Andrew Pollack, the father of slain Parkland student Meadow Pollack, killed in 2018 during the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., praised President Trump’s leadership in taking action in an emotional speech during the first night of the Republican National Convention.
“I never wanted this to become a political spectacle but it did. And I never wanted to meet the President like this but I did,” Pollack said. “I was invited to the White House. The truth is—I had just buried my daughter—I wasn’t really interested in public event like a tour or a photo-op. I was interested in answers and solutions… At the White House, my family and I told him about Meadow. I told him what we knew. I told him that his administration needed to take a closer look at what went wrong and why.”
Pollack recalled his first meeting of the president, saying Trump is “a good man and a great listener and he cuts through the BS,” before unleashing on the media for turning his daughter’s death into a “coordinated attack on President Trump, Republicans, and the Second Amendment.”
He praised Trump for taking action, including forming the “School Safety Commission” that issued dozens of recommendations to make schools safer and for rolling back Obama’s guidance on “restorative justice,” policies that Pollack said, “far-left Democrats in our school district made this shooting possible.”
“The president did what he said he said he would do: He took action. He formed a School Safety Commission that issued dozens of recommendations to make schools safer. But I’ll bet you never heard about that,” he said. “After my daughter’s murder, the media didn’t seem interested in the facts. So I found them myself. When I learned that gun control laws didn’t fail my daughter. People did.”
Far-left Democrats in our school district made this shooting possible because they implemented something they called “restorative justice.” This policy—which really just blames teachers for student failures—puts kids and teachers at risk and makes shootings more likely. But it was billed as a pioneering approach to discipline and safety,” Pollack continued. “I was just fine with the old approach to discipline and safety—it was called discipline and safety. But the Obama-Biden administration took Parkland’s bad policies and forced them into schools across America.”
Pollack shifted his remarks to focus on 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has previously claimed to have been the Vice President during the time of the incident.
“Biden has campaigned on bringing back “restorative justice,” as part of his “Unity Platform” with Bernie Sanders, and has pledged to implement it in school districts across America. But he doesn’t even seem to know when this shooting happened—he said that he was Vice President when it happened. But he wasn’t,” Pollack said. “Biden may not know when my daughter was murdered. But I do—February 14, 2018. Mr. Biden may not know who was Vice President that day but I do. It wasn’t Joe Biden. It was Mike Pence, thank God. And I know who the President was too. It wasn’t Barack Obama. It was President Donald J. Trump. And he took action.”
Concluding his remarks, Pollack issued a heartfelt call to American parents watching, saying the “safety of your kids depends on whether this man is re-elected.”
20202020 Conventions2020 ElectionAndrew PollackJoe BidenParkland FloridaPresident TrumpRepublican ConventionRepublican National ConventionRestorative JusticeRNCWhite House
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