GOP congressman calls school shooting survivor 'illiterate' for criticizing Trump
Texas Rep. Chip Roy accused mass shooting survivor David Hogg of feigning ‘compassion’ for migrant kids.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) attacked a 20-year-old survivor of the Parkland mass school shooting on Friday, calling him “functionally illiterate” for criticizing Donald Trump’s family separation policy.
“Imagine being so functionally illiterate about the tragedy of cartel-driven trafficking of human beings on our southern border,” Roy tweeted, “that you ignorantly mock @realDonaldTrump for using the well-established term ‘coyote’ in a leftist zeal to (wrongly) virtue signal your ‘compassion.'”
He was responding to a comment by David Hogg, a gun violence activist who survived the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, lambasting Trump’s latest attempt to defend taking immigrant kids from their parents.
“Imagine calling the immigrant parents that bring their children to the United States for a better life ‘Coyotes,'” Hogg had tweeted Thursday night. “The level of xenophobia is sickening.”
Trump was asked at the final presidential debate about a New York Times report revealing that the his administration has been unable to locate the parents of 545 children who had been forcibly taken from their families at the southern border under his zero-tolerance policy.
Trump first suggested — with no evidence — that many of the kids had been brought into the country by “coyotes.”
Joe Biden emotionally rejected Trump’s argument, saying, “Let’s talk about what we’re talking about, what happened. Parents, their kids were ripped from their arms and separated. And now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”
Trump also falsely claimed the children were being “so well taken care of” in “facilities that were so clean.”
A spokesperson for Roy did not immediately respond to an inquiry for this story.
Roy’s tweet is the latest in a long series of offensive comments by the first-term congressman.
Last May, he dismissed the deaths of six migrant kids in U.S. custody, saying it was “fine.”
Last July, he complained that it was unfair to complain about caging immigrant children because he didn’t think they were cages, per se. “I’ve seen the facilities and I’ve not seen a single ‘cage’ in the way that it is being depicted,” he said at a House hearing. “I’m seeing ways to try to separate people and keep them safe.”
In April, Roy likened COVID-19 safety restrictions to Adolf Hitler’s reign. “We need more rational human beings that are going to step back and say ‘no, this isn’t a police state, this isn’t Nazi Germany, this isn’t Russia, we’re not going to do that,'” he urged.
And in May, he compared anti-racism protesters to the former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd. “Justice should be served here,” he said of the arrest, “And also for looters destroying people’s livelihoods and endangering lives.”
Roy faces a tough reelection race in his Texas congressional district against Democratic former state Sen. Wendy Davis.
Experts rate the race a “toss up.” The most recent major poll in the race, released last month, put Davis up, by a single point.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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