The dispute over Laura Ingraham’s Twitter insults of Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg has escalated into a full-scale political and cultural battle with a coterie of right-wing and pro-gun supporters joining Fox News in defending the embattled host.

High-profile supporters of Ingraham in her feud with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior include conservative commentators Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza and Bill O’Reilly, as well as British TV journalist Piers Morgan, who said that the repercussions of her March 28 tweet, saying Hogg “whines,” are an “absurd over-reaction.”

Joining this cause with varying degrees of vehemence are outspoken rocker Ted Nugent, an internet conspiracy theorist who reportedly has ties to Alex Jones and Russian bots, according to another report.

As Ingraham went on a “pre-planned vacation” this week amid the controversy, Fox News announced Tuesday that it wouldn’t bow to “agenda-driven intimidation efforts” to drive advertisers away from her show.

Roughly a dozen companies heeded Hogg’s call last week for a boycott after Ingraham took to Twitter to mock him for his pro-gun control activism and for his remarks about not getting accepted to University of California colleges, despite his 4.2 GPA.

“We cannot and will not allow voices to be censored,” Fox News co-president Jack Abernethy said in a statement.

Nugent, a National Rifle Association board member, joined Fox in lending support to Ingraham, The Wrap reported. During a radio interview Monday, he doubled-down on his earlier criticism of Hogg, who survived the February 14 mass shooting at his high school that killed 17 people. Nugent called Hogg “a lost cause” and accused him of being “brainwashed,” while insisting that Ingraham is “a great person.”

“The guy has been brainwashed and it’s tragic because he could have been a positive force to identify systems and upgrades to really make schools safer,” Nugent said on 77WABC’s “Curtis + Cosby” show, The Wrap reported. “But now he’s gone off on a tangent being fed the lies and the propaganda from those that would repeal the Second Amendment.”

“I don’t think the guy can be fixed,” the rocker continued. according to The Wrap.

Meanwhile, a website called Hoggwatch.com has emerged that features content exclusively related to Hogg, the New York Daily News reported. The site is linked to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and pushes false ideas that Hogg is an actor paid by left-wing organizations to turn Americans against the Second Amendment, the Daily News said. Many of the articles are written by Mike Adams, the founder of Natural News, a “bombastic” website that seeks to debunk widely accepted scientific theories, the Daily News added.

Joining in the campaign to attack Hogg and to defend Ingraham are Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, the Business Insider reported.

Starting over the weekend, #istandwithlaura was the top trending hashtag among Twitter accounts linked to those operations, the Business Insider said, citing data from Hamilton 68, a website launched last year to track Russian propaganda campaigns in near-real time.

The site’s data showed that the frequency with which the accounts tweeted the hashtag jumped by 2800 percent on Friday and Saturday.

The website botcheck.me, which tracks 1,500 “political propaganda bots,”

also found that @ingrahamangle, @davidhogg111 and @foxnews were among the top six Twitter handles tweeted by Russia-linked accounts this weekend, the Business Insider added.

The Washington Post reported that Russian propaganda bots often wade into political controversies as a way to exploit divisive issues online and to sow discord in the United States.

Whether or not certain social media accounts are the work of Russian bots, the many users sharing the #istandwithlaura voiced their support for Ingraham, occasionally denounced Hogg and called for a boycott of the companies that have pulled their sponsorship of her show.

One user tweeted: “No one likes a bully. Boycott the companies boycotting Laura Ingraham.”

Another said, emphasizing her point with capital letters: “SO TIRED OF LIBERALS AND NOW CHILDREN TRYING TO DESTROY THE LIVES OF PEOPLE WITH DIFFERENT OPINIONS.”

Yet another tweeted: “This is a call for the ‘Silent Majority’ to become the LOUD majority. We need to be organized just like they are. United we stand, divided we fall. FIGHT back to this insane attack on our Free Speech or u can say bye to our 1st Amendmnt forever.#IstandwithLaura #Boycott”