Abusing the survivors
David Hogg isn’t the only Parkland survivor that Marjorie Greene harassed and abused.
Another student activist who was present that day said Greene’s behavior had been “scary” and had left her shaken. Linnea Stanton, a college student and March for Our Lives activist from Wisconsin, recalled that Greene had first confronted the students as they delivered letters to lawmakers inside a Senate office building.
“All of a sudden, this blonde woman was yelling, and someone was recording us with an iPhone,” Stanton said.
After the students started chanting to get the Capitol police to intervene, Greene left, but she waited for the group outside the building, where she continued to harass and film them once they exited, Stanton said.
Stanton said she had only learned on Wednesday that the woman who had harassed her group in 2019 was now an elected member of Congress. “It’s just kind of horrifying,” she said. “It’s bizarre to me that someone who can act like that towards another human being, much less towards a teenager who survived a mass shooting, is allowed to hold power.
Horrifying is exactly what it is. This isn’t just different politics, it isn’t policy versus policy, it isn’t meritocracy or safety net, it’s unashamed cruelty and malevolence versus basic minimal giving a shit about others. It’s horrifying that that’s where we’ve arrived.
In her own mind, she’s not attacking victims but exposing a conspiracy. Her ideological commitments necessitate the existence of these threats to her beliefs. Her beliefs cannot be wrong. These aren’t victims of gun violence but left wing extremists, hell bent on taking her guns away. Global warming is a hoax foisted by anti-capitalist forces plotting to destroy America. Forest fires aren’t a natural consequence of a warming climate, they are incidents of arson, triggered by satellite-based lasers. That the counter-explanations are wildly less likely than the mundane truths of rampages by gun nuts and the physics of anthropogenic climate change matters not one whit. The conclusion comes first: evidence is found (or manufactured) to bolster it. Opponents are dupes or in on it. Throw in some of that Old Time Religion, and you get to claim your ideological adversaries are Evil.