In 2018, Manuel and Patricia Oliver tragically lost their son, Joaquin, in the Parkland High School massacre. He was a mere 17 years old. He never got to take the podium on graduation day. This year alone, 3,044 members of the high school class of 2021 missed their graduation, killed by gun violence.

What follows is the Oliver family’s response to the heartbreaking question: What would you do if your child was killed in a school shooting? 

Their answer was to strike back against those responsible for enabling the kind of monsters that took their son. The organizations that helps to keep assault rifles readily accessible for the next would-be shooter: The National Rifle Association. With this mission, The Lost Class was created.

Soon after, The Lost Class team partnered with people who had experience exposing the hypocrisy of gun rights activists and other fringe right radicals - Sacha Baron Cohen’s producers. They created a fake online high school called James Madison Academy, named after the author of the Second Amendment.

Under fake names, two men were contacted - Former NRA President David Keene and author John Lott, whom Newsweek has dubbed "The Gun Crowd's Guru.” They soon agreed to go to the first ever in-person graduation for James Madison Academy in Las Vegas, Nevada. The production team staged a massive graduation, replete with turf, a towering stage, and 3,044 chairs.

Under the guise of a dress rehearsal prior to the real graduation the next day, Lott and Keene gave their commencement addresses. Instead of graduating students, however, the two men were actually speaking to the students who would never get the chance to graduate, because of the work these men had done to keep assault rifles on the streets.

When the piece aired soon after, it took the media by storm. The story was covered in a segment by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, with tens of millions of views across news outlets like CNN, USA Today, NBC News, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Daily Mail, Buzzfeed, The Daily Beast, The Guardian and Refinery29 and social platforms like Twitter and TikTok. The videos, which were released on YouTube, garnered