Because they are terrified of them and their righteous cause

Those students, who rapidly turned themselves into activists and organizers after 17 of their fellow students and teachers were murdered at their school, have become the most visible face of this new phase of the gun debate, and conservatives are absolutely livid about it. As a consequence, they’re desperately arguing not just that the students are wrong in their suggestions for how gun policy should be changed, but also that they shouldn’t be speaking at all and ought to be ignored.

There are two critical reasons the right is having this reaction, one more obvious than the other. The plainer reason is that as people who were personally touched by gun violence and as young people — old enough to be informed and articulate but still children — the students make extremely sympathetic advocates, garnering attention and a respectful hearing for their views.

The less obvious reason is that because of that status, the students take away the most critical tool conservatives use to win political arguments: the personal vilification of those who disagree with them.

snipped all the examples of which you should be aware

As Carlson accidentally let slip, what worries the right is not that they won’t be allowed to disagree with the Parkland students, but that they’ll be restricted to disagreeing with them on substance, and not be able to give the kind of full-throated personal attack they’re used to.

The “paid actor” attack is also a familiar one from the right — pretty much every time there’s a mass protest from liberals, conservatives can be counted on to allege that George Soros is paying them all. This accusation has a long history; as historian Kevin Kruse pointed out, conservatives even accused the children who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957 of being actors.

Ironically — or perhaps not — the most prominent figure to have used paid actors in a political event recently was Donald Trump, who retained a firm to assemble actors to cheer for his announcement speech, at a rate of $50 each. The firm lodged a complaint with the Federal Election Commission because the Trump campaign failed to pay its bill (the campaign did eventually pay).

The idea of the paid actor criticism, like the charge that the students must be using PR agents to book their interviews, is that if you can find some reason that their words aren’t a pure expression of their feelings without any strategic intent behind it, then their testimony is no longer valid and need not be addressed substantively. So either they’re just emotional and naive and therefore need not be listened to, or they’re too savvy and strategic and therefore need not be listened to.

The truth is that in politics, people on every side try to find sympathetic spokespersons with personal stories that give them authority to speak on particular issues. More than 2000 years ago, Aristotle wrote that there are three modes of persuasion: logos (facts and logic), pathos (emotion) and ethos (the character and credibility of the speaker). While conservatives might complain that the Parkland students are using ethos and pathos to overwhelm logos, in fact it’s their ethos that forces conservatives to argue on the basis of logos.

Once you rule out personal attacks, what’s left is arguing substance. No one is going to criticize Tucker Carlson or anyone else for disagreeing with the students, for saying “Here’s why the ban on AR-15s they’re proposing is a bad idea.” It’s only personal attacks on the students, which we so often accept as just how politics gets done, that come off sounding so despicable.

Which is exactly why the right wishes that the Parkland students would just go away.

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a conservative vs. progressive matter, regardless how much some attempt to paint it in that light ..... especially when given an opportunity to attack one side.  Secondly, while some do use personal vilification to make their point, several posts on this board recently have done a fine job of articulating some of the pitfalls of emotional teenagers setting policy or formulating legislation, their legitimate feelings and experiences notwithstanding.  Further, many of us who do consider ourselves as conservatives do not "fear" the students or even the abolition of the 2nd-Amendment.  The only thing which truly infuriates me is people who might attempt to use extra-Constitutional measures to achieve a goal for which our Founding Fathers already provided the means.