David Hogg Heads to the Slaughterhouse

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

 

Readers, let us stipulate at the outset that nobody should reasonably care as much as I do about a Democratic National Committee vice-chairman. (These are not important people.) But I am not a reasonable man — I write about politics for a living. And for weeks now, I have been farming the travails of whelpish wunderkind David Hogg for as much comic content as I possibly can — just as I cruelly exploited Jamaal Bowman for as long as he retained office — because I’ve been around long enough to realize that opportunities like these are fleeting. To paraphrase the words of another prophetic martyr, we shall have the poor always with us; but Vice-Chairman David Hogg we shall have not much longer.

 

A recap: The Parkland shooting survivor bootstrapped his way from anti-gun youth activist to recent election as one of the vice-chairs of the Democratic National Committee — and all this despite having forearms that look like they were carved out of balsa wood. But instead of being the easily controlled patsy the DNC’s grandees and voters expected, Hogg promptly began using the DNC’s fundraising lists and prestige to raise money for his own outside super PAC — one designed to take down “asleep-at-the-wheel” Democratic incumbents. Keep in mind that most Democratic incumbents sleep (and sometimes at the wheel) in a perpetual cold sweat about being primaried by the next wave of “Squad”-like radical lefties; now their own vice-chairman is promising to help unseat them. (The calls to get them out of the House are coming from inside the house.)

 

Obviously the DNC had to put a stop to this, or else risk the complete collapse of regular order and discipline. There was never any real doubt that they would, though in my heart I was hoping they might be so cowardly as to accept Hogg fragging their own soldiers from inside the tent. Politico revealed this weekend that Hogg, hilariously, proposed to cut a deal with the DNC:

 

Speaking with DNC Chair Ken Martin, Hogg proposed a so-called internal firewall in which he would stay on as vice chair but be barred from accessing any internal DNC information about congressional and state legislative races as long as he was supporting challengers, according to three people familiar with their conversations and granted anonymity to describe them.

 

There aren’t gonna be any deals, kid. The DNC has instead approved a resolution challenging the validity of Hogg’s election on pretextual grounds and is set to nullify the race later this month and bounce the little chiseler out of office altogether. He got too greedy with his power too fast. As both farmers and politicos will tell you: Pigs get fed, but hogs and Hoggs alike get slaughtered.

 

As much as I enjoy making jokes about the Democratic Party nullifying its own democratic internal processes because democracy elected the wrong person, I speak as an adult when I say Hogg had it coming, and then some. His pitch to “firewall” himself away from races where he is fundraising for enemy insurgents was the sort of farcical fantasy-world pitch that could only come from a spectacularly self-centered youth, one who believes his personal project is more important than the corporate enterprise he has joined. As another current vice-chair says in the piece, “it is not the DNC’s job to create a firewall for one officer — it is the officer’s responsibility to create a firewall.”

 

And the way the Democratic National Committee is doing it is so splendidly pathetic that I can barely believe my good fortune. Remember: The DNC voted for Hogg as vice-chair a mere three months ago. Upon what grounds do they propose to undo that vote? (“Behaving like a traitorous weasel” was apparently insufficient under current DNC bylaws.) Upon grounds of insufficient wokeness, as it turns out:

 

In her complaint, shared with Semafor by a Democratic source, Free argued that she lost a “fatally flawed election that violated the DNC Charter and discriminated against three women of color candidates,” and asks for “two new vice chair elections.” In February, after several rounds of voting, the race came down to five candidates — Kenyatta, Hogg, Free, and two other women. Kenyatta and Hogg claimed the open spots.

 

“By aggregating votes across ballots and failing to distinguish between gender categories in a meaningful way, the DNC’s process violated its own Charter and Bylaws, undermining both fairness and gender diversity,” argued Free, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation.

 

The DNC announced last night that, upon further consideration, the election may have indeed failed to provide for sufficient Choctaw representation, so the full committee will gather later this month to contemplate annulling the outcome entirely. In essence, that means the die is cast: Hogg is a goner, and he knows it too. (I know nothing about Pennsylvania state Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, but if he loses his vice-chairmanship because David Hogg invalidated the entire race outright, I will laugh.)

 

I mock Hogg because it is easy — I don’t like his jerk-off name, face, or behavior — but I also mock Hogg because his kamikaze sincerity is, in its own way, disarmingly likable. He’s too stupid and new to responsibility to be properly cynical yet. And on the basis of how he has handled himself, it will be a long time before he is given any sort of responsibility again. Furthermore, I wish chaos and confusion upon the Democrats as a rule, and watching them cannibalize one another at the exact moment they need to keep their act together cannot help but fill me with mordant glee.

 

James Carville, last seen calling Hogg a “contemptible little twerp,” later did a debate with him and emerged comparing Hogg to Ulysses S. Grant, announcing, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.” (You can blame ol’ Serpenthead for overenthusiasm or hackery if you’re so inclined, but the inadvertent image of David Hogg turning things around after Day One of Shiloh is admittedly priceless.) It’s funny how we agree, and for the same reasons too: I desperately wish the Democrats were not about to send David Hogg to the charnel house, because I will miss how much he fights — with Democrats.