San Antonio-Austin U.S. Rep. calls Parkland shooting survivor 'functionally illiterate' in tweet

click to enlarge U.S. Rep. Chip Roy - Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore
Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy
Freshman U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-San Antonio-Austin, may be striking a moderate tone in recent campaign ads, but the famously combative pol isn't exactly showing similar restraint on Twitter.

On Friday, Roy went ballistic over a tweet by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg that criticized President Trump for claiming during the last debate that "coyotes," not parents, were responsible for bringing separated migrant children across the border.

In his response, Roy called the 20-year-old gun control activist "functionally illiterate" about human trafficking and blasted him for his tweet "ignorantly" mocking Trump. The criticism was Hogg's attempt to "(wrongly) virtue signal your 'compassion,'" he added.


Of course, Roy is free to use his Twitter account however he pleases. And Hogg — while a minor when he first began speaking up about gun violence — is an adult fully capable of defending himself.

But the Twitter outburst doesn't exactly line up with Roy's attempt at rebranding himself as a bipartisan family man as heads into the home stretch in his race against Democrat Wendy Davis.

As one Twitter follower noted, the attack was "not a good look for a statesman."


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Sanford Nowlin

Sanford Nowlin is editor-in-chief of the San Antonio Current.

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