The right wing website RedState has issued a correction after publishing an article Monday evening strongly suggesting student and mass shooting survivor David Hogg lied and was not even at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the Florida Valentine’s Day massacre that took 17 of his friends, fellow students, and faculty members.
“New Video Casts Doubt on Whether David Hogg Was at School on the Day of the Shooting,” was the article’s headline.
Written by Sarah Rumpf, the article compared a CBS documentary video to an interview Hogg gave for a TIME magazine article.
At issue for Rumpf was Hogg discussing hiding in a school closet, but also riding his bike back to school. As Mediaite points out, Rumpf’s main point of contention is it was “not possible for him to have been in class and also have been at home, a three mile bike ride away from campus.”
Unless you factor in that both things don’t have to happen at once.
Rumpf’s original attack on Hogg includes comments like, “Something doesn’t add up here,” “This does not make sense,” and “It is not possible.”
She ends her article writing, “One of those stories is a lie. Hogg should explain himself, and quickly.”
Her correction includes the crossing out of all 856 words of her original article.
It’s now titled, “UPDATE: CBS Video Confusing. Hogg Was On Campus.”
But the damage was done the moment she originally published her story.
Other right wing websites sprung into action, spreading what literally was “fake news.”
This isn’t RedState’s first attempt to try to attack and discredit Hogg, who for many has become the face of the gun control movement. A sampling of articles from RedState:
“David Hogg Says Things That Are Not True and The Media Has a Responsibility to Challenge Him”
“There Is an Expiration Date on the Hysterical Activism By Parkland Students, and It’s Long Overdue”
“David Hogg Looks to Coast Through His 15 Minutes as the Most Obnoxious Kid in the News”
The insanity of the right to try to discredit and attack the Parkland students – like the recent meme of Emma González that went viral, showing her holding up a destroyed copy of the U.S. Constitution (below) which was actually just a bad photoshop and thus a lie – says everything about the perpetrators of these attacks, and only serves to create even more empathy for these children (yes, they are still children.)
The attacks are unending, and go as high as from a sitting U.S. Congressman, Republican Steve King, a racist and white supremacist, who attacked González for wearing a jacket with a small patch, a flag of Cuba, where her ancestors came from. King’s campaign took to Facebook to destroy González, a high school student.