David Hogg may never have become so well known – or at least while he was in high school – if he had not experienced one of the worst imaginable traumas.
He was attending Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018, when a former student, using an AR-15-semi-style-automatic rifle, open fired on students and teachers, killing 17 and injuring 17.
Hogg and several of his classmates then did the most logical of things:
They demanded that legislators enact legislation to help prevent this from happening again.
Hogg, a student journalist, began interviewing his classmates in real time on his cell phone while first responders and police were at the scene of this grisliest of grisly crimes. He introduced himself to the news media who had come to the scene of this act of violence. He called for legislators to “get something done.”
Hogg and his fellow students didn’t stop there. They organized “March for Our Lives,” a protest in Washington D.C. He co-wrote a book and donated all the proceeds to charity, #NEVERAGAIN: A New Generation Draws the Line.”
In this, Hoggs was comparable to Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, who raised millions for the college educations of children of those men and women in the military who were killed in service to their country.
Except that very little of the money that Hannity raised for charity went to charity.
SEE SEAN HANNITY
I didn’t say the two things were the same. I said they were comparable.
Right-wing conspiracy theories called the Parkland shooting a “hoax” and Hogg and other students “crisis actors.”
Alex Jones, the virtuoso con man of conspiracies, called it a staged operation – as he did the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School where 20 students and six adults were murdered in 2012.
Hogg took his movement to social media and shared his thoughts on his life as a graduating senior and on applying to colleges and universities. He mentioned in a video that he was rejected by four universities. He was asked if he was surprised by the rejections, given his recent notoriety.
“I’m not surprised at all, in all honesty,” he says in the video. “I think there’s a lot of amazing people that don’t get into college, not only [who] do things that I do, but because their voices just aren’t heard in the tsunami of people that apply to colleges in such an impacted school system here in America.”
In response, Laura Ingraham, the host of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle and the Nurse Ratched of prime-time television, tweeted:
“David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.)”
Hogg was a kid who has just experienced a tragedy beyond comprehension. He then took that tragedy and turned it into something positive. His response to being rejected was honest and humble and anything but whiny.
Ingraham bullied him with an unprovoked attack.
Hogg then did something remarkable for someone so young. He called for a boycott of Ingraham’s program.
Eight companies then pulled their advertiser from her program.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/business/media/laura-ingraham-david-hogg.html
Hogg then responded:
Soooo @IngrahamAngle what are your biggest advertisers … Asking for a friend. #BoycottIngramAdverts
If Ingraham’s action had been an aberration, there would be little reason to include her on this website.
But it isn’t.
This is Laura Ingraham in all her right-wing malevolence.
Her brother calls her a “monster.”
I’ll get to that in a minute.
Ingraham’s career as a bullying provocateur may have begun at Dartmouth, a fine school but not as prestigious as Harvard, where Hogg attended and graduated in 2021.
https://www.newsweek.com/parkland-survivor-david-hogg-last-laugh-laura-ingraham-1802748
Ingraham outed homosexuals on campus as editor of the Dartmouth Review in 1984. He referred to the gays who belonged to an organization, according to piece in the Huffington Post, as “cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/laura-ingraham-right-wing_b_106034
In 1997, Ingraham wrote a moving op-ed about her regret about her wretched homophobia as a student at Dartmouth. She had learned that her brother Curtis was gay and that his partner was dying of AIDS.
“By refusing to give in to bitterness or defeat in the face of a relentless disease, they have shown me what C.S. Lewis meant when he wrote that our ideology and faith must leave room for tolerance and empathy,” she wrote. “I now regret that at Dartmouth we didn’t consider how callous rhetoric can wound.”
But why does it so often require those on the far right to temper their homophobia when they realize they have a gay child or sibling, as it did former Vice President Dick Cheney, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Ingraham and others?
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/republicans-gay-marriage-117400
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2000/08/06/gay-daughter-poses-dilemma-for/51013311007/
Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for defamation for $1.6 billion, alleging that Fox News, including its on-air personalities such as Ingraham, repeatedly made the baseless claim that the election technology company had switched votes from President Donald Trump to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, giving Biden the election.
Fox News settled the suit before going to trial for $787 million.
In their depositions, Fox News commentators said they didn’t believe the lies perpetuated by Trump and his associates but went on the air with the claims without raising any questions about their credibility.
Tucker Carlson knew that Trump attorney Sydney Powell’s accusations had no basis in fact and refused to put her on the air.
According to his deposition in the Dominion Voting lawsuit, he told Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson allegedly said. “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”
Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her.”
She said the same thing about Rudy Giuliani, another Trump attorney.
“Ditto with Rudy,” she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/business/media/fox-dominion-lawsuit.html
Fox News commentators, including Carlson, Ingraham, and Hannity, had doubts about the legitimacy of the fraud claims coming from Trump World, but they did not share those doubts with their viewers, the New York Times reported.
“Messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him,” The Times reported, “even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/business/media/fox-dominion-lawsuit.html
Ingraham’s column about her gay brother appeared authentic.
She appeared to be saying that she wanted to be a better sister, a better person.
Or maybe, if you believe her brother Curtis, this was just an act of phony self-aggrandizement.
In September 2018, a few months after Ingraham had tried to embarrass David Hogg, Ingraham’s brother Curtis condemned his sister in an interview with The Daily Beast.
“I think she’s a monster,” Curtis Ingraham said in the interview, which was published on Wednesday. “She’s very smart, she’s well-spoken, but her emotional heart is just kind of dead.”
He credited her bigotry to their father.
“Our father was a Nazi sympathizer, racist, anti-Semite and homophobe,” Curtis Ingraham said. “Like father like daughter?”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/laura-ingrahams-brother-goes-to-war-against-her
Ingraham also took issue with Ingraham’s support for Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose country had invaded Ukraine and Russian soldiers had been accused of war crimes against Ukrainian children.
“This is rich coming from my Putin-loving sister who seems okay with children being killed in Ukraine,” Curtis wrote on a social media post. “Looks like she has a new trope in hand to further rile and anger her followers. What a monster!”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/curtis-laura-ingraham-lgbtq_n_6256efa5e4b0be72bff1939a
