AP

In the aftermath of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, a group of student survivors have banded together to push for serious gun reform that could ensure no other children have to go through what they, and so many before them, have. For many people, this effort is incredibly inspiring. For the eldest son of the president, it’s the perfect opportunity to slyly endorse a smear campaign against a 17-year-old in the name of a truly insane conspiracy theory.


As Mediaite has pointed out, within the last 13 hours, human-sized Despicable Me minion Donald Trump Jr. smashed the like button on two separate conspiracy-riddled tweets that linked to articles about 17-year-old David Hogg, one of the outspoken survivors of the shooting.


Each claimed that, because his father is a retired FBI agent, and President Trump has been attacking the FBI, Hogg’s defense of the FBI and criticism of Trump is actually an FBI conspiracy.


One of the tweets accused Hogg of actually being an FBI plant, which is objectively insane. It would be laughable if we hadn’t already seen the trauma that these sorts of conspiracy theories put families in Newtown through after the Sandy Hook massacre. And now the president’s own son has apparently been endorsing this horrifying treatment of a school shooting survivor.

I personally can’t imagine having such disdain for the victims and survivors of gun violence that it’s easier to believe they’re part of a conspiracy to smear the president than to believe that, after losing friends in a preventable massacre that they managed to survive, they’d work to change the things that subjected them to that terror.


I suppose Trump Jr. has some insight, in that he is the son of a government employee who constantly makes an ass of himself in his father’s name. He may suspect something similar is going on with Hogg, but that’s probably giving too much credit to a 40-year-old man who feels threatened by a 17-year-old.