David Hogg, the Parkland, Florida student who survived the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and became one of the nation's leading gun reform activists practically overnight, has renewed his call for an advertiser boycott of Fox News personality Laura Ingraham's show, The Ingraham Angle, after she described the child detention centers housing immigrant children as “essentially summer camps.”
"As more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents,” Ingraham said during her show last night. “And temporarily housed at what are, essentially, summer camps.”
To underscore her point, Ingraham cited a news report from The San Diego Union-Tribune that compared the camps to “boarding schools.”
Ingraham's comments placed her on the receiving end of withering criticisms as President Donald Trump's administration faces considerable opposition to its family separations policy which has led to what advocates are calling human rights abuses at the nation's southern border.
It didn't take long for Hogg to respond.
"So @IngrahamAngle we meet again. Who are you biggest advertisers now?" Hogg tweeted.
"I love capitalism," he teased before listing seven advertisers with stakes in Ingraham's show. The list includes such companies as SIRIUS XM, Cabela's, Carfax, and Ace Hardware.
If the threat of an advertiser boycott sounds familiar, it's because it's happened before. In March, Ingraham feuded with Hogg amid a heated national debate about gun reform and mocked him for not getting into several of the colleges to which he applied. At the time, Ingraham cited a Daily Wire story which spotlighted Hogg’s college rejection notices.
“David Hogg Rejected by Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it,” she wrote, adding that Hogg had been “Dinged” by the University of California with a 4.1-grade point average.
Hogg went after Ingraham's advertisers in response.
Ingraham chose to apologize to Hogg shortly after advertisers began dropping her program.
Hogg did not accept Ingraham's apology and her supporters launched the hashtag #IStandWithLaura in response to boycott advertisers who dropped her show.
Many individuals went ahead and canceled their subscriptions and accounts with a slew of advertisers which included Expedia, Wayfair, and Office Depot. Others referred to Hogg as:
- an "anti-gun communist"
- a shill for groups funded by business magnate George Soros, who has often been accused of masterminding and funding liberal and progressive movements
- a "Lil Hitler pug"
- a "Hitleresque punk"
- a "Dem Puppet"
- a "radical leftist"
- a "fouled [sic] mouth [sic] teenager"
Ingraham's comments likening detention centers to "summer camps" are especially damning as they come on the heels of the release of an audio clip obtained by ProPublica which reveals children sobbing for their parents. At one point, a Border Patrol agent jokes, “We have an orchestra here.”
President Trump has admitted that his administration's "zero tolerance" policy is a negotiating tool to get Democrats to cave to his demands (which include tougher border security as well as a wall erected along the nation’s southern border). His Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, announced the policy last month. The Department of Homeland Security announced last week that around 2,000 children have been separated from their families during the six weeks since the policy went into effect.
