Teenage gun control activist David Hogg dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he claimed that he has survived multiple assassination attempts over the last several months.
“In the past year, there have been seven assassination attempts,” Hogg admitted in a Washington Post interview published on Tuesday. The 19-year-old liberal refused to provide any additional details about the attempts on his life.
Targets on his back
Hogg isn’t the chief executive of a multinational corporation or a hated foreign head of state. In fact, he’s just a college student who happened to survive to talk about the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida last year that took the lives of 14 children and 3 adults.
Without providing any details about his would-be assassins, Hogg told the Post that he would become a martyr if someone murdered him.
“I see people as misguided and misinformed of what we’re actually here to talk about,” he said. “But I also realize, if they kill me, that’s probably the stupidest thing they could do to try to end the movement. Because that would make it even more successful in the end. Because it would invigorate us and create f*****g change.”
Survivor-turned-activist
A co-founder of March for Our Lives, an anti-gun group established in the aftermath of the Parkland massacre, Hogg obtained celebrity on social media and in progressive circles for his hardline stance against gun ownership. Calling on adults to “get over politics and get something done,” Hogg spent the weeks after the shooting politicizing the Second Amendment and aligning himself with the far left, adopting new pet causes like free college, abortion rights, and universal healthcare.
In the process, Hogg has made enemies among gun rights groups and militant right-wingers. Using a deadly hoax known as “SWAT-ing,” someone called a heavily armed police presence to Hogg’s family home in June 2018 by claiming that someone had killed his family and was barricaded inside the residence.
Of course, using violence and intimidation to silence a political viewpoint — no matter how radical or destructive — is despicable. But when Hogg makes such a bold claim and refuses to elaborate, it is difficult to tell if he is truly in danger, or if the facts are being distorted by his inflated sense of self-importance.
“Honestly, I realize that it’s horrible that I have to live through this, and it is traumatizing. But you eventually become desensitized to it,” Hogg said in his interview with the Post. “Like, oh, your house got SWAT-ted. You got a call from the police saying someone said that everyone in your family had been killed and that you are being held hostage for $100,000. Right?”
He continued: “That becomes part of daily life. It’s just something that you have to get through. But I mean, what am I going to do? Stop?… Well, I’m not going to stop. I want to go to school and, for lack of a better word, weaponize my knowledge and learn as much as possible to end violence.”
Career assassin
While Hogg claims to be the victim of numerous plots against his life, the Harvard University enrollee has worked over the past year to assassinate the careers of prominent conservative figures. He successfully convinced several advertisers to pull their sponsorship of Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s primetime political commentary program after she mocked him for failing to get into several colleges.
Later, in June 2018, Hogg engineered a second boycott of Ingraham’s show, The Ingraham Angle, after she referred to immigrant detention facilities that house children as “summer camps.”
Like Hogg, Ingraham has survived multiple attempts to take her down. Unlike Hogg, however, she never thought her life was in danger.
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