him a mother[fucker], which I agree would be out of line?

She just said: "David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable given acceptance rates.)"

Why is that boycott-the-advertisers material? Yes, it was a little mean to use the word "whines," considering that Hogg is only 17 or 18 years old, but he's made himself a big public figure and he issues denouncements of others, so using a modestly judgmental word to describe his tone of voice is really nothing. Especially compared to calling him a motherfucker, which is what I thought happened.

So this is really a story about insanely over-the-top reaction.

And look, it's Hogg himself setting the fire of overreaction and fanning the flames:

Soooo @IngrahamAngle what are your biggest advertisers ... Asking for a friend. #BoycottIngramAdverts

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) March 29, 2018

Pick a number 1-12 contact the company next to that #

Top Laura Ingraham Advertisers
1. @sleepnumber
2. @ATT
3. Nutrish
4. @Allstate & @esurance
5. @Bayer
6. @RocketMortgage Mortgage
7. @LibertyMutual
8. @Arbys
9. @TripAdvisor
10. @Nestle
11. @hulu
12. @Wayfair

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) March 29, 2018

Yeah, but he's a kid so don't criticize him!!! No, I've got to say he is an over-empowered inciter who's way too eager to break things. Kids need limits.

As for "You're a mother," that was somebody's tweet pushing back Laura Ingraham. Which I read as sexist. Are special demands for empathy imposed on women who have given birth? As long as that's considered a strikingly pithy argument — as WaPo's headline strongly implies — we'll never have a woman President... unless that tweeter meant Laura Ingraham is a motherfucker.

UPDATE: The headline is now: "Facing boycott, Laura Ingraham apologizes for taunting Parkland teen over college rejections." I'm tempted to say, I get results! But the apology is new:

“On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland,” Ingraham tweeted. 

Really only a nonapology. Sorry you're hurt.

Why are colleges rejecting the prominent high school activist David Hogg?

TMZ reports:

David has been rejected by the 4 University of California campuses where he submitted applications -- UCLA, UCSD, UCSB and UC Irvine. He says the rejection letters came 2 weeks ago. He has a 4.2 GPA and an SAT score of 1270.

1270 is slightly above the average SAT score for UC Irvine. Numbers aren't enough, of course. Soft variables matter. But the teenager's activism, organizing the March For Our Lives, is extraordinary. So it's almost as if the schools are repelled by him (in secret) — the way many gun-rights people are repelled (openly). What's up schools? Are your values phony? Do you want pliable mush minds to shape and not an irksome, pesky, know-it-all, loudmouth kid?

This is — I hypothesize — what happens when institutions internalize political activism and why youthful political activism cannot be what it was in the 1960s.

I haven't watched David Hogg's political speeches, only this video. To my eye, he looks stressed and troubled. I don't know how independent he is, who if anyone is using or abusing him, how much sleep he gets, how confused and addled he may feel after such an intense time in the spotlight (immediately after the trauma of the Parkland massacre).

I wish some school with a traditional, structured approach to education would reach out to him so he'd have a good place to develop his mind and get some footing for his activism. He should want to avoid the shapers of pliable mush minds to give himself a chance to grow into mature political activism... or to turn his back on the whole thing and do something else with his life.