David Hogg was angry. Everyone agreed on that. Media profiles were popping up everywhere on the kids now, almost exclusively on the big three, and journalists had typecast them quickly. Cameron and David were assigned clichés: class clown and angry pugilist. Emma was unique: some sort of tiny, fiery truth god, exposing bullshitters with the intensity of her brown eyes. The Outline ran a big piece headlined “David Hogg Is Mad as Hell,” over a photo of him grimacing. “His anger was palpable from the moment he walked into the room,” the author said. “He said ‘fuck’ so many times during our interview that he jokingly said he hoped it wouldn’t be televised.” The Outline piece was well reported, and generally perceptive, but that take on David—true?
It was tough to reconcile with the bubbly, playful David I had chatted with that first weekend. He was equally joyous and agreeable on follow-ups that week. But when I interviewed him in mid-March, David was spitting fire. “Politicians have been allowed to become corrupt, abused their power, and kept their power, to allow the slaughter of their citizens,” he said. “These politicians have shown that they want to be on the wrong side of history and that’s absolutely fine—we’ll be sure to smear them in our history textbooks that we write, and that will be their legacy and how they will be forever remembered, as the cowards that many of them are—that want to take money from special interest groups instead of putting their constituents’ lives in front of their political agenda.”
He peppered random answers with allusions to his Twitter accusers, spitting out terms like “libtards,” “Nazis,” and “crisis actors.” The digs were getting to him. He was angry at the system rigged against young black boys, repeatedly decrying the “school-to-prison pipeline.” That was a signature phrase of the Peace Warriors, and while David had missed the meeting at Emma’s house, the concept quickly permeated the group.
David kept saying he was an angry person and a nihilist. His mother rolled her eyes. He was never an angry person, Rebecca Boldrick said. Now, though, he’s like a pit bull. If David were a comic book character, he would be Bruce Banner, appearing in public as the Hulk.
The anger was new, but David’s obsessiveness went way back. “Oh my god, like he will get really into something like drone photography, and for like three months he’s just maniacal about it,” Rebecca said. “And then something else comes up and he’s just totally into that.”
She ticked through several obsessions, all visual. “Like making movies, and editing things.”
David was doing interviews constantly, calling himself the de facto MFOL press secretary, so the anger never cooled. And there was another factor: living beside Lauren. “I couldn’t stand to be around my sister in this same house with her crying incessantly and knowing that I couldn’t do anything to help her four friends that had died,” he said. “That was one of the hardest things for me, because whenever I would call my mom, my sister would pick up and she couldn’t even speak, she would just be crying, for like four days straight, she could barely even speak. And as cowardly as it is I couldn’t stand to be around her knowing I couldn’t do anything.” So he threw himself into the movement nonstop. “That’s my way of dealing with it.”
And it was helping, he said. It helped to channel his rage into something constructive, and it helped to engage with all these creative new friends at MFOL. “It’s kind of like our own therapy group,” he said. “We’re all kind of misfits. Oh, we are absolutely huge fucking misfits. Like you hear the square peg in a round hole, we’re like a fucking mutated octagon trying to go in there.”
David was pursuing a career in words, but often thinks in shapes. “Did you know David’s dyslexic?” his mother said. “I always like telling people that. I am, my dad was, it runs in the family.” Rebecca had watched David struggle, failing to read until fourth grade. Teachers wrote him off, he said, “telling my parents I would amount to nothing, like I was some kind of broken toy.” Rebecca wants other kids to know that dyslexia doesn’t have to stand in their way. She is as fierce and stubborn as David, and they butt heads constantly, but she was amazed by what he had done. David also inherited her quirky sense of humor. He said he had no time for laughter anymore, but he confessed that John Oliver was still getting through. “Just cause he’s, like, fucking hilarious. That’s my dream job right there, working to expose the ridiculousness and corruption and just how frankly stupid these politicians have become.”
Little things amused David. He paused midrant to chuckle over the name of a Norwegian interviewer, Fjord. That got him on a roll. “The French always talk very slowly with the French accent”—he amused himself briefly, tossing out various French words like “croissant,” then flipped right back—“and I’m like, ‘Get the message through, man! Like I want to fucking talk to you, but I can’t if you take so damn long.”
More than once, David grew irritated at me lingering on a topic and snapped, “Next question!”
The kids were on a wild ride, and their parents were buckled in with them. At home the kids were often uncommunicative. That left the parents feeling rudderless.
Parents had been invited to an early meeting, and the kids said it took three times as long: concerns about everything, I have an issue with . . . The kids had heated discussions of their own, but they were on the same wavelength, with their own silly process that moved along at their own pace. So parents were banned.
Since the parents had been banished from the kids’ meetings, they were holding some of their own. Mostly just to compare notes, make sure the kids were all right. The parents were often thrown together on the kids’ relentless touring schedule. Rebecca got to know Jeff Kasky on a cross-country flight to Los Angeles, and she could definitely see where Cameron got his sense of humor.
David’s mom, Rebecca, described her life as “a whirlwind,” which was an improvement on the “shitstorm” she experienced in February. David’s remarkably calm father, Kevin Hogg, was a retired navy pilot. He had then served as an FBI special agent at Los Angeles International Airport until he was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. He retired again with disability benefits and moved the family to Florida, where the cost of living was lower. David transferred to Douglas in the middle of freshman year, and it took two years before he felt like he fit in.
Kevin had kept his diagnosis private out of embarrassment, Rebecca said. The concept of privacy was laughable now. The TV cameras were trained directly on David, but the Internet was obsessed with his dad. “FBI special agent” was catnip for conspiracy theorists, even with a “former” in front of it. Wild stories abounded, and no secret from his past was too obscure for a meme.
Retirement simplified chaperoning duties. David was on the road constantly, and they never let him travel alone. Rebecca worried about the pressure on David—but Lauren was her big fear. At least Lauren’s pain was visible. David’s trauma was hard to read. Anger blacked out everything.
All the parents worried about what their kids had taken on. A twenty-year national crisis loaded onto the shoulders of traumatized kids? It seemed to be helping them—but it seemed like a lot. “I’m terrified,” Emma’s mother, Beth González, said. “It’s like she built herself a pair of wings out of balsa wood and duct tape and jumped off a building. And we’re just, like, running along beneath her with a net, which she doesn’t want or think that she needs.”
Rebecca worried about packages. Every week a huge new stack of letters showed up at school, and some came directly to the house. Their address was out there; that was unnerving. Most of the mail was positive, but the bad ones were threatening.
Mail delivery was Kevin’s favorite part of the day. David could be harshly contrarian and rebuffed all of Kevin’s attempts to help, but he had conceded the mail. It piled up fast, and what a nightmare to process it all. When would David have time?
That’s a common problem. Shooting survivors often describe unforeseen guilt. Public support means everything, but it quickly becomes a burden too. Even when it’s 98 percent positive, it’s the vicious 2 percent you remember. You never know which envelope will be toxic, and they go right for the jugular. Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis said he let thousands of letters build up, and he felt obligated to at least read them all. So he assigned himself a quota of twenty-five a day, but that was overwhelming. “My counselor said that was putting me in a bad place,” he said. So he boxed them up and put them away for a few years. (That story had a happy twist. He finally pulled the boxes out in 2002 while going through a divorce. One of the letters was from his high school girlfriend. They reconnected and they’re now married.)
Kevin foresaw some version of this. Plus there were checks in there, and random bits of cash like $5 bills—not to mention heartfelt wishes from people who deserved a reply, or at least a read. Kevin devised a little system, sorting everything in an old cardboard box. The tricky part was sometimes discerning where the money should go. Most of the writers were clear—for David’s college fund, or for the movement, or to treat himself to something nice—but sometimes Kevin had to make a judgment call. David could make some choices later, but at a minimum, every contribution would get a thank-you, no matter how small. It was the $5 donors who could probably spare it least.
Working his box made Kevin happy. David would thank him some day.
Misfits. David kept calling them misfits—and theater geeks, drama nerds, and journalism fanatics. He loved the image of the misfits fighting back. “I think it’s very true,” his mom said. “They’re used to being outliers and they don’t care about being different.”
Some of the other MFOL boys were using the misfit label too. A few days later, I met three of them for a long group interview. As I tossed out some of David’s phrases, Alfonso and Ryan Deitsch giggled and agreed. Daniel Duff looked a bit taken aback. Finally he spoke, hesitantly. “Are we? Misfits?”
Ryan let out a howl. “We are totally misfits!”
“The fact that you asked that question proves you’re a misfit,” Alfonso said.
Ryan kept riffing. “You have to ask if you’re the weird guy on the bus.”
Daniel decided to go along. “Yeah, we’re like the drama club and the TV club.”
“Can we be honest? Those are not the popular clubs,” Alfonso said. “Although, me, I was an exception. I feel like that’s all I have to say.” He said it with a big smirk, and then let out a hearty laugh.
But I sensed Daniel had it right. We have all seen our share of teenage misfits, and it’s hard not to wince. These kids had huge circles of friends, and Alfonso was constantly trailed by a pack of girls. I bounced the idea off Jackie and she was incredulous. “Who’s a misfit?” she asked. When I mentioned Alfonso, she laughed. “Come on. Those boys were overplaying it.” They were comedians, so they had fun with themselves. The real outcasts weren’t laughing.
Jackie was battling different stereotypes. She was blond, petite, and pretty, a deadly combination. “I’ve gotten the dumb blonde,” she said. It reared up often on Twitter. She avoided feeding the trolls, but she was touched when friends defended her. Her friend Adam was irked by a post saying she obviously hadn’t paid attention in class. “Adam Alhanti tweeted that comment and was like, ‘Actually, Jackie’s class president, has an SAT score of 1510 and a GPA of 5.2.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my god, Adam.’ They’ll go after everything they can to demean me, but it’s not working.”
David Hogg was exhausted. He couldn’t even find time to schedule all his interviews—mine had been double-booked with 60 Minutes, and then frantically rescheduled thirty minutes prior. The National School Walkout was set for March 14, the one-month anniversary. He was planning to walk out for seventeen minutes and walk back in. He was thrilled to see it happening, but grateful not to be in charge this time. David had been crisscrossing the country on a month-long tear. So many interviews. “Probably over a thousand,” he said—on every conceivable network, in every language, on every continent. “I’ve done Venezuela, Colombia, Norway, Germany, Sweden. . . . I’ve done about ten in Australia alone.”
“Is it getting any easier?” I asked.
“Nah. It’s just as crazy. I’m just getting more tired.”
“Are you sleeping at all, or eating much?”
“No to both.”
“Is there any end in sight? How long can you keep that up?”
“I can keep going till the day I die.”
Although . . . his body had other ideas, he admitted. The pace had just taken him down. “I was sick for the past four days. Sinus infection. And that just knocked me out, so I just laid in bed for like three days and didn’t answer anyone.”
It was one p.m. on a Monday, and he wasn’t in school. “I woke up late and was just like, eh, whatever. So I’ve kind of just been moseying around, cleaning up my room finally because it hasn’t been cleaned in like a month.” He liked order, hated a mess, but everything was on hold. He had put one thing in order, when he was too weak to do anything else.
But he was plowing ahead with interviews, defiantly presenting indefatigable David. Scheduling was a nightmare. David was better with concepts than keeping track of things. He later met Michael Bloomberg and asked how he does it. “He was like, ‘I have a scheduler,’” David said.
He finished an hour with me and hopped on his bike to race to the other interview. Ten million people would see a boisterous and assertive David on 60 Minutes that Sunday. No clue that he had just collapsed.
Several of the kids were showing early signs of burnout. And David wasn’t burned out, just down. He had plenty of fight left in him long term. He knew he was in a marathon, but kept sprinting anyway. Pacing himself, that just wasn’t in his character—or not a trait he had developed yet. He was seventeen.
Jackie was a year behind David, but had developed that skill years earlier. She was self-aware, set realistic goals, and kept a constant eye on pace. Her eight o’clock bedtime was out the window now, because sleep wasn’t coming anyway. Most of them were still struggling with sleep. So Jackie found other ways to pace herself.
“I’m not getting burnt out,” she said. “Honestly I’m kind of jumping on stuff more. In the beginning, I was exhausted because I was nonstop going going going and now it’s slowing down and I’m like, ‘What now?’” She had just gone to the Seventeen Families art exhibit, where Tío Manny had done his first mural. “I posted pictures of it on Twitter, and I kind of like broke down,” Jackie said. “I hadn’t thought about why I was fighting for a few days and it kind of came back to me. It kind of gave me another motivation. I think everyone’s getting even more into it now. In the beginning, we all weren’t friends.” Most of the kids were friends from drama club or news, or both. She and Sarah Chadwick were the only two from neither, she said. “Like I knew Cameron and Alex but I didn’t know anyone else. I was scared, I didn’t know who to talk to, I was a ball of stress. But now that I’m friends with everyone, I can actually talk to them.”
Most of the kids were outgoing, and they bonded quickly. A few in the group were reserved and took longer. David. David took the longest.
Jackie laughed pretty hard at the notion of David as an angry kid. Alfonso also had an angry TV persona, which was even more absurd. “They’re so opposite!” she said. She hunted around on her phone for silly videos of David from the group chat. “They’re hilarious.” She found one of David doing something like a Zoolander impersonation, high-stepping down the hallway at the secret MFOL office, mugging at an imaginary camera. She replayed it for me several times, howling each run, but wouldn’t forward it. “I can’t. He would kill me.” Another contrast to his public persona; David was a very private person.
Jackie wasn’t surprised by David’s image, though. “I just met that side of him,” she said. It was mid-March. “We actually had a conversation—he said that he didn’t like me at first either, because I come from the side of the school—” She considered how to put it. “My friends are kind of crazy. I’m in the student government kind of group—it’s like parties and stuff like that. And David’s like a TV production person, so he didn’t like SGA. A lot of people don’t like SGA. I personally am not really friends with them anymore because they kind of dropped me after this. So he always thought I was like a stereotypical annoying girl, and then he realized I wasn’t, and then I realized he wasn’t a serious person all the time.”
Alfonso hardly ever sounded serious. He could riff on anything. “Alfonso’s really on all the time,” Ryan Deitsch’s brother Matt said. “It’s hard being on all the time.” Alfonso made it look easy, and he could flip from silly to serious and back midsentence. An astute New York magazine feature had described Alfonso as “comparatively conservative.” Many of the kids had Republican parents, but few of the kids were, so I asked Alfonso if that was accurate.
“Yes, surprisingly.”
“In what way?”
“You know how when you’re this age, everyone’s like, ‘I’m a Republican; I’m a Democrat’—there’s no actual thought. In general I say I’m pretty center. Like on social issues I go pretty liberal, and on fiscal issues, sometimes I’ll go conservative.”
He dissed both parties at length. “So both are evil entities, let’s get that out of the way. One of them tried to use me for political gain, and then the other is just showing their face because if not the country would hate them because we’re kids who honestly did survive a school shooting and I’m joking a lot now, but—”
He was thinking out loud, really, and he plunged ahead awhile longer and then asked to clarify: “What I mean by using us is, first, we are using [the Democrats] to our advantage. Realistically, they’re giving us a very nice platform, they’re letting us speak to their leadership which are people in power. Before this, I would’ve probably never voted for that party, and now I’m considering it, I’m really thankful that they at least reached out to us, like we didn’t have to jump so many hoops to speak to them, like the Republican Party. And the Republican Party, generally, I don’t feel agrees with our viewpoint, so it’s understandable that they don’t want to talk to us.”
That was becoming a problem. By March, nearly all the MFOL kids were bringing it up nearly every interview. They were eager to work with both parties, and knew that lots of Republicans quietly supported them but couldn’t risk the association. Ryan Deitsch commented on that danger that same week: “When you take a selfie with a bunch of kids that went there to speak their minds and have their voices heard and then it’s like, ‘I was just with Never Again—vote for me next election—’”
“We have not endorsed political candidates nor shall we ever,” Alfonso said. “That is a rule we have made. That’s why we’ve spoken to both leaderships—I mean as much as we can, because one of them doesn’t want to talk to us as much, and we’re trying to work with them. Honestly, if a Democratic senator and a Republican one asked me to talk to them at the same time, I’d probably speak to the Republican.”
Daniel Duff was planning to walk out, and excited about it—and tickled that he was going to lead the walkout at a distant school, thirteen hundred miles away. His cousins in Pennsylvania had hatched a plan. Colin and Kyleigh Duff were students at Parkland High School (no connection), and Daniel was helping plan the walkout there. Colin and Kyleigh asked Daniel to record a short video, saying who he was, why he was walking, and why it mattered. Colin and Kyleigh’s classmates were over the moon. One of the kids leading the national movement was personally involved with their walkout. The school administration got on board. “So they’re going to meet in the auditorium, watch me, and then they’re going to walk out,” Daniel said, still a bit incredulously. It was a big school too—about three thousand kids. Daniel wasn’t a leader at the MFOL meetings, more of a foot soldier. But he would be so much more for these kids. “I’m going to be like the voice of a walkout, I guess,” he said.
Daniel described the plan gleefully, while still scripting it. Two days later, he was morose. He had stayed up way too late on rewrites and recording, and hated the result. “I was so tired, and I had my March for Our Lives shirt on and everything,” he said. “And I watched the next morning, and I was like, ‘I look way too tired and you can clearly see me reading the script.’ So I’m going to redo it once I get home.”
The walkout was in two days, and his uncle would have to edit it, but he was going to record it over. He had to get this right.