WU Political Review
Young Activists: Fighting to Grow Up Hannah Grimes Artwork (right) by Caroline Weinstein
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had just gotten out of third period when my phone lit up with the notification I had been waiting for all day: my ACT score was available. It was raining hard outside, but I ran to my car across campus to open the email. With water dripping from my hair and hands shaking, I typed in my account password. It was my second try at the test, and I needed this score to be a win. It might sound silly, but when I saw my score, the one I was hoping for, I screamed loud enough to hurt my throat. I had worked hard for this, and it paid off. I rushed back into school to tell my teachers. Months later, I found myself rushing to my car during the school day again. The scholarship program I applied to was releasing decisions at 2:00 P.M., and I wanted to be at home to open mine. The decisions were three hours late, so I sat at my computer and refreshed my screen every minute, waiting for a notification to pop up. When it finally did, my mom started crying before I could read the text. It was an acceptance letter. This time, I screamed loud enough to lose my voice. When David Hogg, Parkland shooting survivor and gun control activist, announced his acceptance into Harvard, Twitter and major news sites were flooded with hate. A tweet from conservative political strategist Caleb Hull quickly went viral: “75% of Harvard students score over a 1470 on their SAT with the bottom 25% averaging just over 1400. You really need over a 1470 to be considered. David Hogg’s SAT score was 1270. He was denied to UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC Irvine, where a 1240 places you above average.” Months before, TMZ had published Hogg’s test scores and GPA. They went viral, and many conservative voices on Twitter made fun of them. Throughout his application process, Fox News host Laura Ingraham mocked him when he was denied admission to a college. For weeks, David
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For famous young activists, the mean girls in high school are millionaire corporate moguls. Hogg’s notification screen was full of people mocking his test scores, his college rejections and acceptances, and his intelligence. He was eighteen at the time, and this was not long after he lost friends in the Stoneman Douglas shooting. Young activists are so often put into the public spotlight as the leaders of movements. In the past five years, we have seen seventeenyear-old Greta Thunberg and nineteen-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez forging paths to stop climate change, thirteen-year-old Mari Copeny fighting for clean water in Flint, twenty-year-old Emma González speaking at March for Our Lives protests, ten-year-old Bana Alabed advocating for peace in Syria, and so many more. While doing amazing work that promotes peace, environmentalism, gun control, and racial justice, these activists are experiencing their formative years. They are growing up in the public eye, with conservative politicians, journalists, and even the president bullying them constantly. Usually, these politicians are not targeting the young activists’ policies to insult them. Rather, conservatives are targeting young activists’ personal lives—they are exploiting, bullying, and targeting children. These personal attacks on activists’ personalities and apolitical lives stands in stark difference to the policy-oriented scrutiny directed towards their older counterparts. Conservative
politicians already have an arsenal of insults to use against liberal activists, often involving their views and intelligence, but the young activist gives them one more thing to insult: age. These politicians see it as acceptable to put young activists in their place, as if they are children to be scolded and grounded at the dinner table for arguing with their parents. Leslie Gibson, a former GOP candidate, said of Emma González: “There is nothing about this skinhead lesbian that impresses me and there is nothing that she has to say unless you're frothing at the mouth moonbat.” When Greta Thunberg was named Time’s 2019 Person of the Year, an honor Donald Trump reportedly pursued, he tweeted, “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Thunberg, sixteen at the time, responded by changing her Twitter bio: “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.” In these situations, Thunberg has to add “gracefully subvert insults from the president” to her long daily schedule, already filled with climate change conferences, important meetings, and school. Young activists cannot just let these comments go, especially when their audience wants a strong leader, but they also cannot respond with anger, which will be written off as a kid’s temper tantrum and will further the dialogue questioning their place in politics. Now that young women are increasingly heard in the political sphere, Trump has more opportunity to target them and, in turn, influence the self-image of millions of girls across the nation. His commentary about women’s bodies has already made a lasting impact on young girls. In a New York Times poll just before the 2016 election, almost half of fourteen to
