David Hogg was born on April 12, 2000, in Los Angeles, California. His mother, Rebecca Boldrick, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Kevin Hogg, was a onetime FBI agent.
David Hogg was a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School in Parkland, Florida, when a mass shooting caused the deaths of 17 victims there on February 14, 2018. Soon after that tragedy, David and his sister, then-MSD freshman Lauren Hogg, co-founded the gun-control advocacy organization March For Our Lives (MFOL).
As the most visible MFOL spokesperson to emerge in early 2018, David Hogg received extensive exposure in the American media. He and other co-founders of MFOL made frequent radio, television, and podcast appearances in hopes of leveraging the national attention they were receiving into political capital – while simultaneously growing their own social media presence. Featured in interviews with the likes of Anderson Cooper, Jimmy Fallon, and Bill Maher, Hogg adroitly utilized his platform to condemn Republican politicians, the Trump family, and the National Rifle Association (NRA).
During a March 2018 interview, Hogg characterized lawmakers who accepted donations from the NRA as “pathetic fuckers that want to keep killing our children,” and who “could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs.” Asserting that it was up to young people to fight for the gun-control measures that adults had theretofore failed to enact, Hogg also stated: “At this point it’s like when your old-ass parent’s like, ‘I don’t know how to send an iMessage,’ and you’re just like, ‘give me the fucking phone’ and you take it and you’re like, ‘okay, let me handle it,’ and you get it done in one second. Sadly, that’s what we have to do with our government because our parents don’t know how to use a fucking democracy, so we have to.” Lamenting the ubiquity of “sick fuckers out there that want to continue to sell more guns, murder more children, and honestly just get reelected,” Hogg asked rhetorically: “What type of person are you, when you want to see more fucking money than children’s lives? What type of shitty person does that?” And when he was asked what specific measures he would implement if given the opportunity, Hogg replied that it was not his responsibility to come up with solutions: “I shouldn’t have to! I’m 17.”
On March 24, 2018, Hogg and other MSD High School students participated in the initial “March For Our Lives” demonstration in order to promote stricter gun-control laws in Washington, D.C. Contrary to various news reports, the event was not truly “student-led.” As one University of Maryland study noted, fewer than 10% of all the demonstrators were under the age of 18, and the average protestor age was about 49 years old. Moreover, many of those present were there for reasons other than to advocate for gun control — e.g., to protest the overall policies and presidency of Donald Trump. The March For Our Lives protest in Washington, and its accompanying demonstrations in other major cities, received the backing of numerous Democrat politicians and their supporters, including such notables as Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Among the celebrities in attendance were George Clooney, Kanye West, Amy Schumer, Miley Cyrus, Kim Kardashian, Paul McCartney, Cher, Will Smith, and Lady Gaga.
In part, the aforementioned March For Our Lives gathering was organized by the political action committee Never Again MSD, which Hogg had co-founded shortly after the mass shooting at MSD High School; the organization was initially comprised mostly of MSD drama-club students.
The ensuing March For Our Lives demonstrations that Hogg and others promoted were made possible also by the assistance of fellow gun-control radicals affiliated with Everytown for Gun Safety.
In March 2018, it was reported that Hogg had expressed disappointment over the rejection of his admission applications by several University of California schools. Undaunted, however, he stated: “At this point, I’m probably going to take a gap year and I’m sure I’ll eventually find the right place for me. Right now I’m more focused on changing the world and the future of America.” “At this point,” Hogg re-emphasized, “we’re already changing the world. If colleges want to support us in that, great. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter; we’re still going to change the world.”
In March 2018 as well, Fox News television host Laura Ingraham posted an online tweet in which she mocked Hogg for his public lamentations vis-à-vis his rejected college applications. Wrote Ingraham: “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.)” Upon seeing that tweet, Hogg responded by using his Twitter account to list the companies that advertised on Ingraham’s show, and exhorting his social media followers to persuade those companies to pull their ads from the program. Within a short time, approximately a dozen corporations had decided to stop running ads on Ingraham’s show, including Office Depot, Jenny Craig, Hulu, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Wayfair, StitchFix, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, Atlantis Paradise Island, and Liberty Mutual. When Ingraham subsequently apologized for her tweet and invited Hogg to appear on her program, Hogg rejected the offer, saying: “She only apologized after we went after her advertisers.”
Also in March 2018, Hogg initiated a second boycott – this one against the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s television and radio host Jamie Allman, who had written a tweet threatening to insert a heated fire poker into Hogg’s anus. Two weeks after the tweet and the launch of the boycott, Allman was fired and his program was canceled.
In April 2018, Hogg pushed for a boycott against mutual fund companies that invested in firearm-manufacturer stocks.
That same month, Hogg announced that although he had recently been accepted for admission to UC Irvine, he would be temporarily putting off his college education, so that he could first focus his attention on helping to promote the campaigns of pro-gun-control political candidates – i.e., leftwing Democrats – in the upcoming November midterm elections. He later explained that he did not “feel comfortable going to college until we have at least $50 million to fund gun violence research annually.”
On June 5, 2018, Random House Publishing Company released Never Again: The Parkland Shooting and the Teen Activists Leading a Movement, a 176-page book written by David Hogg and his 15-year-old sister, Laura. The website Marxism-Leninism Today published a glowing review of what it described as this “memoir” of the co-authors’ “lives before, during and after the Parkland massacre, and of the influences that shaped their consciousness and pushed them into political activism.”
In the summer of 2018, Hogg collaborated with a number of fellow Parkland student gun-control activists in a 60-day, 75-stop summer tour aiming to register new pro-gun-control voters and to push legislators to pass laws restricting the sale and availability of firearms.
When the Democrats gained an astounding 41 U.S. House seats in the November 2018 midterm elections, March For Our Lives, citing the numerous media appearances that Hogg and other members of that organization had made during the campaign season, claimed credit for having helped the party greatly increase its power: “We spurred a historic youth turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, with a 47% increase over the last midterm election and the highest percentage of youth voter turnout ever. Voters made it clear that the status quo was no longer acceptable — a record 46 NRA-backed candidates lost their elections that November.”
Time magazine included Hogg in its list of the 100 Most Influential People of 2018.
In December 2018, Hogg announced that he had been accepted into Harvard University and would enroll there in the fall of 2019. Harvard’s acceptance came despite the fact that Hogg’s SAT score and academic credentials were well below those of the typical Harvard admittee.
In early January 2019, Hogg articulated his belief that America had no legitimate right to exist as a sovereign nation. “Reminder: No one is illegal on stolen land,” he told his nearly 1 million Twitter followers at the time.
On April 8, 2019, Hogg accused President Trump of supporting “terrorism” against black churches, because Trump had not yet tweeted about three historically black Louisiana churches that had recently been destroyed by what the Reuters news service described as “suspicious” fires. “You won’t see Donald Trump tweeting about this terrorism because it’s the kind he supports,” wrote Hogg.
In August 2019, Hogg appeared on MSNBC Live to discuss his “Peace Plan for a Safer America,” which called for:
Also in August 2019, Hogg posted on Twitter that: “If I die from gun violence I want my photo published.” “In the event I am killed,” he instructed his social media followers, “organize, mobilize and get the Peace Plan passed and put my body on the NRAs [sic] doorstep in Fairfax, VA.” Hogg further exhorted his Twitter followers to make it known if they likewise wished to have their “photo published” in the event that they too were to “die from gun violence.”
During a September 6, 2019 appearance on MSNBC’s All In, Hogg asserted that mass shootings in the U.S. were rooted in the nation’s ugly track record of racism and oppression:
“I think it comes down to reckoning with our history and our history of white supremacy in the United States. The fact that we live in a post-genocidal society oftentimes that was orchestrated by the United States government in that if we want to talk about mass shootings, we need to recognize the massive number of indigenous mass shootings that was conducted by the United States government. I think back to the battle of Wounded Knee and the several hundred Native Americans, predominately men, women, and children that were slaughtered by the United States government back in the nineteenth century. And how that is never discussed as a mass shooting. And that was wrong because those people were not armed, and we were stealing their land.”
Hogg reprised this theme in a May 2021 speech to the Northwestern University College Democrats wherein he stated: “Gun violence in the United States, the vast majority of the time, is a product of injustice…. It’s a symptom of systemic racism. It’s a system of purposely corrupt and unjust systems that have been built up in this country to benefit [the] few at the cost of the many.”
In a June 2021 op-ed piece that he co-authored for the far-left Daily Beast, Hogg promoted his recently produced documentary advocating strict gun control and calling for an intersectional approach to recruiting young people into political activism: “Our experience of working on this documentary and reclaiming our narrative permanently altered our understanding of the role systemic injustice plays in the creation of gun violence. We must have a much broader conversation around gun violence as a symptom of racial inequality, white supremacy, and economic inequality. We need to hear more stories from kids who are disproportionately affected by guns on a daily basis.”
In a July 10, 2022 appearance on MSNBC, Hogg suggested that mass shootings were possibly part of a “coordinated mass terror attack” by white nationalists. He elaborated:
“The thing that I’m deeply concerned about is, you know, the fact that many of these mass shooters have similar intentions, if not almost the exact same intentions, of building a white and male-dominated white ethnic state in our country. What scares me is that we’ve seen the shooters, time and time again, like the shooter at my high school, have these incredibly xenophobic ideals — these hateful and racist ideals over and over again.
“We need to realize that, again, hatred is not a mental illness. I can’t stand it when there are these terrorist attacks that are happening across the United States by these white nationalists, and we repeatedly act like hatred is a mental illness. Racism is not a mental illness. Racism is learned. Hatred is learned. Our country needs to realize that mental illness does have a role in addressing gun deaths. That’s only in regards to the two-thirds of gun deaths that are suicides. What’s not going to help to reduce gun death is stigmatizing it and making people think that the only time we should be talking about mental illness is when there’s a white-nationalist mass shooter that goes and kills people, like the 17 students and educators the white nationalist last year at my high school killed.”
On January 20, 2020, Hogg – in reaction to a large, peaceful, orderly, pro-Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Virginia — tweeted: “How many of these people [pro-gun demonstrators] do you think would support the Black Panthers [sic] right to carry? Or [would support] armed resistance to the white militias that stole the North American continent? Answer: none because they only want guns to enforce white supremacy.”
Prior to the November 2020 presidential election, Hogg called for unity in supporting the candidacy of Joe Biden over the incumbent Donald Trump. “Vice President Biden wasn’t necessarily my first pick,” said Hogg, “but the fact of the matter is it’s not a question so much anymore of who the candidate is. It’s a question of, are we going to have a democracy in four years? I truly am concerned about that.”
In a February 4, 2021 appearance on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber, Hogg said: “We have seen one of the most remarkable and truly, honestly, a horrific change in the Republican Party over the past 30 years. I would say it really started in the ’90s, but you could even go back to the primary of Barry Goldwater and the New Conservative Movement way back in the 20th century, as I study my history classes in college. But it’s scary. It’s really scary because people used to think they’re mostly a group of good people that truly want what’s best for the country. Yeah, there is a fringe of people that may or may not be white supremacists, but that’s a very small minority of people. But now what we’re seeing is there are actual conspiracy theorists and white supremacists that are becoming the party. And the fringe are those people that were originally, you know, believed to be the majority. It’s truly terrifying.”
In a series of tweets in February 2021, Hogg announced that he and the leftwing tech entrepreneur William LeGate would soon be launching a company to compete with MyPillow, the latter of which was headed by CEO Mike Lindell, a devoted supporter of former President Trump. “Mike [Lindell] isn’t going to know what hit him—this pillow fight is just getting started,” said Hogg. The name of hogg’s startup company was later announced as Good Pillow. But in early April 2021, Hogg announced that he had resigned from the venture and was leaving the company entirely in LeGate’s hands. Said Hogg in a statement: “Effective immediately, I have resigned and released all shares, any ownership and any control of Good Pillow LLC. I want to thank his partnership and wish him absolutely nothing but success with the future of Good Pillow. Over the next several months, I will be taking some time to focus on my studies in college and advance the gun violence prevention movement with March for Our Lives and personally.”
During a May 24, 2021 appearance on CNN’s Newsroom, Hogg asserted that people were motivated to buy guns chiefly because of their own unfounded fears of people unlike them:
At a June 11, 2022 “March For Our Lives” rally, Hogg said: “We need to treat guns the way we treated cigarettes 30 years ago. With cigarettes, we didn’t just change the laws, we addressed why people wanted to smoke in the first place. We have to address how people get guns and why they feel the need to pick them up in the first place.” “We addressed why cigarettes were so easy to access,” he continued, “especially for poor people and kids of color. And we stamped out the corruption, misinformation, and lies of Big Tobacco. And guess what? We’re going to do the same thing with guns and the gun industry.”
At the same June 11, 2022 rally, Hogg derided the notion that it might be useful to station police officers in schools as a means of preventing deadly shootings therein. Implying that an inherent and unconscious bias allegedly rested within the hearts of white officers, he said: “Realize that putting more cops in schools actually may be a form of endangering our students as well — for the students that don’t have the privilege of having my skin color, or the fact that I am an American citizen.”
Following a July 4, 2022 mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, which resulted in the death of 7 people, Hogg stated that he was growing increasingly “more anxious than ever about the possibility of a coordinated mass terrorism attack by white supremacists.” In a Boston Review interview that touched heavily upon the issues of “gun violence” and “white supremacy,” Hogg depicted conservatives, Republicans, and “white men” as the principal threats to public safety in America. Some selected quotes from Hogg::
In July 2022, it was announced that Hogg would be one of the featured speakers at the American Federation of Teachers’ upcoming national convention in Boston. Other notable speakers would include Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, First Lady Jill Biden, and Boston mayor Michelle Wu.
During a July 20, 2022 House Judiciary Committee hearing, Hogg interrupted the markup of two gun-control bills introduced by Democrats. One of the bills was the Assault Weapons Ban of 2021, which sought to outlaw the personal ownership of most semi-automatic guns; the other was the Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act, which aimed to impose civil liability on firearms manufacturers if the weapons they made or sold were subsequently used in shootings. Among the remarks Hogg shouted were the following:
On February 26, 2023, Hogg tweeted: “You have no right to a gun. You are not a militia. When you’re talking about your second amendment rights you’re talking about a states right to have what is today the national guard. The modern interpretation of 2A is a ridiculous fraud pushed for decades by the gun lobby.” (The text of the Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”)
In April 2024, Hogg participated in a rally supporting Just Majority, a coalition of leftwing nonprofits that support “court packing,” – i.e., expanding the number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court by adding several leftwing activist ideologues.
On November 19, 2024 — two weeks after the U.S. presidential election in which Donald Trump won the male vote by a substantial margin while defeating Democrat opponent Kamala Harris — Hogg met with what he described as “a group of researchers and activists to discuss how Democrats win back young men.”
In December 2024, Hogg announced that he was running for the position of vice chair of the Democrat National Committee (DNC). “I think this role is a great way of, for one, bringing newer voices into the Democratic Party,” he said. “…I just want to be one of several of those voices to help represent young people and also, more than anything, make sure that we’re standing up to the consulting class that increasingly the Democratic Party is representing instead of the working class.”
Over the years, Hogg has lent his name and energies to Democracy House, described by Influence Watch as “a fiscally sponsored project of the Foundation for Civic Leadership that organizes programs to engage college students in political advocacy and recruit them to vote.” For example, on one occasion Hogg led a webinar for Democracy House’s “Young Leaders Summer Institute,” a program designed to encourage college students to become politically active in support of Democrat and leftwing agendas.
On February 1, 2025, Hogg was elected — along with Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta — to serve as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). That same day, Ken Martin, a longtime chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, was elected as the DNC’s chairman. Said Hogg in his victory speech: “Who’s ready to take the fight to the Republicans and win this thing? Are you guys ready to fight? It’s been a long day, but guess what? We have a long road ahead. Let’s go and kick some ass. Let’s go win our young people back, and let’s stop sending just our thoughts and prayers to address gun violence, and do something. Are you ready to do that? Because together, we can make school shooter drills history, and not headlines. Are you ready to do that?”