Special Opinion to the Cape Charles Mirror by Paul Plante
One thing that can be said about young David Hogg of Parkland, Florida is that when others were cowering in fear during the recent Parkland, Florida school shooting, young Hogg, ever the entrepreneur, saw it as an opportunity to be exploited, and so, he jumped on it before anyone else could, with his now-famous interviews of other students which were conducted in the closet where he was hiding, and ever since then, he, like many other politicians, has been milking the “crisis” for all it is worth, even to the point of getting a book deal out of it, according to the USA TODAY article “Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg nabs book deal on making of #NeverAgain movement” by Christal Hayes on 19 April 2018, where we learned as follows:
Two siblings who survived the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla. are penning a book about the massacre and the gun-control movement that followed.
The book titled #NeverAgain by David Hogg, one of the most recognizable faces of the movement, and his younger sister, Lauren Hogg, who has also been active in the effort, will chronicle the Valentine’s Day Shooting and how the pair — along with other students — aimed to start a revolution to stop gun violence.
It’s scheduled to be released June 5.
He first gained attention while filming, reporting and interviewing other students while on lockdown during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Within hours, he and others started calling for a change to gun laws.
Hogg became one one of the leaders of the #NeverAgain movement and helped plan the March for Our Lives event in Washington, D.C. last month.
He also got in a fight with Fox News host Laura Ingraham earlier this month after she mocked him about not getting into several colleges.
Hogg called for a boycott and Ingraham lost more than a dozen advertisers within days.
The 128-page novel will serve as a guide to the student-led movement and detail the “voices of a new generation that are speaking truth to power, and are determined to succeed where their elders have failed,” according to Penguin Random House, which is publishing the book.
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Truth to power?
How about bull**** to the people of America, instead, as we can see from a recent Miami Herald article entitled “Seconds mattered: How the response at Parkland went wrong in 11 minutes” by Nicholas Nehamas, Martin Vassolo, David Smiley, Chabeli Herrera and James LaPorta on 29 April 2018, to wit:
MIAMI – Ten people lay dead or dying on the first floor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s freshman building when assistant football coach Aaron Feis rushed across campus and burst through the structure’s west door to confront Nikolas Cruz.
The burly Feis nearly grabbed Cruz, who was heading up a stairwell to the second floor when Cruz shot him.
Not far from the building, Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy Scot Peterson heard the gunfire crack out the open door.
It was Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, two minutes after the shooting started.
Gripped by an unholy bloodlust, Cruz kept firing for another four minutes, until 2:27 p.m., going up two flights of stairs to kill six more people, sometimes pumping more bullets into the wounded lying helpless before him.
Much went wrong between the time Cruz started shooting at Stoneman Douglas and the moment 11 minutes later when law enforcement officers first entered the building through the same door Feis used: Broward County’s long-troubled emergency communication system broke down.
Some deputies appear not to have followed active shooter training – which they hadn’t received since 2016.
And agencies didn’t share crucial information that could have led to a faster response.
“It was a cluster you-know-what of errors and mistakes,” said Fred Guttenberg, the father of student Jaime Guttenberg, who died in the rampage.
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Now, that paints quite a different picture about where responsibility for the Parkland shooting really does lie, which is quite a bit different from the picture David Hogg is painting, where responsibility for all the failures in Broward County, Florida, have instead been laid at the feet of the American people and the mean and nasty NRA, as if we thousands of miles away from Florida were somehow responsible for what takes place on tony, upscale Parkland, Florida.
Let’s look further into that Miami Herald analysis of this cluster-**** at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in a better section of Parkland, Florida that David Hogg blames on all adults in America who he says have failed him, when it is his own community that failed him, not America and not the NRA, and no, I don’t belong to the NRA and never have:
Even though at least three BSO deputies arrived in time to hear Cruz’s gunfire, neither they nor Peterson went into the building immediately to stop him – unlike the unarmed Feis.
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Before reading further, just pause there for a moment to ponder that sentence, and wonder why.
Getting back to the Miami Herald:
The first BSO deputies on scene said they could not pinpoint the shooting to Building 12, although Cruz was firing bullets through exterior windows – leaving visible holes – and students were running from the building screaming.
Some deputies were said to have taken cover behind their cars as lives leaked onto Stoneman Douglas’ floors.
Coral Springs police officers saw the deputies – and two officers were so angry they put the damning information into their official reports.
One Coral Springs cop even said a BSO deputy taking cover behind a tree told him the shooter was on the third floor.
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Now, had this information been more readily available when David Hogg was making all of his specious charges about who was responsible for that shooting, young Hogg would have been laughed off all the TV talk shows he was a guest star on, but he got out ahead of the curve with his false reporting, and now, as information slowly leaks out about what really happened, we who are for the truth here are forced to play catch-up, which takes us back to the Miami Herald article, as follows:.
Now, both Coral Springs and BSO are pointing fingers at each other as various state investigations try to piece together the mistakes and offer solutions.
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Ah, yes, but will any of that make its way into David Hogg’s book, where he details the “voices of a new generation that are speaking truth to power, and are determined to succeed where their elders have failed?”
Of course not, is that answer – lies suit young David Hogg here much better than this now-revealed truth ever could.
Getting back to the Miami Herald expose:
How law enforcement responded is still under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, as well as a special state commission set up by the Florida Legislature.
But it’s clear that BSO – a law enforcement behemoth led by Sheriff Scott Israel, who touted his own “amazing leadership” days after the shooting – wasn’t prepared to handle a mass shooting in one of its safest districts.
“Coral Springs reacted the way police are expected to,” said attorney Alex Arreaza, who is representing wounded student Anthony Borges in a planned lawsuit against BSO.
“If only BSO reacted like they did, maybe things would be different.”
End quotes
But wait, wait, I thought it was the fault of the NRA and the American people, so why are they singling out the Broward county Sheriff’s Office?
My goodness, how unfair is that, people?
And back to the Miami Herald:
This account of how the response to the Parkland school shooting unfolded is based on hundreds of pages of law enforcement documents and hours of 911 calls and police and fire-rescue radio chatter, as well as interviews with more than a dozen students, teachers and first responders who were at the school.
In addition to the dead, 17 people were wounded, some of them seriously, and police and paramedics certainly saved lives.
But the Herald found that mistakes made by individual officers and systemic problems in Broward County law enforcement severely hampered efforts to save lives.
Among the most significant:
– Because of a patchwork 911 system in Coral Springs and Parkland, emergency calls made from cellphones inside the Parkland school were routed to a Coral Springs call center, not to BSO, which polices Parkland.
That meant BSO deputies trying to figure out where the shooting was happening weren’t hearing first-hand information from those being attacked.
– Coral Springs police weren’t immediately notified of the mass shooting at nearby Stoneman Douglas by Coral Springs’ joint police-fire dispatch center.
One of the first Coral Springs officers into Building 12 said he learned of the shooting from a Coral Springs Fire Department commander four minutes after the first 911 call came in.
– BSO’s radio system overloaded as deputies talked over each other, causing such communication problems they resorted to using hand signals.
The radio difficulties hindered the ability of BSO’s Parkland district captain to receive information and direct her deputies, limiting her effectiveness as an on-scene commander.
The system, contracted by Broward County, not BSO, is undergoing a $59.5 million upgrade expected to finish in 2019.
– BSO and Coral Springs police use different radio frequencies.
An on-the-fly attempt to fuse the channels so Coral Springs officers and BSO deputies could communicate failed.
That meant BSO and Coral Springs were responding to the same situation but acting as separate teams and not sharing information.
– Because of the heavy demands for various types of law enforcement training – including how to use body cameras and how to safely confront those suffering from mental illness – BSO says it has not held active shooter training since 2016.
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I personally would like to see some TV commentator or personality like Bill Maher confront young Hogg with all of these findings, to see what his response would be, now that the fault is being found a lot closer to his home,as opposed to the people of America and the NRA.
Going back to the Miami Herald:
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting,
Israel blamed Peterson for what went wrong, holding a national news conference to say the school resource officer’s conduct left him “sick to my stomach.”
“He never went in,” Israel said.
Singling out Peterson, who resigned, may have been a political mistake for Israel, an elected official, according to Robert Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University who co-authored a book chronicling the history of BSO.
“His strategy initially was to blame one officer,” Jarvis said.
“There’s never one officer who is responsible all by him or herself.”
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Which reminds me of the old adage, “truer words were never spoken!”
And getting back to that fiasco at Marjory Stoneman Douglas the day of that shooting, we have:
Jeff Heinrich had a hose in his hand, not a gun.
An off-duty Coral Spring cop, he was watering Stoneman Douglas’ baseball field before the attack began.
His son is a pitcher and Heinrich liked to help out the team.
Then he heard the school’s fire-alarm – set off not by Cruz’s hands or his gun smoke, as previously reported, but by bullets kicking loose acoustic tiles lining the ceiling of Building 12 and releasing a cascade of dust, according to BSO.
Then he heard a series of loud pops.
Maybe it was firecrackers.
Then more pops – and he knew.
Outside Building 12, also referred to as 1200, Heinrich could see students now sprinting to get out – tripping over each other and screaming.
He ran toward the building.
The first BSO deputies to arrive did not.
Peterson was already on campus.
He took charge of the scene – while taking cover behind a concrete column near the southeast corner of Building 12, school surveillance video shows.
It was two minutes into the shooting.
“We’re talking about the 1200 building,” he told deputies arriving at Stoneman Douglas via radio.
One of them, Michael Kratz, thought he heard shots at the football field on the northwest corner of the sprawling campus.
“I took cover behind my marked unit and scanned for a gunman but was unable to locate one,” Kratz wrote in a report summarizing his actions.
Two others, Detective Brian Goolsby and Sgt. Brian Miller, also wrote that they heard shots – but didn’t immediately approach the building identified by Peterson in his transmissions.
From that point, Peterson’s commands focused on setting up a perimeter.
“Get the school locked down, gentleman,” Peterson said as the gunfire continued.
“Do not approach the 12 or 1300 building,” he added seconds after Cruz had abandoned his rifle in the stairwell, left Building 12 and blended in with a crowd of other students.
“Stay at least 500 feet away.”
“Stay away from 12 and 1300 building,” a dispatcher repeated.
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Stay at least 500 feet away?
The police?
That is amazing, as we can see by going back to the Miami Herald article, to wit:
That is not how police have been trained to respond to active shooters since the 1999 massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School.
“We train officers to focus on things that are most critical,” said Blair, the Texas State active shooter expert.
“And the first one is: If there is active killing going on, you need to stop that.”
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That may be true in Texas, and elsewhere, but it obviously was not true in Parkland, Florida, at least on that particular day.
But according to the Miami Herald, no commander gave an order contravening Peterson.
Why?
Part of the reason, BSO says: Its radio system was overloaded by the number of deputies trying to use it.
The problem, known as “throttling,” also hindered BSO’s response to the 2017 Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport Shooting.
The Parkland district commander, Capt. Jan
Jordan, was seen on body camera footage repeatedly trying to use her radio, her deputies’ radios and a car radio, all to no avail, said BSO Col. Jim Dale in a recent interview.
“Unless we were standing right next to each other, we couldn’t communicate,” said a BSO deputy at the scene that day who asked not to be named.
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Whose fault is that, people?
Are the people of America really responsible for that?
Or does that responsibility really lie a lot closer to David Hogg’s own home town in Florida?
Let’s look a bit further to see what else we can see here:
BSO has known for years that its emergency radio system was on its last legs and a liability during a mass casualty event.
The county government has been working to replace an analogue network of 14,000 radios, having long ago acknowledged that the system was nearing the end of its functionality.
“The system does take time to develop.”
“You want to do it right for our first responders,” said Alphonso Jefferson, the assistant Broward County administrator overseeing regional communications.
But Jefferson said the problems appear to have been related to user error: deputies were talking over each other and over-using single channels.
“The system did not fail,” Jefferson said.
“I stress that because the system was operational.”
“Communication was happening.”
When Jordan was able to use her radio, she seemed to reiterate Peterson’s commands.
“I know there’s a lot going on, do we have a perimeter set up right now and everyone cleared out of the school,” she asked one minute before law enforcement entered Building 12.
And when Chad Ryen, a Margate police officer, arrived at Stoneman Douglas he said he saw “officers with their weapons drawn, positioned behind vehicles and pillars,” according to his report.
A BSO deputy told him not to go in: “Standby, SWAT is on the way.”
Ryen, a SWAT officer himself, disagreed with the strategy.
The shooter had stopped firing but was still on the loose.
“Based on my training and experience, I made the determination to make entry into the school,” Ryen wrote, although acting on faulty information he searched the wrong building.
In the catastrophic chaos, BSO deputies didn’t have recent training to fall back on.
The last time they went through an active shooter training cycle was 2016, according to Dale.
Some, like Capt. Jordan, hadn’t been through one since 2015.
(Coral Springs officers do active shooter drills ever year, according to Chief Clyde Parry.)
“Agencies have a large number of mandatory issues they have to train for as part of their certification,” Dale said, pointing to needed training for Tasers, crowd control, body cameras and other law enforcement responsibilities.
“You can only take a deputy off the road for so many days before they spend most of their time in training.”
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But really, people, isn’t it a lot better politically, if you happen to live down there in Parkland, Florida, an upscale community where bad things like this aren’t supposed to happen, to shift the blame for all of this away from Broward County, Florida and over onto the people of America and the much hated and maligned NRA?
And that answer is, of course it is, at least if you want to get a book deal out of like David Hogg did.
And isn’t that what this really all about on the part of young David Hogg – selling hype, and not facts?
He does have an agenda, afterall, and in that narrative of his, there simply is not room for the truth to enter.
Such is America today, and David Hogg, as said before, is milking this for all it is worth, to him and his movement.
Stay tuned, more to come, so don’t change that dial.
Paul Plante says
And getting back to the rest of this background story as to where fault really does lie in connection to the school shooting in ritzy, upscale planned-community Parkland, Florida, as opposed to where young David Hogg, the Parkland entrepreneur milking the crisis for all it is worth, to him, would have that fault be placed, which is on the nation, old people in the nation like myself who young Hogg says don’t know a ******* thing about democracy, and the NRA, we have these further details on the subject from the recent Miami Herald article entitled “Seconds mattered: How the response at Parkland went wrong in 11 minutes” by Nicholas Nehamas, Martin Vassolo, David Smiley, Chabeli Herrera and James LaPorta on 29 April 2018, to wit:
What BSO deputies knew and when is likely to be a focus of FDLE’s investigation.
BSO maintains it did not have the proper information to realize Cruz was attacking Building 12 and that people needed help inside.
One of the problems BSO points to: 911 calls made from cellphones in Parkland go to a Coral Springs communications center.
If it’s a police emergency, an operator transfers the call to BSO, which patrols Parkland.
If it’s a fire call, it goes to the Coral Springs Fire Department, which provides fire-rescue.
Terrified students and teachers calling from inside Stoneman Douglas used cellphones not land lines, meaning their calls went to Coral Springs, which received a total of 86 calls.
The callers said they were inside classrooms in Building 12 – and needed help now.
But only three of the calls were passed to BSO, Dale said.
end quotes
Now, if that was the story young David Hogg had to tell to the world, as opposed to his more spectacular version of reality which transfers blame away from Parkland, Florida and Broward County, Florida and over onto the NRA and the American people, would he have gotten himself onto the Bill Mahar Show, where he made himself nationally famous?
Would he have been able to milk that to get a book out of it?
One thinks not, and I am sure the JayCees and the Democrat party in Broward County, Florida would rather have people believing Hogg’s hype, as opposed to the real facts, which make them look quite incompetent down there in paradise.
Getting back to the Miami Herald:
What explained the difference between how Coral Spring police and BSO deputies responded to the shooting?
“The quality of the information,” Dale said.
“Coral Springs may have benefited” because its officers had a better idea of where the shooting was taking place.
Still, some information got through.
For instance, a BSO dispatcher was told by Coral Springs that a person had been shot in Building 12.
But as the dispatcher prepared to relay that information to deputies two minutes into the shooting, Peterson interrupted her transmission to say he heard shots fired – the shots that killed Feis.
The BSO dispatcher didn’t repeat her message, according to Dale.
end quotes
But wait, no, no, people, it is the NRA that is at fault here, that is the operative narrative, so let’s all stick to the narrative and ignore that that ever happened!
And back to the Miami Herald once again:
“Coral Springs has its own dispatch.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Coral Springs Mayor Walter “Skip” Campbell told the state’s Parkland shooting commission Tuesday.
“We did not have confidence – still do not have confidence – in the system that Broward County put together.”
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HUH?
That is a kind of damning statement there.
I wonder how come we never hear anything about that from David Hogg.
Did he forget about it?
Or did he ever bother to try and find out?
And back to the Miami Herald:
“… Our communication dispatch people attempted to call the Broward Sheriff’s Department, attempted to communicate with them, to no avail.”
That meant it was up to deputies on the ground to figure it out for themselves.
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No wonder young David Hogg doesn’t want this version of reality getting out – it makes this look like a modern-day version of the Keystone Cops or the Three Stooges skit.
And back to the story:
Coral Springs officer Tim Burton didn’t go into Building 12 right away either – but his commanders have still hailed him as a hero.
Burton was the first armed Coral Springs cop on the scene.
A Stoneman Douglas employee told him the suspect had been seen near the 1200 building and drove him part of the way there in a golf cart.
At the freshman building, Burton wrote in his report, he saw Peterson “seeking cover behind a concrete column.”
Peterson told him to watch his back in case the shooter was planning an ambush so Burton took cover.
(Cruz was already gone.)
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What is surprising is that given his media presence, David Hogg has never been confronted with any of this reality in any of his TV appearances by any media personality.
Why is that?
Because they are afraid of him, that he will get them removed from the air the way he removed Laura Ingraham?
And back to the story:
Unlike Peterson, Burton gave clear commands in line with active shooter training to other Coral Springs officers who were responding.
“(Suspect) last seen in the three-story building (12), north parking lot,” Burton radioed at 2:29 p.m.
A dispatcher helped with information collected from 911 calls, telling deputies at the same time that three people had been shot in room 1216.
“It’s the three-story building considered the freshman building,” Burton said.
For the Coral Springs officers flooding the scene, Burton’s information was “like a beacon” directing them to Building 12, according to Brad McKeone, deputy police chief for Coral Springs.
But the information couldn’t be shared with BSO.
Coral Springs and BSO don’t just use different 911 systems – their police also have different radio frequencies.
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Memo to young David Hogg – if you want to find fault here, dude, and there seems plenty to go around, take your focus off the NRA and put it on your own home town, because that is where the ****-ups occurred, not at NRA headquarters; and the sooner you face that reality, young David, the sooner you can effect positive change, starting right there in Parkland, Florida and Broward County, where you can agitate for the removal from office of all those down there who failed you children in MSD.
And again, back to the story:
An attempt to “patch” the two channels together failed.
Both agencies blame the other for what went wrong.
The end result: Police responding to the same deadly scene couldn’t talk to each other.
end quotes
Yes, people, Keystone Cops – there is where young David Hogg’s ire should be firmly placed – it was not the nation that failed the kids of Parkland – it was Parkland that failed the kids of Parkland, and now, they want that reality covered over, with the blame placed everywhere but where it really does belong.
Which takes us back to the story, as follows:
Coral Springs Mayor Campbell said that, for all the talk about Coral Springs and BSO being on different radio systems, it appears to have helped the response to have had a second police department using functioning radios.
“Had we not had our system going, there would have been more deaths,” Campbell said.
“I’m not trying to blame anybody.”
“I’m not trying to point fingers.”
“But there’s a problem that has to be fixed.”
“It’s definitely a county problem, and I can state on the record as long as I’m there and as long as the city commission is there, we’re not going to go with the county.”
end quotes
Well, dude, if you don’t “point fingers” where they should be pointed, how is anything down there ever going to get fixed?
Not pointing fingers is a cousin, if not closer relative, to a cover-up.
And back to the story, once again:
At 2:32 p.m., four Coral Springs officers, assisted by two BSO deputies, finally went into Building 12.
They might have been able to get there even earlier.
Coral Springs fire-rescue dispatched its personnel at 2:23 p.m.
But dispatch didn’t tell police there was a mass casualty situation just outside their jurisdiction until 2:26 p.m.
“There is an active shooter working at Douglas, multiple gunshots are being fired,” a dispatcher said after an officer called in for confirmation of what he’d been told by fire-rescue.
“We can hear them in the background.”
“Our 911 lines are blowing up.”
(Coral Springs says its dispatchers first had to alert the fire department and BSO, both by transferring calls and relaying information directly over the radio, before notifying police.)
end quotes
I don’t know about anybody else, but I find this all quite incredible to read on the one hand, but on the other, it seems such a typical story of just how poorly run our high-priced governments in this country really are – this is what your tax dollars are paying for, people – chaos and confusion when you need prompt and decisive action.
And back again to the story:
The bulk of BSO’s SWAT team, which had been training 18 miles away, arrived at Stoneman Douglas around 2:45 p.m., according to South Florida law enforcement sources.
Even then, there were problems: School personnel rewound security footage to see where Cruz had gone.
That information was relayed to officers and deputies who didn’t realize the footage was delayed.
Police were searching for several minutes for a shooter who had fled.
Air-rescue was denied due to fear that the killer could start shooting at a helicopter.
It took several minutes to realize there was no more threat of that.
end quotes
David Hogg, please do the nation a favor and come out on national TV and give us some of your color commentary on these critical failures right there in your home town.
And then issue the nation and the NRA the apology you owe them for blaming them for the failures in your community that resulted in all those deaths.
It would be appreciated.
Paul Plante says
By way of some necessary review in here as to the genesis of this thread, it is now some two-and-a-half months after young, 17-year old David Hogg of tony, upscale Parkland, Florida burst onto the political stage here in America on 2 March 2018 with a guest appearance on the HBO show, “Real Time With Bill Maher,” where the nation and the candid world heard him utter these following words, to wit:
“We don’t need to listen to President Trump, Present Trump needs to listen to the screams of the children and screams of this nation.”
“We want Americans to stop being afraid of demanding our politicians to take action.”
“They work for us; we don’t work for them.”
end quotes
As we were informed in the Sacramento Bee article “‘I honestly thought kids were a lot stupider,’ Bill Maher tells poised Parkland duo” by Howard Cohen on March 03, 2018:
Many seasoned politicians — including former presidents like Barack Obama — along with authors, entertainers and journalists have sat face-to-face with TV host and comedian Bill Maher for his HBO show, “Real Time With Bill Maher.”
But Cameron Kasky and David Hogg, two teenagers from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, survivors of the Parkland shootings a little over two weeks ago, held their own with Maher on his program Friday night.
As in previous forums they have appeared on since the massacre, the two Floridians were composed, articulate and media savvy — at several points Kasky even had Maher, the experienced comic, laughing during the 10-minute segment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcsKMie6M94
end quotes
Now, when that article said they held their own with Bill Maher, that really was not saying much, since Bill Maher, who may well have been so stoned he didn’t know what day of the week it was, or what issues were on the table, put up about as much fight as would a flounder when confronted with those same words from young David Hogg, as we are informed by the Sacramento Bee:
“I honestly thought kids were a lot stupider,” Maher told Hogg and his classmate Kasky — co-founders of the student advocacy group #NeverAgainMSD and two of the organizers of nationwide marches and the March for Our Lives rally planned for March 24 in Washington.
“You’ve really given me faith that the kids today are actually very bright, way brighter than we were,” said Maher, who has often joked that he is happy that he has never had children.
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And that was it, people.
That was the best that Bill Maher could come up with in reply – he was forced to admit that he personally was not smart enough to engage with David Hogg on any of those statements David Hogg made that night, with the result that they have gone unchallenged ever since.
For those unfamiliar with him, William Maher, born January 20, 1956, is an American comedian, political commentator, and television host known for the HBO political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, known for his sarcastic attitude, political satire, and sociopolitical commentary, who targets many topics including religion, politics, bureaucracy, political correctness, and the mass media.
In 2005, Maher ranked at number 38 on Comedy Central’s 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time and he received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star on September 14, 2010, so it should not be all that surprising that it would be on his show that young David Hogg would burst on the political scene here in America as a voice for American youth, in much the same way that the Red Guards in Maoist China were the voices of Chinese youth in that country back in the 1960s.
Adults, according to David Hogg in a REAL CLEAR POLITICS by Tim Hains on March 23, 2018, are stupid and as a consequence, need the children of America, who are all-knowing and deserving of all our love, to save us from ourselves, to wit:
The Outline interviewed David Hogg, a 17-year old survivor of the shooting in Parkland, Florida, who says he is the NRA’s “worst nightmare.”
Hogg’s interview was laced with profanity against his detractors, Gov. Rick Scott, the NRA, old people and others.
Hogg said he became an activist because adults don’t know how to “use a f*cking democracy”:
“When your old-ass parent is like, ‘I don’t know how to send an iMessage,’ and you’re just like, ‘Give me the f**king phone and let me handle it.’”
“Sadly, that’s what we have to do with our government; our parents don’t know how to use a f**king democracy, so we have to.”
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There, people, staring us in the face, is the voice of our future in this country, and if you are an older person like myself who is older than Bill Maher, and not nearly as stupid and ill-informed as he is, that voice does not sound like a pleasant one, nor one that is at all intelligent, either – only crafty and cunning.
As to the Red Guards in China who may well serve as a model for the David Hogg political movement over here, a review of history informs us that in 1966, a group of middle school students in Beijing named themselves “Chairman Mao’s Red Guards.”
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In this country, it is a group of high school students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in ritzy Parkland, Florida who are making themselves into our Red Guards.
In China, Mao’s support for them led to the name “Red Guard” being adopted by groups who were sanctioned by Mao and his supporters to “rebel against the system” all over China.
end quotes
Now, young David Hogg and some high school students in this country are here to “rebel against the system” in this country, by bringing down Donald Trump, the NRA, Laura Ingraham of Fox, and whoever else might get in their way.
Getting back to the Red Guards in China, they were sworn to protect Chairman Mao and his revolutionary line with the Red Guards and other, older revolutionary rebels causing havoc and eventually turned on each other, resulting in great destruction and considerable loss of life.
Once the Red Guards had served their purpose of overturning the old order, these restive young people were exiled from the cities to be re-educated by the peasants in the countryside.
end quotes
In a CNN article entitled “Confessions of a Red Guard, 50 years after China’s Cultural Revolution” by Yu Xiangzhen, a retired editor who was a middle school student when the Cultural Revolution began 50 years ago in May 1966, as told to CNN’s Shen Lu, and posted May 15, 2016, we have this view of the Red Guards through the eyes of one of its members, to wit:
Beijing (CNN) — I have lived a life haunted by guilt.
In 1966, I was one of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Red Guards.
Myself and millions of other middle and high school students started denouncing our teachers, friends, families and raiding homes and destroying other people’s possessions.
Textbooks explain the Cultural Revolution — in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed and millions more abused and traumatized — as a political movement started and led by Mao “by mistake,” but in reality it was a massive catastrophe for which we all bear responsibility.
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For many people today, images of fanatical Red Guards dressed in old army jackets and wearing red armbands, waving copies of Mao’s Little Red Book and chanting “Long Live Chairman Mao!”, are all that remain of the complex, at times idealistic, and often violent student movement of the Cultural Revolution.
While young participants in the Cultural Revolution are commonly referred to simply as “Red Guards,” in reality, they were originally one specific group of students.
These students decided to call themselves ‘Red Guards’, hong weibing; they saw themselves as soldiers (bing) who were fighting to protect (wei) the Revolution and Mao Zedong Thought (represented by the word ‘red’ or hong).
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Today, in this country, we have young David Hogg to be the voice of our future, to save us older people who don’t know how to use a ******* democracy from our own stupidity and lack of sense, and how lucky are we in that people?
Characterized by the Sacramento Bee as being “composed, articulate, media savvy,” David Hogg identifies himself on his TWITTER site as an entrepreneur whose product is very much himself, and why not – this is America, afterall, the land of opportunity, and here young David Hogg, who chose to attend Stoneman Douglas High School because of the television production classes it offered where he was a Teenlink reporter for the Sun Sentinel, found himself presented with a golden opportunity to exploit, and he is now exploiting it to the hilt, which is what brought to mind the Red Guards in China, and this NPR article “Chinese Red Guards Apologize, Reopening A Dark Chapter” by Anthony Kuhn on February 4, 2014, to wit:
For most of the past half century, China has avoided a full accounting for one of the darkest chapters of its recent history: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
During that time, Chairman Mao Zedong’s shock troops — Communist youth known as Red Guards — persecuted, tortured or even killed millions of Chinese, supposed “class enemies.”
The Cultural Revolution was orchestrated by the Chinese leader, an effort to build a utopian society through class struggle.
It drove the country to the brink of civil war and, by some estimates, cost more than 1 million lives.
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One wonders if young David Hogg is aware of any of that history and what happens when movements such as his to build a utopian society in this country through class struggle get out of control.
Getting back to the Red Guard story:
The early phases of the Cultural Revolution were centered on China’s schools.
In the summer of 1966, the Communist Party leadership proclaimed that some of China’s educators were members of the exploiting classes, who were poisoning students with their capitalist ideology.
Indeed, the educated classes in general were marked as targets of the revolution.
The leadership gave Communist youth known as Red Guards the green light to remove educators from their jobs and punish them.
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In this country, it is the NRA that is poisoning students with its capitalist ideology, so it has been marked by the Hogg movement as a target of their revolution.
Getting back to NPR:
One of the highest-profile apologies comes from Chen Xiaolu, a Red Guard leader at Beijing’s elite No. 8 high school.
He is also the son of Chen Yi, a leading Communist revolutionary and former foreign minister, and that allows him some latitude to speak out.
“On August 19, I organized a meeting to criticize the leaders of the Beijing education system,” Chen, now 67, recalls.
“A rather serious armed struggle broke out.”
“At the end, some students rushed onstage and used leather belts to whip some of the education officials, including the party secretary of my school.”
Chen says he was against the violence, but the situation spiraled out of his control.
Chen says his school’s party secretary later committed suicide, and a vice secretary was crippled as a result of that day’s attack.
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And they were just children, just kids, like David Hogg and his movement in this country.
And back to the story of a student movement gone amuck in China:
The same summer, Chairman Mao met with crowds of frenzied Red Guards in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
He endorsed their violent tactics — consisting mainly of beatings with fists, clubs and other blunt instruments.
In August and September 1966, a total of 1,772 people were killed in Beijing, according to the Beijing Daily newspaper.
Students beating up their teachers was a shocking reversal in the Confucian society, where educators were once held in the highest esteem.
“Teachers were made to stand onstage, bow their heads and confess their crimes,” he says.
“Looking back on it, I believe their human rights and dignity were trampled upon.”
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In this country, to make things alright again, will we see young David Hogg making NRA members have to stand on a stage and bow their heads and confess their crimes?
Or can’t that happen here?
Paul Plante says
First of all, people, God bless Bill Maher.
He has as much right to be who he is as does anyone in America, even if he comes across as being slow on the uptake and as dumb as a box of rocks with his comment on March 2, 2018 that “I honestly thought kids were a lot stupider,” and “You’ve really given me faith that the kids today are actually very bright, way brighter than we were.”
So how did Bill Maher get to be the spokesperson for American politics as he has become?
According to his bio, Maher was born in New York City, and his father was a network news editor and radio announcer, while his mother was a nurse.
Maher was raised in River Vale, New Jersey, and graduated from Pascack Hills High School in Montvale in 1974.
He then attended Cornell University, where he double majored in English and history, and graduated in 1978.
Maher has said: “selling pot allowed me to get through college and make enough money to start off in comedy.”
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Ah, yes, doing it the American way – money for nothing and the chicks for free!
As to Montvale, New Jersey, the Census Bureau’s 2006-2010 American Community Survey showed that in 2010 inflation-adjusted dollars median household income was $111,633 and the median family income was $140,026 with about 3.6% of families and 5.3% of the population below the poverty line, including 10.4% of those under age 18 and 1.5% of those age 65 or over.
So Bill Maher came from what could be called a “comfortable” upbringing, and my goodness, people, in America, isn’t that what it is really about – being comfortable inside your own skin?
Getting back to Bill Maher, he began his career as a comedian and actor as host of the New York City comedy club Catch a Rising Star in 1979, and then he began appearing on Johnny Carson’s and David Letterman’s shows in 1982.
He also made limited television appearances including on Sara (1985), Max Headroom (1987), Murder, She Wrote (1989, 1990), and Charlie Hoover (1991), while his feature film debut was in D.C. Cab (1983), with him later appearing in Ratboy (1986), House II: The Second Story (1987), Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1988), and Pizza Man (1991).
It is said among pundits who claim to know these things that it was his appearance in the 1988 psycho-thriller “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death,” in which Bill Maher played a studly hunk named Jim, that put the name of Bill Maher in lights as America’s up and coming political commentator of our times today.
For those who missed it, “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death” was a 1989 film starring Shannon Tweed and Bill Maher.
The film sends up many pop culture motifs and societal trends, including feminism and feminist movements’ fragmentation around various issues, B movies, particularly Cannibal Holocaust, celebrities, major writers and political figures.
The plot opf the thriller is as follows:
The U.S. government grows worried for the nation’s avocado supply after some confrontations with the “Piranha” tribe of cannibal women, who live in the mysterious “Avocado Jungle” (westernmost outpost: San Bernardino) and ritually sacrifice and eat men.
The government recruits Margo Hunt (Tweed), a professor of feminist studies at a local university (“Spritzer College”), to travel into the Avocado Jungle and make contact with the women to attempt to convince them to move to a reservation/condo in Malibu.
Along the way, she and her travelling companions — male chauvinist guide Jim (Maher) and ditzy undergraduate Bunny (Karen Mistal) — meet a tribe of subservient men called the “Donnahew” (a reference to talk-show host Phil Donahue) and face dangers in their path.
Eventually, the trio (Margo, Bunny and Jim) meets the Piranha women, who have recently taken Dr. Kurtz (played by Adrienne Barbeau) as their “empress.”
Kurtz is Dr. Hunt’s former colleague in feminist studies (the internationally famous author of Smart Women, Stupid Insensitive Men) and now her nemesis; she has joined the tribe of Piranha women with her own exploitative agenda.
The two argue about the morality of sacrificing men and the exploitation of the Piranha women, and Bunny decides to join the tribe, her first sacrifice being Jim.
Bunny cannot go through with the kill, however, and Dr. Hunt escapes, aided by the handsome, intelligent, and sensitive Jean-Pierre (Brett Stimely), who also was to be sacrificed.
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And that is just the beginning, people.
Talk about a thriller, that is the one to see.
Maher then assumed the host role on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, a late-night political talk show that ran on Comedy Central from 1993 to 1997 and on ABC from 1997 to 2002.
The show regularly began with a topical monologue by Maher preceding the introduction of four guests, usually a diverse group of individuals, such as show business, popular culture, political pundits, political consultants, authors, and occasionally news figures.
The group would discuss topical issues selected by Maher, who also participated in the discussions.
Jerry Seinfeld, a regular guest on the show, stated that Politically Incorrect reminded him of talk shows from the 1950s and 60s “when guests interacted with each other as much as with the host”.
In 2003, Maher then became the host, co-producer and co-writer of Real Time with Bill Maher, a weekly hour-long political comedy talk show on the cable television network HBO, where on 2 March 208, young David Hogg made his guest appearance that put the name of David Hogg in lights in America.
During an interview, Maher told Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air that he much prefers having serious and well-informed guests on his program, as opposed to the random celebrities that fleshed out his roundtable discussions on Politically Incorrect.
With David Hogg, he greatly missed that target, by a mile.
As with his previous show, Politically Incorrect, Maher begins Real Time with a comic opening monologue based upon current events and other topical issues.
He proceeds to a one-on-one interview with a guest, either in-studio or via satellite.
That is the portion of his show on 2 March 2018 that featured David Hogg.
Following the interview, Maher sits with two or three panelists, usually consisting of pundits, authors, activists, actors, politicians and journalists, for a discussion of the week’s events.
So that is some background on who Bill Maher really is.
The only unanswered question is how come ten years after I got out of high school, Bill Maher was able to get out of high school as stupid as he claims he is, which certainly was no impediment to his show business career.
Maybe one day he could get David Hogg back on his show and David Hogg could outline for us what it is that makes him and the kids of today so much smarter than TV host Bill Maher.
The candid world would like to know.
Paul Plante says
For those who think young David Hogg of upscale Parkland, Florida is only interested in his 15-minutes of fame, a pair of recent news articles should disabuse one of that notion while serving to put that thesis firmly to rest.
Young David Hogg of upscale Parkland, Florida isn’t interested in 15-minutes of fame – to the contrary, he is in it for the long haul, for his interest is in political power, which he intends to get the old-fashioned Tammany Hall way – by controlling large blocks of votes to elect into office politicians beholden to young David Hogg of tony Parkland, Florida, and therefore, loyal to him, as well.
That information comes to us from the ABC NEWS story “Gun-reform activists spur voter registration at high schools” by Wilfredo Lee and Kelli Kennedy, Associated Press on May 29, 2018, as follows:
Students at more than 1,000 schools across the country are registering young voters in lunchrooms, hallways and even at upcoming graduation ceremonies in a week of activism aimed at electing lawmakers who support gun reforms in response to school shootings in Florida and Texas.
David Hogg, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, is spearheading the national effort along with the New York-based organization HeadCount.
Hogg and organization officials say students at more than 1,000 schools in 46 states are participating, with most starting their drives Tuesday.
Their goal is to have 90 percent of the nation’s high schools host drives before the current senior class graduates in hopes of boosting young-voter turnout, which is traditionally low, especially during midterm elections.
HeadCount, a national organization that has registered nearly half a million voters since 2004, mostly at concerts and music festivals, also hosted voter tables at the March For Our Lives gun-reform rally organized by Hogg and other Parkland students in Washington, D.C., that drew hundreds of thousands of young people in March.
Voter-registration drives were the logical next step after months of rallies and schools walkouts, the activists said.
Hogg says all the rhetoric on gun reform is worthless unless voters oust lawmakers who are beholden to the National Rifle Association.
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Hogg wants to oust lawmakers he feels are beholden to the NRA, which has become the national bad guy in America, and replace them with lawmakers who are beholden to him, instead, as we see from the following:
“We need to vote people out of office that are perpetuating issues affecting young people like gun violence.”
“… The youth don’t vote lawmakers into office and as a result they don’t work for them,” he said.
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There is a very good reason that “the youth” don’t vote lawmakers into office and that includes their lack of judgment and lack of life experience which develops judgment, and no, I don’t buy into the Bill Maher bull**** argument that young David Hogg of Parkland, Florida is smarter than I am when it comes to citizenship in America.
If he was smarter than I am, he wouldn’t be peddling that line of bull about the lawmakers working for anyone, and especially for him.
The lawmakers are supposed to represent the interests of congressional districts, not faction leaders like young David Hogg, who wants politicians beholden to him, as opposed to the NRA, which brings us to Nurah Abdulhaqq, a 14-year-old at Chapel Hill High School in Douglasville, Georgia, who has been an advocate for gun reform since 2016, when her cousin was gunned down in her small town.
“It was kind of shocking to me, and the fact that this has happened time and time again in this country and nothing’s changed.”
“There’s been no stronger gun-control laws passed,” she said.
“We know the only way to get real change is to vote and check a ballot box and to get the right people in.”
“… It’s just time to vote these people out that don’t really care if we’re getting killed in school or not.”
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Now, pardon me here, but that last statement about “these people out that don’t really care if we’re getting killed in school or not” is total horse****, and one has to seriously wonder who it was that filled this impressionable young child’s head with that toxic horse****, and more to the point, why?
Who is telling this impressionable young child that if people are for the 2d Amendment, it means they don’t really care if children are getting killed in school or not?
And that takes us to the 2d article, this one from the Florida Sun Sentinel, entitled “Parkland parents set up PAC to take on NRA” by Lisa J. Huriash on 31 May 2018, to wit:
Parkland parents have created a political action committee directed against politicians who are funded by the National Rifle Association.
The group, which begins taking donations Wednesday, will use its money to try to oust political candidates who both oppose its efforts to amend the laws that permit semi-automatic rifles, or who receive campaign donations from the NRA – or both.
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Rather than look inward and admit to themselves that the first people responsible for the Parkland shooting are themselves and their neighbors and their community leaders and the Democrat county sheriff, these parents want to shift the blame off themselves for their own failures, and instead, place it on the NRA, as if the NRA had actually perpetrated the shooting by standing up for gun rights in America.
As to this PAC, the Sun Sentinel informs us as follows:
State records show Families vs Assault Rifles PAC Inc. was registered as a nonprofit on May 18 by Jeff Kasky, the father of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High student activist Cameron Kasky, who is a founder of March for Our Lives.
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We in America with working memories will recall son Cameron Kasky coming on national TV in early March of this year, on the nationally-televised Bill Maher show, where young Kasky was heard to say as follows:
“I mean this sincerely, I really do, to all the generations before us we sincerely accept your apology,” the teen said.
“We appreciate that you are willing to let us rebuild the world that you f—ed up.”
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My assumption is that he is talking to his own parents there about the world they ***** up for young Cameron, to be truthful, because he certainly is not talking to me, nor will he find any apology from me forthcoming for the sorry state of affairs in Broward County and Parkland, Florida.
I did not make it that way, so I am not in any way responsible to Cameron Kasky of Parkland, Florida, or his father, for that matter, for the chain of incompetence and outright failure which led to the Parkland school shooting.
Getting back to the Sun Sentinel article we have:
Jeff Kasky said the politicians “who refuse to listen to their constituents and instead, in exchange for cash, do the NRA’s bidding” will be its target.
“We are going to go up against NRA candidates in every meaningful race in the country,” Kasky told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
According to its website: “FAMSVARPAC was founded … with a vested interest in keeping our community and our entire country safe from the proliferation of military-style assault weapons – extraordinarily dangerous weapons designed for nothing more than killing the greatest amount of humans in the shortest possible time.”
The group’s mission is to “remove the NRA from our political system” and also to make an amendment the National Firearms Act of 1934 to include a ban on assault weapons, bump stocks, and high-capacity magazines, according to its website.
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The group’s mission is to remove the NRA from our political system.
It’s time for a purge.
Anathema has been called down on the evil NRA!
It must be suppressed!
It is time for them to go!
Say good-bye to the NRA, they will be no more.
And such is the state of politics in the USA today!
John Oliver says
Bill Maher is pure genius, Our idol. The best thing about Fridays and the only reason to subscribe to cable.
Paul Plante says
John Oliver is far better, however, at least in my estimation.