Parkland Victim's Family Sick After Getting Behind-the-Scenes Look at DC March
According to south Florida’s Sun-Sentinel, the brother of one of the Parkland shooting victims, Hunter Pollack, claimed that he wasn’t allowed by event organizers to participate in the March For Our Lives and deliver a short speech about his slain sister, Meadow Pollack.
In a Facebook Live video posted the morning of the event from a hotel in Washington, D.C., father Andrew Pollack bluntly stated: “My son got denied to speak at the march, so I’m going to a lacrosse game. I guess he’s got a different agenda than their agenda.”
“They don’t really care about the victims’ families,” Hunter added.” I don’t know what this is about but it’s definitely not about mourning individuals.”
Some of the survivor students of the Parkland, Florida, school massacre — with tremendous financial and logistical assistance from several liberal anti-gun organizations — held the March for our Lives event on Saturday in Washington, D.C., and other major cities.
Hundreds of thousands of people turned out for what was in reality a protest demanding gun control, but had been billed as an opportunity for the voices of survivors and the families of the victims to be heard.
Except it appears that not all of the victim’s families were extended that opportunity to be heard by the crowd.
According to WPLG, the brother told them, “I was going to give a speech about Meadow and how devastated I am and how we need to make change, but they won’t allow me to put my voice out.”
The “change” that Hunter wanted to talk about was an increased focus on school safety measures, not blanket gun control measures like bans on so-called “assault weapons” that event organizers seemed focused on.
But Ryan Deitsch, one of the student organizers of the event, disputed Pollack’s claim that he wasn’t allowed to speak and asserted that the brother had been invited but “he never showed up” for early morning preparations on Saturday.
“We openly invited a lot of people, and some people just turned it down,” Deitsch said. When asked if Pollack’s different views on gun control played a role in his not being there to speak, Deitsch replied that it was “not political whatsoever, he just wasn’t there.”
Deitsch also denied the claim that Pollack was disallowed to speak when asked by the Sun-Sentinel, saying, “As far as I know, he was on the list” of guest speakers.
But Pollack was not alone in his claim that he was excluded from the march due to holding a different opinion on solutions to school shootings, as National Review reported that one of the survivor students who has advocated for legislative solutions that don’t involve gun control, Kyle Kashuv, was also barred from participation in the event.
Patrick Perry, who’s 14-year-old sister Alaina died in the school massacre, also took issue with the march and some of the organizers, tweeting at anti-gun student Emma Gonzalez that he’d prefer she not use his sister’s name and memory to “push your agenda” as she would not have been supportive of it.
Furthermore, conservative documentary filmmaker Dennis Michael Lynch — who has been assisting the Pollack family in their dealings with the media — claimed on his website DML that student organizer Deitsch had lied about Pollack being invited and included as a speaker but hadn’t showed up.
Lynch produced screenshots of alleged text messages between Pollack and other event organizers — which have not yet been independently confirmed — that appeared to reveal an at best halfhearted effort to include Pollack at his request that was strung out and fell through at the last moment.
He further stated that Pollack was informed late Friday night that he would not be included in the “show” as a speaker, and that when Pollack and his mother attempted to go the event regardless on Saturday morning, they were ignored by event organizers and invited celebrities.
One thing that has emerged as clear as can be from this whole event is that there was a singular purpose behind the March for our Lives — an effort to disarm American citizens — and voices speaking to the contrary would not be granted an opportunity to share their platform and be heard.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
