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Tag: david hogg
After Slandering All Democrats As 'Communists,' Greene Cries She's 'Most Attacked'

After Slandering All Democrats As 'Communists,' Greene Cries She's 'Most Attacked'

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

If it seems like it was just yesterday that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene labeled the President of the United States and in fact every Democrat in the country “communists,” it was, which is why it might seem strangely hypocritical that the Republican from Georgia is labeling herself the “most attacked” freshman member of Congress in all of U.S. history.

“Joe Biden is a communist,” Greene declared strongly Thursday evening. “And that’s who the Democrats are – they’re communists.”

“You know, a lot of people are swallowing down the word ‘socialist,’ but that’s not a good enough word for Democrats – they are communists,” Greene told her supporters, clearly ignorant of the words’ meanings.

“That’s the word we need to keep using with them,” she continued. “Because they’re using these unprecedented, authoritarian, tyrannical controls on the American people to force people to comply.”

But Greene was singing a very different tune Friday afternoon.

“I have been the most attacked freshman Member of Congress probably in United States history,” Greene cried in a video she posted to social media. “The media has defamed me. They have completely smeared my character. Called me names and labeled me horrible things, none of which I am. None of the things they have said are true about me.”

What has been said about Rep. Greene in the legitimate media? Unlike her videos, there’s a high degree of likelihood it’s mostly true.

Here’s a portion of what The New York Times wrote in January:

Marjorie Taylor Greene had just finished questioning whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and flatly stating that President Barack Obama was secretly Muslim when she paused to offer an aside implicating another former president in a crime.


“That’s another one of those Clinton murders,” Ms. Greene said, referring to John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death in a 1999 plane crash, suggesting that he had been assassinated because he was a potential rival to Hillary Clinton for a New York Senate seat.
Ms. Greene casually unfurled the cascade of dangerous and patently untrue conspiracy theories in a 40-minute video that was originally posted to YouTube in 2018.
…
Ms. Greene suggested in a 2018 Facebook post, unearthed this week by Media Matters, that a devastating wildfire that ravaged California was started by “a laser” beamed from space and controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family with connections to powerful Democrats. She endorsed executing Democratic lawmakers, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She served as a prolific writer for a now-defunct conspiracy blog called “American Truth Seekers,” writing posts with headlines including “MUST READ — Democratic Party Involved With Child Sex, Satanism, and The Occult.” And she argued that the 2018 midterm elections — in which the first two Muslim women were elected to the House — were part of “an Islamic invasion of our government.”


Ms. Greene has repeatedly claimed in multiple videos and social media posts that several school shooting massacres were “false flag” events perpetrated by government officials in an attempt to drum up support for gun control laws. In an October 2020 video surfaced on Friday by Mother Jones, she said that the “only way you get your freedoms back is it’s earned with the price of blood.”
Ms. Greene is perhaps best known for having endorsed QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy movement that claims that Mr. Trump was facing down a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles.

That was almost an entire year ago. You’re probably more familiar with all the baseless and unfounded attacks she has made since.

Greene has made lying about and attacking Democrats part of her weekly, if not daily routine. Sometimes those attacks have been very personal – and very close. Like when she followed Parkland shooting survivor and gun control activist David Hogg around the streets of D.C. He said he felt she was threatening him. Or more recently, when she verbally assaulted U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the steps of Congress. That was one of her countless attacks against the New York Democrat who Greene seems disturbingly obsessed with.

But if indeed Greene is the “most attacked” freshman member of Congress in all of U.S. history, she has only herself to blame.

David Hogg: ‘Nobody Likes To See Us As Kids’

David Hogg: ‘Nobody Likes To See Us As Kids’

Most of us are more than one thing, but sometimes one thing happens that changes us forever.

David Hogg, a survivor of last year’s Valentine’s Day massacre in Parkland, Florida, comes to mind.

He was 17 when, sitting in his AP environmental science class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, he heard a gunshot at 2:30 p.m.

He and his terrified classmates crammed into a small closet as more gunfire erupted. The shooter fired more than 100 rounds from an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, killing 17 people. Fourteen of them were students.

“It was sheer terror,” Hogg told CNN days later.

In that cramped closet, the 17-year-old student journalist pulled out his cellphone and started interviewing classmates closest to him. Their whispered accounts are breathless, their fear palpable.

“I want to show these people exactly what’s going on when these children are facing bullets flying through classrooms and students are dying trying to get an education,” he told CNN. “That’s not OK, and that’s not acceptable, and we need to fix that.”

In that day, in the wake of so much loss, David Hogg the activist was born.

He went home that day, but in the early evening, he rode his bike back to school to talk to reporters still gathered there. Soon, he and other survivors were nationally recognizable. They co-founded the March for Our Lives to push for stronger gun law reform and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. They won the International Children’s Peace Prize. They became targets of right-wing threats and propaganda, too.

On the eve of the anniversary, NPR’s David Greene interviewed Hogg. I found it impossible to listen to him and do anything else at the same time. It was so clear that in many ways, this teenager has left his childhood behind.

His activism has taken him to some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America, where he talks to other victims of gun violence. “I’ve met families that literally eat on the floor in their household so that they don’t get hit by a stray bullet coming in through their window,” he told Greene. “Those are the stories that are not being told.”

Greene mentioned a story in which one of Hogg’s friends described him as more complex than the activist we see “behind the microphone and out there speaking.” Hogg, Greene quoted the friend as saying, “can be a goofball and vulnerable and a jokester.”

“Has this movement forced you to take on a certain persona to make it work, to be a leader?” Greene asked. “Do you take those times to be vulnerable in your private life?”

“Yeah, definitely. Anybody put in my position would act differently,” Hogg said. But “it has to do with how it gets covered. It’s always going to get more media hits that ‘David Hogg says that the NRA benefits off of school shootings because they’re funded by gun manufacturers, whose sales go up after every school shooting’ than me talking about something funny, because … I’m not a comedian, right? And that’s something that you’re really never going to see in the national media — unless, like, you see me riding one of those amazing electric scooters in D.C. going to lobby in Congress.”

For just a moment, Hogg then sounded like any other teenager. “I like surfing a lot. I like watching The Office and cooking with Emma, one of my best friends. Those are the intimate times with friends that you don’t see because nobody likes to see us as kids.”

Hogg’s response answered more than he was asked. He wants to be that kid still, but his activism — along with a year’s worth of strangers’ assumptions and attacks — seems to be forcing him to come to terms with a fame he did not seek. He is learning that leadership is often lonely.

For David Hogg and his fellow survivors, Valentine’s Day will most likely never again be a contrived special date on the calendar. This is true for the rest of us, too, if we choose. “The Parkland tragedy,” we tend to call it. Such a softer heart’s landing than the massacre that it was.

At the end of the interview, Hogg made a request, because of that one thing that has changed who he will be for the rest of his life.

“And please,” he told Greene, “don’t say the shooter’s name or show their face in y’all’s articles.”

There are heroes, and there is unspeakable evil. David Hogg wants us to remember that, too.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: David Hogg (left) and Emma Gonzalez (right) at rally to support firearm safety legislation in Fort Lauderdale, FL, March 27, 2018.