San Antonio Radio: Joe Pags, Ted Nugent Talk Student Activists

The Parkland, FL teen-led movement has reignited the nation’s gun debate, drawing stark partisan lines, as well as cries of manipulation from the right, who say Democrats have used the students as both shield and sword to advance tighter restrictions on firearms.

Enter the Motor City Madman, musician Ted Nugent, perhaps the National Rifle Association’s most outspoken board member, according to The Washington Post.

In a Friday interview mostly focused on González’s and Hogg’s criticism of the NRA, Nugent and radio host Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo discussed how the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., have navigated media appearances and their belief that the teenagers have been manipulated by left-wing ideologues.

“These poor children, I’m afraid to say, but the evidence is irrefutable. They have no soul,” Nugent told Pagliarulo on the radio show on WOAI 1200 AM in San Antonio, which is syndicated nationwide.



Nugent and Pagliarulo dissected González’s and Hogg’s interviews with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota five days after the shooting. “If they accept this blood money, they are against the children,” González said, speaking about politicians who accept donations from the NRA. “You’re either funding the killers, or you’re standing with the children.”

Nugent noted that no known NRA members have been involved in mass shootings, and he decried Camerota for not challenging González’s link between mass shootings and the NRA.

“The lies from these poor, mushy-brained children who have been fed lies and parrot lies,” Nugent said. “I really feel sorry for them. It’s not only ignorant, dangerous and stupid — it’s soulless. To attack the good, law-abiding families of America when well-known, predictable murderers commit these horrors is deep in the category of soulless.”

Defending the NRA, Nugent noted that the gun-rights group has provided firearms safety training and that it is sustained not by gun manufacturers but by “families, good families” in the organization.


Nugent, like many on the right, has been flustered by recent portrayals of firearms in the media and by the students, and been incensed when the semiautomatic AR-15 — what the NRA has called America’s favorite rifle — is described as a “weapon of war.” Semiautomatic rifles are not carried into combat, Nugent said on the program.

Pagliarulo said Nugent’s claims on his program were “verifiably true.” When asked by The Washington Post to clarify what he meant by that, he said in an email exchange: “Ted called them liars. That’s verifiably true. Unless, of course, you believe NRA members are ‘child murderers,’ or you’re either ‘with us or with the killers.’ ”