Did marjorie taylor greene confront a parkland shooting survivor and call him a 'coward'?

Claim: U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene once followed and shouted at Parkland mass shooting survivor and gun control activist David Hogg. In January 2021, after the 118th Congress was sworn

in, attention turned to the record and background of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, who promoted the far-right QAnon cluster of conspiracy theories and gained the

support of former President Donald Trump during her campaign. On Jan. 19, left-leaning Media Matters for America revealed that in 2018, Greene had explicitly endorsed the false and damaging

conspiracy theory that the Parkland mass shooting, which left 17 people dead at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February 2018, had been faked in order to justify a

crackdown on gun rights. A week later, CNN reported that Greene had "liked" Facebook posts that called for the assassination of high-profile Democratic politicians. In response,

Greene said those particular actions had been taken by other unnamed individuals who have managed her Facebook page. On Jan. 27, social media users began sharing a video which they described

as showing Greene harassing or confronting David Hogg, a former Stoneman Douglas High School student and survivor of the mass shooting there, who has gone on to become a gun control

activist. Since 2018, Hogg has been a frequent target of disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories for his role as a public advocate on behalf of those killed in the Parkland massacre.

Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was murdered in the shooting, posted the video clip along with the following caption: > [Marjorie Taylor Greene], is this you harassing 

[David Hogg] weeks > after the Parkland shooting, that my daughter was killed in & he was > in? Calling him a coward for ignoring your insanity. I will answer > all of your 

questions in person. Get ready to record again. A similar, widely-shared tweet was posted by the journalist Yashar Ali, who wrote that the video showed Greene "trolling" Hogg.

Those descriptions were accurate. The woman at the center of the video was indeed Greene, and the man who was the subject of her ire was indeed Hogg. Greene posted the video to her own

YouTube account in January 2020, and it remained published there at time of writing. However, the video was recorded during Greene's visit to Washington, D.C., in March 2019. The

confrontation in question did not take place mere "weeks" after the Parkland massacre, as Guttenberg claimed, but rather just over a year later. In fact, Snopes has uncovered

evidence that Greene followed and harangued Hogg on _two_ separate occasions during that visit. Her purpose was ostensibly to lobby members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to

oppose "Red Flag" gun laws, which authorize law enforcement agencies to exercise emergency gun confiscation powers in cases where an individual is flagged by loved ones as being

at immediate risk of doing serious harm to themselves or others. TWO CONFRONTATIONS The first confrontation took place on March 25, 2019, and was streamed live on Greene's Facebook

page. The video has since been removed, but a cached version shows that Greene described it as having taken place inside U.S. Senate offices, called it "a surprise David Hogg

confrontation," and said "This was the first one when we came across their group inside." Later that day, Greene conducted an interview with Will Johnson, a far-right social

media personality who once had his own show on the conspiracy theorist platform Infowars, and now runs a platform called "Unite America First." That interview contained a clip from

Greene's confrontation with Hogg (apparently the one streamed live on Greene's Facebook account earlier that day). In prefacing the footage, Greene complained that Hogg and his

fellow activists appeared to have garnered more media coverage than her, and expressed frustration that he appeared to have been able to secure a greater number of meetings with senators and

representatives while she, in many cases, found lawmakers unwilling to meet with her, or did not receive any response to her requests. At one point, Johnson calls Hogg "pretty

despicable," to which Greene responds "Yes." At the time of the confrontation, Hogg was 18 years old. His youth clearly appears to have been a consideration for Greene, who

told Johnson she had checked his Wikipedia page and found he was 18 years old which meant, in her view, "I'm not picking on a kid." In the footage itself, which can be viewed

below, Greene can be seen following Hogg and his associates through hallways amid U.S. Senate offices. Hogg never demonstrates any willingness to speak with Greene, and the confrontation

appears entirely uninvited and unsolicited on his part. Nonetheless, Greene continues to follow Hogg, shouting a series of questions and statements at him about gun control policy, red flag

laws and, provocatively, the Parkland shooting itself, of which Hogg is himself a survivor. At one point, Greene shouts at Hogg, "If the FBI had followed through on their tips, then

Nikolas Cruz wouldn't have been able to kill 17 people in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School." Later in the video, Greene assails Hogg for his youth and supposed naivety, in

an apparent contradiction of her earlier explanation that, since Hogg was 18 years old, he should be treated as an adult: "David Hogg, you don't even know what you have.

You're so young you cannot realize that the right to bear arms is what makes America so great." [embedded content] The second confrontation is the one shown in the videos posted by

Guttenberg, Ali and others in January 2021. Based on descriptions contained in a Big League Politics report, it appears to have taken place later on the same day, Mar. 25, 2019.   The

video, as posted to Greene's YouTube channel, can be viewed below. It again shows Greene following Hogg, this time outside on a sidewalk, shouting questions and statements at him.

Again, she makes provocative pronouncements about the mass shooting which Hogg himself survived, and accuses him of "using kids as a barrier." At no point does Hogg engage with

Greene, or respond to her, much to the visible frustration of the future Congresswoman. After she ends her pursuit of Hogg, Greene turns to the camera and says "He's a coward, he

can't say one word to defend his stance, because there is no defense for taking away guns." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM05FwyhHPA&t In the days after her brief visit to

Washington, D.C., Greene repeatedly advertised and promoted her confrontations with Hogg on Facebook and Twitter. Reacting to the renewed coverage of the footage in January 2021, Lauren Hogg

— a sister of David's and herself a survivor of the Parkland shooting and a gun control activist — wrote on Twitter that: "The harassment that [David Hogg] and I received in the

aftermath of the shooting was so severe that I have more PTSD from the harassment and conspiracy theorists that we’ve had to deal with with than I do going through the actual shooting."