When Laura Ingraham finally issued an apology to Parkland survivor David Hogg this week—after mocking his college rejections—she included an invitation to appear on her Fox News show “anytime for a productive discussion.”
Hogg isn’t buying it.
During an appearance on CNN’s New Day with anchor Alisyn Camerota—who dismissed Ingraham as a biased “talk show host”—on Friday morning, Hogg rejected both Ingraham’s apology and her invitation.
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Stating that he does not accept Ingraham’s apology, Hogg told CNN, “She’s only apologizing after a third of her advertisers pulled out. And I think it’s really disgusting the fact that she basically tried promoting her show after ‘apologizing’ to me.”
He used air quotes on the second instance of “apologizing.”
Hogg previously called for a boycott of Ingraham’s advertisers, leading at least seven major brands to pull their spots from her primetime program.
Even if Ingraham is a “talk-show host” as opposed to a journalist, Hogg argued that she has a “responsibility” to be more “objective” when it comes to the gun-violence issue and represent both sides of the debate.
“The fact that they’re going after us personally shows that what we’re doing is working,” Hogg added. “We have them scared. And now we have to go even harder, because this is when it really starts to matter.”
As for Ingraham’s invitation, Hogg said, “I would like to do that, but first I would need her to be more objective in the way that she talks about us.” He accused her of using a “really threatening tone” when she talks about him and his fellow student activists.
Ingraham’s original charge against Hogg was that he was “whining” about not getting into college. And Camerota seemed to be almost goading him into doing just that when she said, “David, I am stunned that four colleges rejected you. What kind of dumbass colleges don’t want you? I mean, you have taken the country by storm. How do you explain this? Did they reject you before the Parkland massacre?”
But Hogg didn’t take the bait. Explaining that the rejections from his top choice colleges came about two weeks ago, he said, “I think there’s a lot of really good candidates that don’t get into college,” adding, “And I think it goes to show, regardless of whether you get into college, you can still change the world. The hardest part is just believing that you can and continuing that effort to change the world because you eventually will.”
Asked if he still plans to go to college in the fall given everything else that has been going on his life, Hogg said he will most likely take a “gap year” to work on 2018 campaigns for candidates who support action on guns, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. “Lives really are not a partisan issue,” he said. “I think that’s what a lot of this country is forgetting right now.”
