A Florida county commissioner defended comments he made earlier in March when he called the Parkland shooting survivors who had become media celebrities “miscreants” and “little monsters.”

Escambia County Commissioner Doug Underhill refused to apologize for his characterization of the students who became liberal echoes after surviving the Valentine’s Day mass shooting, insisting that they posed a threat to the “constitutional rights of Americans.”

“I know that people would maybe prefer that you’re supposed to use softer words and things like that,” Underhill told the Pensacola New Journal Wednesday. “If you’re coming after the constitutional rights of Americans, it’s probably not going to be soft words.”

Underhill previously insulted the students coming out for the March for Our Lives event in a Facebook comment to radio host Andrew McKay that asked whether Underhill felt that the students should not be allowed to march in general.

“Keep in mind Andrew, it was the socialist experiment of this radically leftist south Florida town that created the monster that did this AND the little monsters who are parading around pointing the finger at people like me,” Underhill wrote. “These miscreants are not reacting to the event: They are prostituting the deaths of their classmates to drive an agenda that was formed in them long before the first shot was fired.”

On Monday, Underhill defended his comments to another local outlet, saying that while the shooting was tragic, the reaction to the event was more tragic.

“If you don’t figure out a way to stop creating hate and propagating hate, then it doesn’t matter what the tools of hate are, the end result will be the same and that will be dead people, dead children and rending the fabric of our society” Underhill said.

It will be interesting to see how teen activist David Hogg will react to Underhill’s putdown. Unlike TV personality Laura Ingraham, Underhill has no advertisers Hogg can exploit in the hopes of silencing him.

This report, by Amber Randall, was cross posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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