David Hogg was trying to thrust himself into the media spotlight long before the infamous 2018 shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. His first brush with fame came in 2017 when he recorded a friend having a minor confrontation with a lifeguard at Redondo Beach in California. Hogg’s video went viral. As a result, he tasted his first thirty seconds of fame.

In an interview with CBS Los Angeles, Hogg claimed his friend put his wakeboard on top of a trashcan because he didn’t want it to get sandy (at a beach!) and the confrontation took place after the friend removed the board…and then mouthed off to the lifeguard. The lifeguard responded by getting in the teen’s face and—it is California—ultimately faced some unknown form of discipline, even though it was painfully obvious the kid had provoked him and only words were exchanged.

Less than twelve months later, Hogg became a media rock star after recording interviews with classmates at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas while the shooting was allegedly still in progress. That’s also when the rumors began that Hogg was some sort of a crisis actor because he always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.

However, Hogg’s migration from California to Florida appears to coincide with his father’s retirement as an FBI agent. The fact that Hogg lived in California for one year and recorded a viral video before moving to Florida the next year is far less interesting than the fact his father is a former FBI agent. Historically, the FBI were the good guys. In recent years, my opinion shifted to the rank-and-file FBI are the good guys, but senior leadership had become corrupt. The recent arrest of Peter Navarro has eroded my confidence in the bureau even further.

Anyway, Hogg makes it on television again. This time he’s not just a one-interview wonder. He’s become a full-fledged media rock star. As an MSD “survivor,” Hogg found a golden ticket to media credibility, and his fame grew exponentially. He became the de-facto leader of the March for Our Lives gun control movement and recently celebrated the news that a bipartisan group of senators had agreed to some new (unconstitutional) gun control legislation. In between those two career milestones, David parlayed his social media fame into his new career as a student activist enrolled at Harvard University.

In March 2021, Hogg decided to launch a new company called Good Pillow with “progressive” entrepreneur William LeGate, ostensibly to compete directly with Mike Lindell and MyPillow as a punitive measure after Lindell led several efforts to investigate 2020 election fraud. The company literally started as a joke, as Hogg and LeGate were kidding around about starting “a pillow company that doesn’t try to overthrow the government” and, before you know it, the mainstream media was conducting fawning interviews with Hogg to promote the fledgling company.

The dynamic duo was not ready for prime time and soon began making rookie mistakes, such as publicly announcing the name of the company while forgetting to trademark the name beforehand. As a result, Hogg and LeGate found themselves in the embarrassing position of having created a buzz about the company when they didn’t even own the name.

Image: David Hogg (edited). YouTube screen grab.

By the middle of the following month, Hogg apparently realized that starting a company was actual work and resigned from the company, relinquishing his ownership. He released a statement saying that he needed to focus on his studies and his work in the gun violence prevention movement, namely March for Our Lives.

LeGate somehow managed to resolve the copyright issue, perhaps by changing the company name from Good Pillow to GoodPillow (which is more like MyPillow anyway.) The business has an official website that looks like it was built by a high school kid who flunked out of web design class. With an amateurish website and a launch date coming in less than a month, GoodPillow appears doomed before it officially launches.

By comparison, the website for March for Our Lives looks like…well, every bit as professional as the website for MyPillow. David Hogg is listed as a board member but it’s clear he’s just a minor cog in the much bigger machine laser-focused on the conflicted liberal goals of both ending gun violence by suing gun manufacturers out of existence while somehow simultaneously achieving “peace without police.” Hogg likes to present himself as a leader of the movement in front of the camera but, behind the scenes, he’s more like a minnow swimming in a school of sharks.

Recently David made news by publicly alleging that Senator Marco Rubio had refused to meet with him, claiming Rubio was afraid because his physical presence might “trigger” the senator from Florida. Unfortunately for Hogg, Rubio’s office kept receipts showing that Rubio had a meeting scheduled with Hogg that was canceled only after Hogg lied to the media and made false claims about Rubio. David was forced to issue a public apology. Anyone else would have had their credibility utterly destroyed by such a buffoonish gaffe, but Hogg just seemed to shrug it off like water off a duck’s back before going on to his next interview.

My problem isn’t that Rubio canceled the meeting. My problem is that the interview was even scheduled in the first place. What makes David Hogg newsworthy? Why should one of the one hundred most important people in America waste his time on a self-aggrandizing nitwit?

Not only did an egregious public lie about Marco Rubio fail to destroy Hogg’s career as a public activist, but less than a week later, Time magazine fawningly described him as “older, wiser David Hogg” for his willingness to accept a compromise that totally guts the Second Amendment. This segues nicely into my real question: Who is David Hogg’s P.R. guy behind the scenes?

Search for “David Hogg” using Google and you’ll get roughly 16.3 million hits. Even more impressive, the entire first page of search results is all about him. Heck, if you search for “Greta Thunberg” you’ll get 17.3 million hits, only one million more for an international media rock star, as opposed to a domestic U.S. wannabe.

We know the secret identity of the brains behind the Trayvon Martin scam—Ryan Julison. Attorneys Benjamin Crump and Natalie Jackson hired the Orlando-based public relations executive to craft an alternative narrative to the official ruling in the case of self-defense. His company website also boasts of doing work for the families of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Ahmad Arbery but gives no mention of Hogg.

So, who is the evil genius behind David Hogg? Someone is propping up the kid. PR Week named Hogg “Communicator of the Year” in 2019. He claimed to throw away his notes before giving his acceptance speech in order to speak from the heart, but it sure sounded scripted to me.

Hogg is only a marionette. Who is the puppeteer?

John Leonard is a freelance writer and author of six published books, including Always a Next One, his award-winning collection of short stories about animal rescue. His seventh book, titled The God Conclusion, will be available on July 7th^. It is currently available for preorder on Amazon. He may be contacted via his website at southernprose.com.