Michigan GOP candidate calls Parkland survivor David Hogg a 'crisis actor' who is paid by CNN

An Allegan County Clerk Bob Genetski, who’s also the Republican candidate for Michigan’s 26th district state senate seat called Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg a “crisis actor,” the Holland Sentinel reports.

The comment appeared in a tweet Genetski sent shortly after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School, where 17 people were killed. Since the shooting, student organizers have led a gun-control movement that’s included the historic “March for Our Lives” and a National School Walkout being held Friday.

Genetski who served three terms as a Michigan state representative, told The Sentinel he “personally [believes] David Hogg is being used by CNN because he fits their liberal narrative of Big Government Solutions to the Parkland tragedy.”

The former lawmaker told The Sentinel he doesn’t think CNN is paying Hogg, but that the “liberal network found a preppy, middle class looking kid—who sadly, according to the media, was at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on the day of the shooting—and pays him in interviews and airtime as long as he drives their message of gun confiscation

He added that Hogg is “grandstanding and self-promoting with this awful event in the background and that he is using the shootings as cause to be disrespectful to Florida Governor Scott, Senator Rubio, the president and basically anyone whose views CNN happens to disagree with.”

Genetiski also argued that the process by which Hogg became the face of the massacre was inorganic, telling The Sentinel CNN handpicked him as the “face of the tragedy.”

“I would feel much better about seeing and hearing his opinion everywhere if the students from his school were to have voted Hogg as spokesperson and not CNN,” he said.