Although attendance at the May 2 anti-gun control rallies was ultimately dwarfed by surrounding events urging tighter gun control, from a logistical standpoint, the Tea Party Patriots’s plan to stage a national “student-led” protest was a major success: A majority of news outlets that reported on the walkouts—including
Huffpo,
Vox,
USA Today, and the
Los Angeles Times, among others—failed to mention the involvement of a group of veteran political operators, which was already then public information.
Aside from
CNN and handful of
local reports, the media solely attributed the planning of the pro-gun protests to a New Mexico high school senior: Will Riley, the author of a newspaper op-ed titled,
Parkland Students Don’t Speak for Me or My Generation.
The “Stand for the Second” school walkouts were staged specifically as a response to the “March for Our Lives” demonstrations attended on March 24 by more than a million protesters nationwide. Save for the
National Review, top conservative outlets mostly
credited Riley alone with planning and carrying out the event. The Daily Caller, for example, did not identify the Tea Party Patriots as organizers in its
May 2nd coverage, even though the group’s chairman, Jenny Beth Martin, had already penned
an op-ed for the website taking credit. The Tea Party outfit, Martin wrote, was “naturally drawn to the effort of helping these students fine-tune their event-organizing skills, and also develop a deeper understanding of why the Second Amendment was so important to our nation’s founders…”
A batch of leaked PDFs reviewed by Gizmodo, however, reveal the Tea Party Patriots went beyond a “fine-tune,” steering the students’ messaging from start to finish. Several times the group directed the would-be protesters to simply parrot pre-written talking points, many drafted by “our friends” at
The Heritage Foundation, the Twitter account of which students were also advised to follow. Students were also directed towards YouTube channels of right-wing think tank and non-university Prager U, as well as
Arthur voice actor-turned-milquetoast pundit-turned-
meme Stephen Crowder. Many of the photos of the event online show students holding signs with simplistic slogans pre-written by the Tea Party group, such as, “Gun control only stops good guys from getting guns,” and “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”—a
quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin that was written to argue the finer points of a tax dispute.
