Parkland Mom and dad Have a Message for Marjorie Taylor Greene

Linda Beigel Schulman does not have the luxury of believing in conspiracy theories. She appreciates that no total of magical wondering can convey her son again. She knows exactly how extensive he’s been absent. She is aware of mainly because she does not have the luxurious of forgetting.

“It’s been a person thousand and seventy-nine times considering that the murder,” she mentioned, “I depend every working day. I will depend every working day for the relaxation of my everyday living.”

Scott J. Beigel was killed on February 14, 2018, when a gunman opened fireplace inside of Marjory Stoneman Douglas Substantial University in Parkland, Florida. Beigel taught ninth-grade geography and coached the cross-country group. Two other academics and 14 learners were being killed together with him. It was just one of the deadliest school shootings in American background.

Linda knows it occurred since she fought with the county sheriff for entry to the stability-camera footage from that day. She was granted permission to check out the second her son’s life was taken. The video exhibits how he opened the doorway to his classroom and stepped into the hallway to wave pupils fleeing the shooter to basic safety. In advance of he could lock the door once more, the shooter, dressed for a war, fired in his route. His blood fell onto the vinyl floor and he collapsed. She knows it occurred because he was laid to rest in a mausoleum in Boca Raton, Florida. She is aware of it occurred mainly because he isn’t right here any longer.

Linda and her husband, Michael, responded to the loss not by denying what transpired, but by performing their greatest to carry on in a way that would honor their son. They started a charity that raises dollars to ship disadvantaged youngsters touched by gun violence to summer season camp. They foyer lawmakers for gun security. They’ve attempted to make it so that Scott’s absence from their life does not suggest their lives are empty. In 2019, they invited me to a Mets activity with a bunch of young ones they’d been capable to deliver to camp. They are very pleased that they can do items like that. But the reason why hangs over them. They however really do not have their son.

That would be true no make any difference what, but there are ghoulish people today who feel intent on reminding them. Individuals people imagine mass shootings are “false-flag operations” in which “crisis actors” phase a phony violent assault in purchase to foment concern of guns so that the govt can disarm its citizenry. The moment pushed to the fringes of our culture, these types of conspiracy theorists have been empowered and mainstreamed over the last ten years, in which a fellow conspiracy theorist was elected president for one particular phrase many thanks, in portion, to their assist.

The increase of QAnon, the convoluted conspiracy that little one-having, little one-intercourse-abusing elites control the entire world, has introduced extra previous outcasts to Washington, these types of as Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican who represents Georgia’s 14th district in the new Congress. Very last week, Media Issues noted that Greene experienced endorsed and promoted the lie that Parkland was a “false flag” in because-deleted Fb posts. On Wednesday, online video surfaced from 2019 of Greene harassing David Hogg, a Parkland survivor turned gun-basic safety activist, in Washington, wherever he was meeting with lawmakers.

It was much too substantially for Linda Beigel Schulman and Michael Schulman. Linda and Michael are decent and liable folks. They have an understanding of that responding to Greene usually means offering her extra interest, and that additional consideration carries the danger of her information achieving far more men and women than it by now has.

But they imagine that the most effective way to prevent the distribute of a lie is to confront it with the fact. And so on Wednesday, the a single thousandth and seventy-ninth day due to the fact Scott J. Beigel was murdered, they determined to reply.

“Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the taking pictures exactly where my son was murdered defending his pupils was not a ‘false flag,’” Linda reported in a assertion to New York. “It was not staged. It seriously happened. Do not trivialize my son Scott’s sacrifice to help save his college students for your individual political attain. As Joseph Welch said to Sen. Joseph McCarthy Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1954: ‘Until this minute, Senator, I think I by no means genuinely gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no feeling of decency?’ Congresswoman Greene, I check with you the very same query. Are you that cruel? HAVE YOU NO Feeling OF DECENCY??”

“What do we need to have to do?” Linda asked me, her voice cracking. “Show her the video? Do I need to acquire her more than to Scott’s mausoleum? Does she have to have to see how he was shot 6 times from 3 toes absent?”

“It’s wrong,” she stated. “It’s just completely wrong.”

Greene did not answer to a request for remark.