David Hogg is back at it, doing the only thing he apparently knows, which is mau-mauing business.

The youthful gun-control activist staged a "die-in" at Publix in Coral Springs, Florida to protest the grocery retailer's donation to a pro-business Republican candidate who also supports the Second Amendment.  Apparently, you can't do that and must work only to elect anti-business leftists, or else Hogg will come protesting, bringing his media gaggle, at you.

Hogg's do-this-or-I'll-stage-a-dramatic-protest-and-bring-the-press is nothing but "a shakedown."  It doesn't matter that you might be supporting a Republican for business reasons to represent you; you must support leftists or else be declared a mass murderer, all in for the slaughter of high school children.  What a bargain.  And if you want to talk about divisiveness, and demonizing the opposition, this is how it's done.

Sadly, Publix, wary of boycotts, has caved in, apologized for being "divisive," and declared that it has halted all corporate political donations in the service of its business interests.  That pretty well ends donations to any Republicans now.

Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it, as Saul Alinsky says in his Rules for Radicals, the textbook guide to politically motivated racketeering.

Orlando Sentinel columnist David Whitley has an excellent local perspective here.

What's frustrating here is that Publix didn't stand up to this little monster, whose piling-on victories have increased his power and public influence – not through the force of his ideas (which have no force and which won't lead to any gun control), but through the force of his coercion.  He's already shown how immature he is, unable to convey his losing ideas to the public, so now he uses Chicago-style muscle as a frontman for the sleazy left-wing groups financing him.  He's not even old enough to remember the nuclear "die-ins" of the Reagan era that inspired this stunt against Publix – but the moneybags backing him are.

Now he's got a new battery to go pull another stunt on some new hapless business as well as make other companies think twice before giving to Republicans.  Would having a one-party state premised on leftist ideas help America?  Would turning it into California or Venezuela be helpful?  Maybe he can ask some of his Venezuelan-American classmates or his former California classmates about that one.

In the meantime, one can only pity Hogg for his ever worsening downslide, from Parkland survivor kid to awful shakedown activist, and wonder if the bad course is really the result of his rage at not being able to get into the college of his choice.  Eric Hoffer used to write about such disappointed fanatics, and the result is never pretty.