New York Magazine did a full lifestyle interview piece with David Hogg.

It is clearly intended to be a glowing puff piece, but it revealed a few scary truths about this kid.

I started reading this article with the intent of fisking it but it is incredibly long.  Therefore I’m going to skip through a lot of the literary fellatio and focus on the critical details I noticed.

At 2:30 on February 14, David Hogg was not yet a spokesperson for radicalized young America or a renowned media savant or a resistance fighter or, to some, the encapsulation of everything terrifying about where the country is going, but a high-school senior crouched in a dark classroom while a gunman with an AR-15 ranged beyond the walls of his hiding place, slaughtering 17 people in six minutes.

Savant: “a person of learning; especially : one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature).”

Hogg is not a media savant.  He is a kid that is attracted to fame and has figured out the more off the wall shit he says, the more airtime he gets.  It’s not nuance and intellect he’s known for.  He’s the anti-gun firebrand equivalent of the YouTube star eating cereal out of the bathtub she’s sitting in.

Like so many young men in so many foxholes before him, Hogg discovered in himself a powerful drive not to leave this Earth without making a mark.

Fuck you, New York Magazine.  He wasn’t in a foxhole.  He was in another building on the far side of campus.  This is some monumental bullshit.

“We really only remember a few hundred people, if that many, out of the billions that have ever lived,” he told me at his house in a gated community in Parkland, ten days after the shooting. “Is that what I was destined to become?”

Jesus… the ego of that kid to think that maybe he was destined to be one of the select few of the billions of living people that he’s going to be a remembered name.  A school shooting happens and it’s his destiny to ride that to fame.

After the shooting, he had met up with his father but then driven himself home. That’s when he lost it, alone in the car, screaming “Fuck!” again and again at the top of his lungs and hammering his fists on the dashboard. By the time he got to his house, he was calm enough to send his video to the Sun-Sentinel, the newspaper where he worked as an intern. “I had the exclusive for about six hours,” he told me.

Who the fuck thinks like that?  “Seventeen of my friends were killed, people are traumatized, but I got the exclusive!”  That’s the kind of thinking that makes people hate the reporters.  That is a near sociopath lack of empathy.  Your friends are lying, bleeding in a hallway and you can grab one thing and rush towards the sounds of moaning, what is it?  If you chose “a camera” over “something to stop the bleeding” you are a piece of shit.

Hogg understood that he was living in a historical moment. Later that evening, he shouldered past his father, who was blocking the door, and biked back to school, where he offered his eyewitness account to the first television producer he saw. The segment with Laura Ingraham aired live at 10:05 on Fox. It is remarkable to watch — Hogg with his stoic poise, his David Byrne cheekbones and wide-set stare, his grave expression and small impatient nods of understanding, narrating the day’s atrocities. But it’s most memorable for its final moments, when he refuses to allow Ingraham to offer her condolences or to get off the air. “Can I say one more thing to the audience? I don’t want this just to be another mass shooting. I don’t want this to be something that people forget.” 

I understand some people handle stress better than others.  This kid experienced a tragedy and was stoic?  He also remembered to get out his political message on the very same day?

More and more the evidence is building that this kid is a sociopath.  When tragedy is going on all around him and people are crying and wailing, he’s comely thinking how this is his destiny, he has to get the exclusive, and he prepares his talking points.

Hogg was so obviously an asset, a connoisseur of news cycles and sound bites, with the ability to hoover up facts and figures like his idol John Oliver and then spew them in angry torrents before the cameras. When Anderson Cooper asked Hogg if banning bump stocks was a good idea, his answer was succinct: “Absolutely, but that should have been done after 50 people were slaughtered in Las Vegas.”

Holy shit, he’s been preparing to be a bottom feeder his whole life.

Also, what did bump stocks have to do with Parkland.

Hogg was good on TV — great, even — and in the marathon of coverage that followed the Parkland shooting, he honed his persona. Angry, edgy, righteous, relentless, he was the warrior who would take anyone on and refused to be knocked off message.

That’s actually pretty creepy.  He is a profiteer in the currency of fame.  Tragedy struck and with laser like focus, he zeroed in on how to maximize his fame.

The White House called to invite him to the president’s “listening session” on guns, and he hung up on them. He told this to Bill Maher on his HBO show, physically leaning across his friend Kasky and into Maher’s face to make his point. “I ended on this message with them: We don’t need to listen to President Trump. President Trump needs to listen to the screams of the children and the screams of this nation.”

This made him look like an incredible asshole.  This was only a shining star moment for people with TDS.

The sun was setting on Huntington Beach Pier in Orange County, California, last month, where Hogg and his classmates were visiting on week five of their tour. Several hundred people had gathered there for a vigil for the victims of gun violence: little girls wearing French braids and heart-shaped sunglasses, older lefties with weather-beaten faces wearing Obama T-shirts. Hogg was the last person to speak. Wearing a black MARCH FOR OUR LIVES hoodie, he first addressed the problem of police violence against unarmed people of color. Then, with relish, he raised the subject of Dana Rohrabacher, the local congressman in the midst of a surprisingly close race and entangled in Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “I tweeted today that I can smell fear, and I think I can smell an indictment, too!” He concluded with the words “Your hope, your vote,” before turning to lead a short march to the beach.

He knows virtually nothing about life outside of high school.  Yet he feels the need to opine on all things Left Wing.  He knows what keeps him in the spotlight and what gets him airtime.

As the procession moved down the boardwalk along Huntington Beach, where a Democrat has not won a House election in 42 years, cyclists and runners and parents pushing strollers stopped and stared at the young man who, having turned 18, looked more than capable of achieving what he told me recently he has decided he now plans to do: run for Congress when he’s 25.

Oh fuck.  A kid who knows nothing and is famous for being angry at all the people who did nothing to hurt him while defending those who put his life in danger is about the worst possible person to have in Congress.

A lot of what has catapulted Hogg to this elevated and precarious place is his wonkishness: his dexterity on social media and cable news, his appetite for the nitty-gritty of policy disputes. He is aware of the way his particular talents mesh with how his generation thinks. “It’s like when your old-ass parent is like, ‘I don’t know how to send an iMessage,’ and you’re just like, ‘Give me the fucking phone,’ ” he told a young journalist two weeks after the shooting.

That wasn’t wonkishness, that was awful.  It made him look even more like an egotistical asshole.

He’s discovered the power of escalation, how calamity can be turned into rage can be turned into provocation. He told one journalist, “The pathetic fuckers that want to keep killing our children, they could have blood from children spattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs.” At one point, I asked him whether he worries, using that language, about riling up NRA members enough that they threaten his life and his mother’s. “If somebody is stupid enough to try anything on us, that will make the movement even stronger,” he said.

The kind of escalation that further drives the divide in America.  That’s what he’s all about.  Also, no one in the NRA is going to hurt this kid, but you can tell he would love to me a martyr.

Hogg frequently uses the word narcissistic in reference to himself.

Why does this not surprise me.  This is not endearing by the way, like he’s pointing out some personal quirk.

He showed up at Stoneman Douglas in the middle of ninth grade, acting like he already knew everything. He rejected the girls who liked him and looked down on those who didn’t. “He always was an attempter,” says Deitsch, who was running the TV-production club. “He would attempt to be great. He would come into TV production like he was the president, and I’d be like, ‘Sir, I’m in charge here.’ ”

He’s a narcissistic bully.

Hogg is adjusting to sudden fame in all the ways you might expect — he wears it uncomfortably sometimes, then other times it’s as if he has practiced for it his whole life. (“He’s like, ‘I’m not a celebrity,’ ” his mother told me, “and I’m like, ‘Shut up. You’re a fucking rock star.’ ”) After the panel, the line to see him, hug him, and take photos with him snaked almost to the back of the room, and he was clearly enjoying himself. I saw, in every place we went, teenage girls hovering just outside his circle. “I think he’s really cool, obviously,” a 15-year-old named Sami Shanman told me one night, as she waited to interview him for a teen-news website. “For me, it’s the way he speaks. He’s the one I’ve seen the most hate on. But he’s also one of the strongest in the movement. He is so strong and not going to give up.”

He basks in the glory of his fame.  He lives for it.  It wasn’t thrust upon him, he sought it out.

At one point this summer, I asked him if he was ever tempted by all the attention from girls his age. “No,” he answered. “They think they know me, but they only know the me that I choose to put out there. Emma and Delaney, and the people in our group — they know me. I may be a teenage boy and a walking hormone, but I just care about everybody.” Later that evening in Orange County, at a bonfire on the beach, Hogg was talking to half a dozen girls who were looking for advice on how to organize anti-gun movements at their schools. He talked about the way women get shafted at work and in culture. “Promise me you won’t take anybody’s shit,” he said. It was as teen-earnest as a John Hughes movie. Then he looked around at the blackness, the beach, the waves. “Beaches are a place for a mass shooting,” he said. “I hate to bring that up.”

He is a god damned zealot.  This is the kind of devotion you see only in holy orders or maybe Kamikazes.  A normal teenage boy would be trying to dip his wick into girls on a beach at a bonfire.  Here he is scaring the shit out of them about the potential for a mass shooting that – as far as my Google search has revealed – has not happened.

If he believes he is destined for fame (and presumably fortune) for his anti gun and Left Wing polemics, he’s not going to let something like teenage in flagrante distract him from his holy crusade.

In the past five months, Hogg has developed political opinions on just about everything. He is against charter schools and for universal health care. He is obsessed with Mueller’s investigation and especially the indictment of Maria Butina, the alleged Russian spy who infiltrated the NRA.

He loves radical conspiracy theories.

He believes that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “a future president of the United States.”

That doesn’t surprise me either.  She’s also a know nothing crazy eye zealot.

Also, socialists are why I am a believer in the Second Amendment.

He is interested in the idea of placing age limits on politicians. “The reason Republicans are successful right now is because they’re empowering young people,” he told me, pointing out that Paul Ryan was 45 when he became Speaker of the House. “Older Democrats just won’t move the fuck off the plate and let us take control. Nancy Pelosi is old.” I am old enough to be Hogg’s mother, and pushed back on the idea that age equals ineptitude. Later, he posted a survey on Twitter. “I had an interesting conversation today when the question of congressional age limits came up. Do you think there should be an age limit on congressmen, congresswomen, and congressthem?” Of more than 33,000 votes, 59 percent said yes.

This is borderline evil.  I’m fine on term limits, but age limits are not much different than saying someone of a certain race can’t get elected.

More immediately, Hogg needs to figure out college. He has declined an offer of admission at UC Irvine, where he might have otherwise gone, but applying to schools again this fall isn’t very appealing — he knows he tests poorly, and he doesn’t like to write.

More evidence of sociopathy.

We finished talking, and he left to take the stage, where I watched him heed the advice he regularly gives to teenage fans who ask what they can do if they’re not old enough to vote. “The most important thing about being young is your face,” he tells them. “Get in people’s faces.”

What I got out of this amazingly long article is that David Hogg is a calculating psychopath.  When disaster hit he used it to springboard into fame.  He’s crafted a persona designed to keep him in the media spotlight.  He preaches his message, bereft of facts as it is, with religious devotion.

This is not some normal teenage activist who will mature and get away from the indiscretions of youth.  This kid is a monster who will fight for every scrap of ego feeding adulation he can get as a true believer of his message.