The NRA has been unusually vocal in the aftermath of the deadliest school shooting since Newtown. And on Wednesday night, that included a tweet in which it used a GIF of Parks and Recreation character Leslie Knope to thank spokesperson Dana Loesch for representing it at CNN’s town-hall event from Florida.
Michael Schur, who co-created the NBC comedy, was not amused.
“Hi, please take this down,” he tweeted. “I would prefer you not use a GIF from a show I worked on to promote your pro-slaughter agenda.”
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Then, he added a message texted to him from the show’s star Amy Poehler, whose character was pictured in the tweet and does not have a Twitter account of her own: “Can you tweet the NRA for me and tell them I said fuck off?”
Poehler’s character Leslie Knope was an iconically progressive figure on American television, consistently pitted against her libertarian boss Ron Swanson. She looked up to Hillary Clinton, was obsessed with Joe Biden, and would never dream of supporting the NRA.
In short, she was the antithesis of Dana Loesch, who served as a surrogate for the Second Amendment die-hards at CNN’s event Wednesday night.
“Was the blood of my classmates and my teachers worth your blood money?” a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High freshman named Michelle Lapidot asked her at the event. Another woman could be heard shouting at her, “You’re a murderer!”
Even Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel condemned Loesch, telling her, “I understand you’re standing up for the NRA and I understand that’s what you’re supposed to do. But you just told this group of people that you are standing up for them. You are not standing up for them until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’”
Later, Schur retweeted another Parks and Recreation meme from Emma Gonzalez, one of the most outspoken Parkland students who faced off with Loesch during the event. In this case, he was totally cool with it.
