Last Saturday, at the Boston satellite March for Our Lives, I noticed a peculiar sight. It was a stout, middle-aged man wearing a Patriots cap and blue wrap-around Oakleys. He looked more like a high school baseball coach with an affinity for canned beer than a leftist activist steeped in the thinking of Noam Chomsky. He was marching alongside a younger woman who looked like his daughter and was carrying an “Enough is Enough” sign. Instead of a pithy zinger, his own sign was plastered in earnest with the handwritten names and faces of all 17 dead victims of the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, each pasted on colorful starburst cutouts in lime green, hot pink, fluorescent yellow, or tangerine.

In the wake of the Parkland shooting last Valentine’s Day, support for gun control in America has surged. Outside liberal bastions like Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., where crowds filled streets as far as the eye could see, marches popped up in previously improbable locations like Marfa, Texas; Laramie, Wyoming; and Lewiston, Idaho. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that support among American voters for stricter gun laws is at an all-time high: 66 to 31 percent, up 19 percent from less than two years ago, with gains in surprising demographics, including independent voters, men, and whites with no college degree.

The Parkland students have been widely credited with changing the conversation on gun control, thanks to their fast-moving social-media savvy and capitalization on the progress forged by older activist groups, such as Moms Demand Action and Black Lives Matter. That also made them a target for right-wing extremists, but that part, unfortunately, was not a new development. The families of murdered Sandy Hook Elementary students endured a deluge of abuse, fueled by false-flag conspiracy theories from sites like Infowars. Now the attacks on shooting survivors has spread from fringe to mainstream conservative sites.

Take David French, a senior writer for National Review, who twice tweeted disparagingly of high school senior David Hogg this past week. “I don’t think that photo translates well outside the gun-control cocoon,” he wrote of an image of Hogg in a gray suit jacket with a raised clenched fist. French's message was ambiguous, with room for plausible deniability. But many online trolls had just compared Hogg’s pose to a Hitler salute, and French made no attempt to distinguish his remark from that interpretation. It was, to say the very least, more than a stretch to compare a raised fist to the open-handed fascist salute, but Nazi comparisons have become the go-to among the gun-violence survivors’ antagonists, who also Photoshopped a swastika on a photo of Hogg with an armband.

“David Hogg Is Fair Game for Critics,” French’s National Review colleague Charles C.W. Cooke announced last month, with the sadly necessary caveat that Hogg is not, in fact, a crisis actor or an FBI plant. Fellow conservatives agreed. National Review ran two more articles on Hogg, including Rich Lowry’s “The Teenage Demagogues,” claiming that the “young activists are making our public debate even more poisonous and less civil,” and a slightly deranged piece called “David Hogg: Oracle, or Useful Idiot?” in which the author wrote that “Hogg is basking in his 15 minutes of fame” before veering into a rambling argument about the obsolescence and “sociopathic” nature of physical schools in the age of online learning. Sarah Rumpf of the conservative blog RedState boosted the insidious conspiracy theory that Hogg wasn’t on campus the day of the shooting, which she later had to retract. Fox News host Laura Ingraham retweeted a story from The Daily Wire, run by French’s friend Ben Shapiro, mocking Hogg for being rejected by four colleges despite a “4.1 GPA,” adding that he was a whiner. Fair game, indeed.