Young Activists: Fighting to Grow Up

I 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 2:00pm, 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 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 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 seventeen-year-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 seventeen-year-old girls responding said that Trump’s comments about women have affected the way they think about their bodies. 

For famous young activists, the mean girls in high school are millionaire corporate moguls, and these moguls are now becoming major influences even in the lives of girls outside of the public eye. 

The focus on girls here is interesting. David Hogg aside, conservatives usually target girl activists. It is not surprising that girls are questioned and insulted more than boys, as we have already seen how women are treated in politics. However, it is jarring that the extremely personal sexist comments are extended to children, especially when women are major sources of the scrutiny.

Women conservatives affront girl activists with the same misogynistic insults that they have experienced in their male-dominated field. Referencing Greta Thunberg and her counterparts, Laura Ingraham said, “The adults who’ve brainwashed these kids should be brought up on charges of child abuse.” Tomi Lahren, Ainsley Earhardt, and Amy Kremer are also among the many women conservatives scrutinizing young women like Thunberg. 

This degradation is even worse for young activists of color, who are excluded from mainstream media entirely, despite their efforts. In January, Vanessa Nakate, a young Ugandan climate activist, was cropped out of a published photo featuring Greta Thunberg and fellow activists Isabelle Axelsson, Loukina Tille, and Luisa Neubauer. 

Young activists are growing up in the public eye, with the president, conservative politicians, and journalists bullying them constantly.

While young white activists are scrutinized, young activists of color are completely erased from the narrative. It is not often that an activist of color breaks the white narrative promoted by the media, which is why it is important to publicly support activists like Vanessa Nakate, Feliquan Charlemagne, Anya Sastry, and their counterparts. 

This erasure and criticism is, unsurprisingly, not given to young conservative activists. According to conservative politicians, when liberal activists speak up, they have been brainwashed, but when young conservatives voice their opinions, they are faces of the future. 

Young Republicans like Breann Bates, Kassy Dillon, and Joshua DeFord have been consistently praised by conservative news outlets – their age is only mentioned as a hope for the future. Even young conservatives seen as the faces of large controversies are praised by older Republicans. 

After the January 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation, a viral conflict between Native American activist Nathan Phillips and disruptive Covington Catholic High School students, Amy Kremer tweeted, “Honest to God, if Democrats didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all. Just look at treatment of Covington kids versus treatment of Gretchen [Thunberg].” 

Here, we see a major conservative influencer standing up for young conservatives while critiquing young liberals. Kremer, a longtime Trump supporter, would likely question Thunberg’s age, but openly supports the Covington students.

These dynamics are terrifying. Conservative politicians are openly mocking young liberal activists about their personalities, appearances, and ages, while praising young conservatives without mentioning age. 

It seems that age has become yet another weapon to yield against people trying to promote gun control, climate change activism, and human rights. In addition, youth has become an added target on the backs of women. 

For famous young activists, the mean girls in high school are millionaire corporate moguls. 

Young girls are scrutinized even by women and are torn apart by older men, and this public mistreatment of girl activists is influencing the self-image of girls across the world, who now have to worry about politicians targeting their bodies, intelligence, personalies, and ages, in addition to their beliefs. 

The field of politics has always been marketed as an adult world, but now more than ever, young people are being hurt by the adults meant to protect us. Politicians repeatedly ignore or push aside climate change, gun control, racial injustice, water crises, and all the other major problems that young people will now have to deal with in the future. Because those adults aren’t doing their jobs, young activists are stepping up to save the world before it is irreversibly damaged. 

Conservative politicians are telling us to grow up before we speak up, while simultaneously pushing to arm teachers in our classrooms, funding fossil fuels, and silencing young and minority voices. They are telling us to grow up while destroying our chances of doing so without fighting for it.